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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown

Bill Clinton to Undergo Heart Surgery Thursday; People on Terrorist Watch List Allowed to Buy Guns

Aired March 08, 2005 - 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.
We begin tonight with the public service that's provided whenever a president or an ex-president becomes ill. When President Clinton was diagnosed with heart disease last year, thousands of otherwise healthy Americans got a checkup. Some of them wouldn't be alive today if they hadn't.

Now, millions of Americans are learning, along with the 42nd president, that heart surgery isn't perfect and complications happen. Mr. Clinton will undergo surgery to deal with those complications on Thursday.

We have two reports tonight beginning with CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The first clues were subtle. During routine exercise near his home in New York, doctors say former President Clinton began to feel the nagging in his chest and shortness of breath.

DR. ALLAN SCHWARTZ, NY PRESBYTERIAN HOSPITAL: He had noticed over the past month or so that on steep hills he was getting winded a bit more easily. At the same time, he was starting to feel a bit of discomfort in his left chest.

GUPTA: A rare complication of fluid and scar built up in the chest will place Clinton back in the operating room on Thursday.

SCHWARTZ: This is not an emergency. This is being done to assure that he is able to continue to maintain a highly active lifestyle and that he's not at all functionally limited by his lung but this is not a medically urgent procedure.

GUPTA: Even though Schwartz called the procedure elective, it's clear that President Clinton needs the operation. His discomfort due to fluid, which is causing the thin lining outside the lungs called the pleura to thicken and collapse.

SCHWARTZ: Left untouched for a long period of time, any collection in the body potentially could be seeded with infection, although that risk is extremely low. We don't want to leave him with compromise of normal lung function. GUPTA: So, doctors will perform a procedure to shore off those thickened layers and remove fluid allowing the lung to heal and re- expand. When asked if Clinton's busy schedule, including recent trips to areas devastated by the tsunami are to blame for his condition, doctors said...

SCHWARTZ: The short answer is no.

GUPTA: And so the president kept his busy schedule and even talked about the procedure.

BILL CLINTON, FMR. PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It's a routine sort of deal and it will knock me out of commission for a week or two and then I'll be back to normal. This is no big deal. And, you know, I felt well enough to go to Asia to try to keep up with President Bush and we're going to go play golf tomorrow, so I'm not in too bad a shape.

GUPTA: Doctors do predict a routine operation and recovery in and out of the hospital in three to ten days.

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: President Clinton and President Bush are going to play golf tomorrow to raise money for the tsunami victims. It goes to show how sick he is.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Well, I have a couple of questions. This is general anesthetic. Anytime there's general anesthetic there's risk.

GUPTA: Yes, in some cases the general anesthesia may be riskier than the operation itself.

BROWN: You talked about, I think the expression you used was shoring the thickness, thinning it out by cutting away some of the lung?

GUPTA: I think the best way -- no, not cutting away some of the lung and that's one of the big risks of this actually. Think of it almost like an orange peel sort of wrapped itself around the lung. You have to sort of peel that away and sometimes that can be pretty challenging. It's pretty sticky to the lung.

BROWN: They do this by cracking open the chest again or can they do this less invasively?

GUPTA: We asked that question. What they specifically said was they want to do it with an endoscope, which basically means making a small...

BROWN: A TV camera, isn't it?

GUPTA: Yes, it's like a fiber optic little camera, little lens that goes through a small opening right into the chest wall. It has some instruments at the end of it and they can actually delicately sort of pull away this peel with that. If it doesn't work, then they do have to open up the chest though.

BROWN: I'm not sure that this, this almost sounds stupid to say it but aside from this because this is a reasonably -- any time somebody has surgery it's a reasonably important thing. Aside from this, you look at President Clinton and he looks like an ideal, in many ways, heart patient. He's lost a lot of weight. He looks -- he looked almost gaunt earlier this summer.

GUPTA: Yes.

BROWN: He looks a little healthier now to me.

GUPTA: I think he has put on some weight since the summer and, you know, when we first heard the story this morning that he was going back to the O.R., the first thing that anyone considers is have one of those areas that he had operated back in September has it re-closed up again, the graft that was -- the bypass? It turns out that that's not the case. We asked specifically about that. He's had stress tests. He's had other tests. All those graphs look like they're open.

BROWN: Let me ask you one other thing that's not necessarily in your area of expertise but close. What is the psychological effect, do you think, of -- I mean the heart surgery itself, heart issues themselves have psychological effect, mortality issues, and now he's got to go back for another one. Is there a concern about the psychology of the second operation?

GUPTA: You know, a lot of surgeons probably don't pay enough attention to that. My father actually had bypass surgery many years ago and I know afterwards it did affect him psychologically in a good way I think. It made him you know, exercise more and eat better.

You know it's a brush with mortality the first time around. The second time around I think the doctors have reassured the former president that, you know, he's not going to die from this. This is something he will probably get through pretty safety but I think it certainly does have an impact any time you go back in the second time.

BROWN: Thank you.

GUPTA: Thank you.

BROWN: Good to see you.

As you heard a moment ago, the president is in Florida tonight. He'll play a charity golf event tomorrow with President Bush, the first, and Greg Norman, which will raise nearly $2 million for victims of the tsunami. Perhaps the very definition of the love-him or hate- him former president, he has seemed of late to find his place and his role.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): There is no real job description for an ex- president and when Bill Clinton became one, he joined an elite group with unique challenges, a task complicated by his relative youth he was just 54, and the controversy that dogged him to his last days in office and beyond.

JOHN HARRIS, "WASHINGTON POST": There's no question for the first year at least and really maybe more than that, there was quite a lot of controversy swirling around Bill Clinton that did make it harder for him to make this transition from a political figure to a more apolitical or statesman like figure.

BROWN: It is not necessarily easy being a statesman when you're treated like a rock star, as the former president seemed to be in his adopted New York home. And while he was trying to find his place, there were bills to pay, $10 million in legal fees, most of it wiped out in a year of speech making.

Like most every president before him, there was a book deal. President Bush had one. Nixon wrote several. So has President Carter. But none received the kind of advance that Bill Clinton received, money that made the former president wealthy and perhaps with wealth and a little more age has come understanding.

DAVID GERGEN, KENNEDY SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT: It strikes me that in the last year or two he has found his voice again as a former president and now he's one of the most interesting and provocative and moving speakers in our public life.

BROWN: So, he's worked on getting drugs to AIDS patients in Africa, worked to bring development to the third world. He has tried to get above it all without actually being completely divorced from his clear passion for politics.

HARRIS: Bill Clinton wants to be above politics. He wants to be a statesman like figure. At the same time, he's acutely interested in Democratic politics of 2008 and what happens to his wife. So, it's a very delicate balance.

BROWN: In some ways he is a man who can't live with it, politics, and can't live without it. He clearly craves a larger stage and a higher purpose. His library is open. He seems at ease with old adversaries and they with him. His wife is now the family political star and he, with one major heart surgery down and another heart surgery coming, seems more at ease with his current job, former president, than ever.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: And, again, President Clinton will have surgery Thursday here in New York.

"Security Watch" now and a question if the government considers you too dangerous to board a commercial airliner should you be able to buy a gun? Okay, should is a loaded question, though most people would say no, Second Amendment or not but according to the Government Accountability Office that's exactly what 47 people on the government's watch list did last year.

Here's CNN's Jeanne Meserve.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JEANNE MESERVE, CNN HOMELAND SECURITY CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A person on a terrorist watch list might have an easier time buying a high-powered firearