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American Morning

Intel Reform Clears the House; IBM Sells PC Business To Chinese Company

Aired December 08, 2004 - 07:00   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.


BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning.
Huge relief for the 9/11 families. Intel reform clears the House, now it heads to the Senate.

Baseball stars admitting to steroids and outraging fans. Now what will the players do about it? And Q and A with Don Rumsfeld.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED U.S. SOLDIER: Our soldiers have been fighting in Iraq for coming up on three years. A lot of us are getting ready to move north relatively soon.

Our vehicles are not armored.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HEMMER: U.S. troops asking life and death questions of their boss and his answers on this AMERICAN MORNING.

ANNOUNCER: From the CNN Broadcast Center in New York, this is AMERICAN MORNING with Bill Hemmer and Soledad O'Brien.

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning. Welcome, everybody.

Nice to have you back, Mr. Hemmer.

HEMMER: Well, thank you.

O'BRIEN: You've been gone for awhile.

HEMMER: Well, you know, shopping for you.

O'BRIEN: For days and days and days.

HEMMER: It's good to be back. Nice to see you, too.

O'BRIEN: Well, while you were gone, intelligence reform was bottled up in the House, as you well know. It was bottled, but now it is unbottled. We have been watching the saga of this legislation for a little while.

Coming up, we're going to take a look at what got it over the big hurdles.

We will also, this morning, talk with Ron Brownstein about some political subtext between the president and members of his own party.

HEMMER: And there's a new turn in the flu shortage, the U.S. buying millions of doses of an experimental vaccine. But is it safe for you to take?

We will talk to a doctor today from the World Health Organization about that. We'll also talk about the group's warnings that millions of people could die from bird flu.

We'll explain that coming up in a moment, too.

O'BRIEN: That's really scary stuff.

Mr. Cafferty, good morning.

JACK CAFFERTY, CNN ANCHOR: How are you doing?

O'BRIEN: Isn't it nice to have Bill back?

CAFFERTY: Hmm?

O'BRIEN: Isn't it nice to have Bill back?

CAFFERTY: That's great.

HEMMER: Happy holidays.

CAFFERTY: I was very lonesome without him.

The latest example of what's wrong with professional sports comes to us in the form of Latrell Sprewell, this punk who plays for the Minnesota Timberwolves. Long history of behaving like a total jerk.

Wait until you see the latest videotape of what he said to a woman in the seats during a game over the weekend. This is a guy who's being paid $14 million to play basketball this year. It's disgraceful.

HEMMER: See it and hear it, too? Thank you, Jack.

Heidi Collins here, top of the morning -- top of the news, too.

Heidi, good morning to you.

HEIDI COLLINS: Good morning to you. And good morning, everybody.

Now in the news this morning.

There is word charges will be filed today in connection with last month's basket brawl. According to media reports, five players and five fans are expected to be charged for their roles in the November 19 fight.

The brawl broke out on the court and in the stands during a Pacers-Pistons game in Auburn Hills. The prosecutor in suburban Detroit has scheduled a news conference for this afternoon.

To California and the penalty phase of the Scott Peterson trial. Peterson's mother expected to be the last witness called today as the defense wraps up its arguments to save him from death row.

The jury is expected to begin deliberating tomorrow on whether to sentence Peterson to death or life in prison.

And Ukraine now giving the OK to electoral and constitutional changes ahead of a scheduled re-vote there. The compromise should limit fraud. Within the past two hours, Ukraine's parliament gave the OK to the changes.

Massive street protests have been ongoing following the disputed election. The repeat vote is set for December 26, one day after Christmas.

Back to you guys.

O'BRIEN: All right, Heidi, thanks.

Well, next stop for intelligence reform is the Senate, where the passage of the 9/11 bill is all but certain. Last night the House finally said, yes, to the legislation that was stalled for weeks.

Congressional correspondent, Ed Henry, live for us on Capitol Hill this morning.

Hey, Ed, good morning.

ED HENRY, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Soledad. You're right. This bill had been tied up into knots, but now it's moving at warp speed by congressional standards, passed the House by a margin of 336-75 and now is expected to be signed into law by President Bush by the end of the week.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

HENRY (voice-over): The Senate is poised to finish the 9/11 bill today, while the House passed the legislation last night on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. And supporters say this sweeping intelligence reform will help prevent America from experiencing another day of infamy.

SEN. BOB GRAHAM (D), FLORIDA: Today, after a half century, we are committed and on the verge of making some fundamental reforms that will reduce the chances of another Pearl Harbor or another 9/11 occurring.

HENRY: But Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, whose immigration provisions were left out, said the reform was incomplete.

REP. JAMES SENSENBRENNER (R), JUDICIARY CMTE. CHMN.: How can we face grieving families in the future and tell them that while we might have done more, the legislative hurdles were just too high?

I, for one, can not and, therefore, oppose the bill.

HENRY: At a closed-door meeting of House Republicans, Sensenbrenner got sustained applause from angry conservatives, a sign President Bush's victory might come with some political costs.

REP. ZACH WAMP (R), TENNESSEE: This may be the most divided the Republican House conference is on any major Bush initiative in the last four years because I think we are still split, sort of, down the middle.

HENRY: Supporters of the 9/11 bill say Sensenbrenner's measures would have sunk the legislation.

SEN. SUSAN COLLINS (R), GOVT. AFFAIRS CMTE. CHMN.: We just could not let the most significant reforms of our intelligence community in 50 years go down because of controversy over issues that were not recommended by the 9/11 commission.

HENRY: The bill does include some immigration changes -- an increase in border patrol agents, more detention beds and stepped up criminal penalties for alien smuggling.

Negotiators admit they could have gone further, but they didn't want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HENRY: Republican leaders are vowing to try and complete the job in January by finally bringing up Mr. Sensenbrenner's proposals. But without consensus, Republicans could be headed for a messy fight over immigration -- Soledad?

O'BRIEN: Ed Henry for us this morning. Ed, thanks.

He's been working around the clock on this story.

HEMMER: Yes, that he has.

More now on this intelligence reform debate. CNN political analyst, Ron Brownstein, of the "L.A. Times" my guest now in D.C.

Ron, good morning. Nice to have you back with us.

RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN SR. POLITICAL ANALYST: Good morning, Bill.

HEMMER: The headline today in the "Washington Post," "Reform In Haste." Is there an argument to be made that this was a rush job?

BROWNSTEIN: Well, it is extraordinary speed from the time of the commission's completion of their report to having this change of this magnitude completed. It is a testament to the political environment that the 9/11 families created and the 9/11 commission created.

In practice, as with the department of homeland security, there are going to be a lot of kinks in working this out. Any kind of bureaucratic reshuffling of this magnitude is very difficult to do in practice.

But I do think that they did create an environment in which this became very difficult to stop.

HEMMER: As it relates to the president, did he spend political capital on this or did he gain it?

BROWNSTEIN: I think he gained it. Look, I think any time a president invests his prestige and his political capital, whenever he's successful in doing that, he earns more.

What the president demonstrated here again -- and let's go back. The president was initially ambivalent at best about this entire process. He didn't like the idea of the 9/11 commission. When the 9/11 commission came out with its recommendations, initially the administration was skeptical of the idea of centralizing authority in a national intelligence director.

George Tenet, the other day in a speech, said again that he feared creating this new level of bureaucracy between the CIA director and the president was a mistake. I believe that was the view of the president, himself, initially.

But once he decided he needed this or wanted this, he was able to get it. And he demonstrated, again, that House and Senate Republicans are willing to follow this president and link their faith to his to a degree that we didn't see when Democrats had unified control in the first two years of the Bill Clinton presidency.

HEMMER: Take this far outside of Washington, D.C., for a moment here. How are Americans safer now than they were before this reform was passed in the House?

BROWNSTEIN: Well, I mean, the hope here -- and again, it is always difficult to see how these things work in practice. But the hope is that this reform, by creating both the counterterrorism center and this national intelligence director, will help the far-flung U.S. intelligence community know what it knows.

One of the greatest problems in any institution, as you know, Bill, is that the left hand often doesn't know what the right hand is doing. And certainly one of the greatest lessons of the 9/11, as we look back at it, was that there was a failure of coordination. The dots were not connected.

And the great hope in this reform as well as all the other steps that are taken -- it goes beyond intelligence reform into a variety of other areas. But the great hope is that this will enable us to better coordinate our information and let us have a clearer sense of the threats that we're facing.

HEMMER: Now, the critics who come back and oppose this, they say the immigration provisions are not included in this bill, and that's a huge failing and huge loophole.

Do you see that issue coming back in 2005, with the new year? BROWNSTEIN: Yes, a couple things -- clearly it will come back in several forms.

But first of all, if bills were stopped because of what wasn't -- what were, what is not in them as opposed to what is in them, there would be very few things that are passed on Capitol Hill.

It's a tough standard to say that you are stopping a bill that you may agree with because it doesn't do everything that you want. I do think is going to come back.

And it's going to come back (a) because the House conservatives clearly believe that we need to go further than the 9/11 commission recommended, as Ed Henry pointed out.

The idea of barring states from issuing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants was not something that the 9/11 commission recommended. But 11 states do it now, and the House conservatives want to stop it.

Secondly, the president has a very ambitious immigration agenda that goes beyond these security provisions. He wants to move toward a guest worker program that would allow millions of illegal immigrants currently in the country to work legally, at least temporarily.

And it's clear that if he's going to have any chance of moving that forward, there's going to have to be a movement on the security side, at least in the House.

HEMMER: Well, we will follow the Senate, today. And Ron, we will follow it also in 2005 apparently, too.

Thank you, good to see you, Ron Brownstein there in D.C. -- Soledad?

BROWNSTEIN: Thank you, Bill.

O'BRIEN: Secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was hit with some pretty pointed questions from U.S. soldiers in Kuwait, who are waiting to be deployed to Iraq.

The troops asked the secretary about a variety of issues, including the military stop-loss policy, the loss of travel pay and the lack of proper equipment.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED U.S. SOLDIER: Our soldiers have been fighting in Iraq for coming up on three years. A lot of us are getting ready to move north relatively soon.

Our vehicles are not armored. We are digging pieces of rusted scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass that's already been shot up, dropped, busted, picking the best out of this scrap to put on to our vehicles to take into combat.

We do not have proper armament vehicles to carry with us north.

DONALD RUMSFELD, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: I talked -- I talked to the general coming out here about the pace at which the vehicles are being armored. They have been brought from all over the world, wherever they're not needed to a place here where they are needed.

I'm told that they're being -- the Army is -- I think it's something like 400 a month are being done. And it's essentially a matter of physics. It isn't a matter of money.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O'BRIEN: Secretary Rumsfeld is expected to meet with the Indian prime minister tomorrow, in New Delhi, to discuss arms sales between the U.S., India and Pakistan.

HEMMER: All right, 11 minutes past the hour now. Chad is out. Rob Marciano is at the CNN Center.

Good morning, Rob.

ROB MARCIANO, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Good morning, Bill, nice to have you back.

(WEATHER REPORT)

MARCIANO: That's the latest from here.

Bill, back over to you.

HEMMER: All right, Rob, good to have you. Talk to you again in about 20 minutes.

MARCIANO: OK.

HEMMER: Thanks.

O'BRIEN: Still to come this morning, baseball caught in a steroid scandal. Now the man who's at the center of that controversy lobs a stunning charge at a star in another sport. We'll explain.

HEMMER: Also, Tommy Thompson announcing a massive plan to solve the nation's flu shot problem. But is the solution now a greater risk than the shortage? We'll talk about that.

O'BRIEN: And another basket brawl. This time a high school coach could be in trouble for what officials say he did as it went on.

That's ahead on AMERICAN MORNING.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

O'BRIEN: Baseball is working on toughening up its steroid policy. ESPN.com is reporting that a deal on the table now includes, "significant penalties for players who test positive for steroids, including the first offense." Currently, first offenders receive counseling and are not fined or suspended;

More tests, possibly three times randomly during the season, up from once; and testing during the off-season, which is not allowed as of now.

Also, the list of banned drugs would be expanded, possibly identical to the substances banned by the international Olympic committee. Team owners and the players union plan to talk again about all this next week.

Victor Conte, the man who is at the center of an investigation into steroid abuse now firing back with his own shots. Conte is also the founder of Balco, that controversial Bay Area laboratory cooperative.

Shaun Assael spent a year talking with Conte, getting him to finally speak on the record. And Conte's allegations appear in today's issue of "ESPN The Magazine."

Shaun joins us in the studio. Nice to have you, thanks for being with us.

SHAUN ASSAEL, SR. WRITE "ESPN THE MAGAZINE": Thanks for having me.

O'BRIEN: Many shocking allegations, I think that's fair to say. What did he say?

ASSAEL: Well, this is really "Mr. Inside" speaking for the first time. And what he said was first, that it's his belief that at least half of major league baseball players have tried steroids, maybe 80 percent have tried amphetamines.

But in the world of track, he is leveling a big allegation against Marion Jones. He is saying that he personally watched her inject human growth hormone. And even more shockingly, before the Sydney Olympics that he knows that she received performance-enhancing drugs.

O'BRIEN: You have a description of how he describes she did it.

ASSAEL: Sure.

O'BRIEN: What did he say?

ASSAEL: He says he is sitting in a hotel room with her in Covina, California. He is about a foot away. She has come to receive an injector that he wants to give her.

He shows her how to take the air out of the needle, how to inject herself and watches her as she lifts up her spandex bicycle pants and injects four units of human growth hormone into her quadricep.

That's his charge.

O'BRIEN: Just right before she goes to compete in the Sydney Olympics.

ASSAEL: The first -- no, actually, this was in the first event of the 2001 season. But he says that clearly during the Sydney Olympics, she had other drugs that he had sent to her.

O'BRIEN: And he created this sort of Sharpie-like pen that would be able to...

ASSAEL: Yes, it was a $1,000 cartridge injector. I think the point is that it is just staggering, the detail and how sophisticated these drugs are and how easy they are to evade drug testers.

O'BRIEN: One would imagine that Marion Jones is going to say, here is a guy who's under indictment for serious crimes. He's going to say anything. And if it behooves him to drag my name into it, well he's going to say that, too and make up stuff about me.

ASSAEL: Yes, as a matter of fact, her statement has been, hey, I took and passed a lie detector test. What about Victor?

I was speaking to him last night, and I was quite surprised, but he says, bring it on. If Marion wants to take a test, I will take one, too. Let's do it in the same place and the same time. So, he's completely defending himself.

O'BRIEN: Well, what's his motivation now for bringing up these...

ASSAEL: Sure.

O'BRIEN: ... allegations?

ASSAEL: He has watched over a year. His feeling is that one leak after another has painted him out as the ring master, the drug king pin of the sports underground.

O'BRIEN: So, he's saying, I'm not a bad guy.

ASSAEL: Well, no. He is saying this is what I did. But he is saying the system is corrupted. I was a player in it.

And I think personally the most shocking thing that he said was that during the 2003 men's championships, Tim Montgomery, he alleges, was on a drug cocktail of five different drugs.

After Tim wins the U.S. championship, he gets a letter from the U.S. anti-doping agency, congratulations, Tim, you have passed all our tests. You're drug-free.

As Victor says, it's like taking candy from a baby.

O'BRIEN: And so, it's not only the system is corrupt but also that the testing is lame?


Aired December 8, 2004 - 07:00   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning.
Huge relief for the 9/11 families. Intel reform clears the House, now it heads to the Senate.

Baseball stars admitting to steroids and outraging fans. Now what will the players do about it? And Q and A with Don Rumsfeld.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED U.S. SOLDIER: Our soldiers have been fighting in Iraq for coming up on three years. A lot of us are getting ready to move north relatively soon.

Our vehicles are not armored.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HEMMER: U.S. troops asking life and death questions of their boss and his answers on this AMERICAN MORNING.

ANNOUNCER: From the CNN Broadcast Center in New York, this is AMERICAN MORNING with Bill Hemmer and Soledad O'Brien.

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning. Welcome, everybody.

Nice to have you back, Mr. Hemmer.

HEMMER: Well, thank you.

O'BRIEN: You've been gone for awhile.

HEMMER: Well, you know, shopping for you.

O'BRIEN: For days and days and days.

HEMMER: It's good to be back. Nice to see you, too.

O'BRIEN: Well, while you were gone, intelligence reform was bottled up in the House, as you well know. It was bottled, but now it is unbottled. We have been watching the saga of this legislation for a little while.

Coming up, we're going to take a look at what got it over the big hurdles.

We will also, this morning, talk with Ron Brownstein about some political subtext between the president and members of his own party.

HEMMER: And there's a new turn in the flu shortage, the U.S. buying millions of doses of an experimental vaccine. But is it safe for you to take?

We will talk to a doctor today from the World Health Organization about that. We'll also talk about the group's warnings that millions of people could die from bird flu.

We'll explain that coming up in a moment, too.

O'BRIEN: That's really scary stuff.

Mr. Cafferty, good morning.

JACK CAFFERTY, CNN ANCHOR: How are you doing?

O'BRIEN: Isn't it nice to have Bill back?

CAFFERTY: Hmm?

O'BRIEN: Isn't it nice to have Bill back?

CAFFERTY: That's great.

HEMMER: Happy holidays.

CAFFERTY: I was very lonesome without him.

The latest example of what's wrong with professional sports comes to us in the form of Latrell Sprewell, this punk who plays for the Minnesota Timberwolves. Long history of behaving like a total jerk.

Wait until you see the latest videotape of what he said to a woman in the seats during a game over the weekend. This is a guy who's being paid $14 million to play basketball this year. It's disgraceful.

HEMMER: See it and hear it, too? Thank you, Jack.

Heidi Collins here, top of the morning -- top of the news, too.

Heidi, good morning to you.

HEIDI COLLINS: Good morning to you. And good morning, everybody.

Now in the news this morning.

There is word charges will be filed today in connection with last month's basket brawl. According to media reports, five players and five fans are expected to be charged for their roles in the November 19 fight.

The brawl broke out on the court and in the stands during a Pacers-Pistons game in Auburn Hills. The prosecutor in suburban Detroit has scheduled a news conference for this afternoon.

To California and the penalty phase of the Scott Peterson trial. Peterson's mother expected to be the last witness called today as the defense wraps up its arguments to save him from death row.

The jury is expected to begin deliberating tomorrow on whether to sentence Peterson to death or life in prison.

And Ukraine now giving the OK to electoral and constitutional changes ahead of a scheduled re-vote there. The compromise should limit fraud. Within the past two hours, Ukraine's parliament gave the OK to the changes.

Massive street protests have been ongoing following the disputed election. The repeat vote is set for December 26, one day after Christmas.

Back to you guys.

O'BRIEN: All right, Heidi, thanks.

Well, next stop for intelligence reform is the Senate, where the passage of the 9/11 bill is all but certain. Last night the House finally said, yes, to the legislation that was stalled for weeks.

Congressional correspondent, Ed Henry, live for us on Capitol Hill this morning.

Hey, Ed, good morning.

ED HENRY, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Soledad. You're right. This bill had been tied up into knots, but now it's moving at warp speed by congressional standards, passed the House by a margin of 336-75 and now is expected to be signed into law by President Bush by the end of the week.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

HENRY (voice-over): The Senate is poised to finish the 9/11 bill today, while the House passed the legislation last night on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. And supporters say this sweeping intelligence reform will help prevent America from experiencing another day of infamy.

SEN. BOB GRAHAM (D), FLORIDA: Today, after a half century, we are committed and on the verge of making some fundamental reforms that will reduce the chances of another Pearl Harbor or another 9/11 occurring.

HENRY: But Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, whose immigration provisions were left out, said the reform was incomplete.

REP. JAMES SENSENBRENNER (R), JUDICIARY CMTE. CHMN.: How can we face grieving families in the future and tell them that while we might have done more, the legislative hurdles were just too high?

I, for one, can not and, therefore, oppose the bill.

HENRY: At a closed-door meeting of House Republicans, Sensenbrenner got sustained applause from angry conservatives, a sign President Bush's victory might come with some political costs.

REP. ZACH WAMP (R), TENNESSEE: This may be the most divided the Republican House conference is on any major Bush initiative in the last four years because I think we are still split, sort of, down the middle.

HENRY: Supporters of the 9/11 bill say Sensenbrenner's measures would have sunk the legislation.

SEN. SUSAN COLLINS (R), GOVT. AFFAIRS CMTE. CHMN.: We just could not let the most significant reforms of our intelligence community in 50 years go down because of controversy over issues that were not recommended by the 9/11 commission.

HENRY: The bill does include some immigration changes -- an increase in border patrol agents, more detention beds and stepped up criminal penalties for alien smuggling.

Negotiators admit they could have gone further, but they didn't want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HENRY: Republican leaders are vowing to try and complete the job in January by finally bringing up Mr. Sensenbrenner's proposals. But without consensus, Republicans could be headed for a messy fight over immigration -- Soledad?

O'BRIEN: Ed Henry for us this morning. Ed, thanks.

He's been working around the clock on this story.

HEMMER: Yes, that he has.

More now on this intelligence reform debate. CNN political analyst, Ron Brownstein, of the "L.A. Times" my guest now in D.C.

Ron, good morning. Nice to have you back with us.

RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN SR. POLITICAL ANALYST: Good morning, Bill.

HEMMER: The headline today in the "Washington Post," "Reform In Haste." Is there an argument to be made that this was a rush job?

BROWNSTEIN: Well, it is extraordinary speed from the time of the commission's completion of their report to having this change of this magnitude completed. It is a testament to the political environment that the 9/11 families created and the 9/11 commission created.

In practice, as with the department of homeland security, there are going to be a lot of kinks in working this out. Any kind of bureaucratic reshuffling of this magnitude is very difficult to do in practice.

But I do think that they did create an environment in which this became very difficult to stop.

HEMMER: As it relates to the president, did he spend political capital on this or did he gain it?

BROWNSTEIN: I think he gained it. Look, I think any time a president invests his prestige and his political capital, whenever he's successful in doing that, he earns more.

What the president demonstrated here again -- and let's go back. The president was initially ambivalent at best about this entire process. He didn't like the idea of the 9/11 commission. When the 9/11 commission came out with its recommendations, initially the administration was skeptical of the idea of centralizing authority in a national intelligence director.

George Tenet, the other day in a speech, said again that he feared creating this new level of bureaucracy between the CIA director and the president was a mistake. I believe that was the view of the president, himself, initially.

But once he decided he needed this or wanted this, he was able to get it. And he demonstrated, again, that House and Senate Republicans are willing to follow this president and link their faith to his to a degree that we didn't see when Democrats had unified control in the first two years of the Bill Clinton presidency.

HEMMER: Take this far outside of Washington, D.C., for a moment here. How are Americans safer now than they were before this reform was passed in the House?

BROWNSTEIN: Well, I mean, the hope here -- and again, it is always difficult to see how these things work in practice. But the hope is that this reform, by creating both the counterterrorism center and this national intelligence director, will help the far-flung U.S. intelligence community know what it knows.

One of the greatest problems in any institution, as you know, Bill, is that the left hand often doesn't know what the right hand is doing. And certainly one of the greatest lessons of the 9/11, as we look back at it, was that there was a failure of coordination. The dots were not connected.

And the great hope in this reform as well as all the other steps that are taken -- it goes beyond intelligence reform into a variety of other areas. But the great hope is that this will enable us to better coordinate our information and let us have a clearer sense of the threats that we're facing.

HEMMER: Now, the critics who come back and oppose this, they say the immigration provisions are not included in this bill, and that's a huge failing and huge loophole.

Do you see that issue coming back in 2005, with the new year? BROWNSTEIN: Yes, a couple things -- clearly it will come back in several forms.

But first of all, if bills were stopped because of what wasn't -- what were, what is not in them as opposed to what is in them, there would be very few things that are passed on Capitol Hill.

It's a tough standard to say that you are stopping a bill that you may agree with because it doesn't do everything that you want. I do think is going to come back.

And it's going to come back (a) because the House conservatives clearly believe that we need to go further than the 9/11 commission recommended, as Ed Henry pointed out.

The idea of barring states from issuing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants was not something that the 9/11 commission recommended. But 11 states do it now, and the House conservatives want to stop it.

Secondly, the president has a very ambitious immigration agenda that goes beyond these security provisions. He wants to move toward a guest worker program that would allow millions of illegal immigrants currently in the country to work legally, at least temporarily.

And it's clear that if he's going to have any chance of moving that forward, there's going to have to be a movement on the security side, at least in the House.

HEMMER: Well, we will follow the Senate, today. And Ron, we will follow it also in 2005 apparently, too.

Thank you, good to see you, Ron Brownstein there in D.C. -- Soledad?

BROWNSTEIN: Thank you, Bill.

O'BRIEN: Secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was hit with some pretty pointed questions from U.S. soldiers in Kuwait, who are waiting to be deployed to Iraq.

The troops asked the secretary about a variety of issues, including the military stop-loss policy, the loss of travel pay and the lack of proper equipment.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED U.S. SOLDIER: Our soldiers have been fighting in Iraq for coming up on three years. A lot of us are getting ready to move north relatively soon.

Our vehicles are not armored. We are digging pieces of rusted scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass that's already been shot up, dropped, busted, picking the best out of this scrap to put on to our vehicles to take into combat.

We do not have proper armament vehicles to carry with us north.

DONALD RUMSFELD, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: I talked -- I talked to the general coming out here about the pace at which the vehicles are being armored. They have been brought from all over the world, wherever they're not needed to a place here where they are needed.

I'm told that they're being -- the Army is -- I think it's something like 400 a month are being done. And it's essentially a matter of physics. It isn't a matter of money.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O'BRIEN: Secretary Rumsfeld is expected to meet with the Indian prime minister tomorrow, in New Delhi, to discuss arms sales between the U.S., India and Pakistan.

HEMMER: All right, 11 minutes past the hour now. Chad is out. Rob Marciano is at the CNN Center.

Good morning, Rob.

ROB MARCIANO, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Good morning, Bill, nice to have you back.

(WEATHER REPORT)

MARCIANO: That's the latest from here.

Bill, back over to you.

HEMMER: All right, Rob, good to have you. Talk to you again in about 20 minutes.

MARCIANO: OK.

HEMMER: Thanks.

O'BRIEN: Still to come this morning, baseball caught in a steroid scandal. Now the man who's at the center of that controversy lobs a stunning charge at a star in another sport. We'll explain.

HEMMER: Also, Tommy Thompson announcing a massive plan to solve the nation's flu shot problem. But is the solution now a greater risk than the shortage? We'll talk about that.

O'BRIEN: And another basket brawl. This time a high school coach could be in trouble for what officials say he did as it went on.

That's ahead on AMERICAN MORNING.

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O'BRIEN: Baseball is working on toughening up its steroid policy. ESPN.com is reporting that a deal on the table now includes, "significant penalties for players who test positive for steroids, including the first offense." Currently, first offenders receive counseling and are not fined or suspended;

More tests, possibly three times randomly during the season, up from once; and testing during the off-season, which is not allowed as of now.

Also, the list of banned drugs would be expanded, possibly identical to the substances banned by the international Olympic committee. Team owners and the players union plan to talk again about all this next week.

Victor Conte, the man who is at the center of an investigation into steroid abuse now firing back with his own shots. Conte is also the founder of Balco, that controversial Bay Area laboratory cooperative.

Shaun Assael spent a year talking with Conte, getting him to finally speak on the record. And Conte's allegations appear in today's issue of "ESPN The Magazine."

Shaun joins us in the studio. Nice to have you, thanks for being with us.

SHAUN ASSAEL, SR. WRITE "ESPN THE MAGAZINE": Thanks for having me.

O'BRIEN: Many shocking allegations, I think that's fair to say. What did he say?

ASSAEL: Well, this is really "Mr. Inside" speaking for the first time. And what he said was first, that it's his belief that at least half of major league baseball players have tried steroids, maybe 80 percent have tried amphetamines.

But in the world of track, he is leveling a big allegation against Marion Jones. He is saying that he personally watched her inject human growth hormone. And even more shockingly, before the Sydney Olympics that he knows that she received performance-enhancing drugs.

O'BRIEN: You have a description of how he describes she did it.

ASSAEL: Sure.

O'BRIEN: What did he say?

ASSAEL: He says he is sitting in a hotel room with her in Covina, California. He is about a foot away. She has come to receive an injector that he wants to give her.

He shows her how to take the air out of the needle, how to inject herself and watches her as she lifts up her spandex bicycle pants and injects four units of human growth hormone into her quadricep.

That's his charge.

O'BRIEN: Just right before she goes to compete in the Sydney Olympics.

ASSAEL: The first -- no, actually, this was in the first event of the 2001 season. But he says that clearly during the Sydney Olympics, she had other drugs that he had sent to her.

O'BRIEN: And he created this sort of Sharpie-like pen that would be able to...

ASSAEL: Yes, it was a $1,000 cartridge injector. I think the point is that it is just staggering, the detail and how sophisticated these drugs are and how easy they are to evade drug testers.

O'BRIEN: One would imagine that Marion Jones is going to say, here is a guy who's under indictment for serious crimes. He's going to say anything. And if it behooves him to drag my name into it, well he's going to say that, too and make up stuff about me.

ASSAEL: Yes, as a matter of fact, her statement has been, hey, I took and passed a lie detector test. What about Victor?

I was speaking to him last night, and I was quite surprised, but he says, bring it on. If Marion wants to take a test, I will take one, too. Let's do it in the same place and the same time. So, he's completely defending himself.

O'BRIEN: Well, what's his motivation now for bringing up these...

ASSAEL: Sure.

O'BRIEN: ... allegations?

ASSAEL: He has watched over a year. His feeling is that one leak after another has painted him out as the ring master, the drug king pin of the sports underground.

O'BRIEN: So, he's saying, I'm not a bad guy.

ASSAEL: Well, no. He is saying this is what I did. But he is saying the system is corrupted. I was a player in it.

And I think personally the most shocking thing that he said was that during the 2003 men's championships, Tim Montgomery, he alleges, was on a drug cocktail of five different drugs.

After Tim wins the U.S. championship, he gets a letter from the U.S. anti-doping agency, congratulations, Tim, you have passed all our tests. You're drug-free.

As Victor says, it's like taking candy from a baby.

O'BRIEN: And so, it's not only the system is corrupt but also that the testing is lame?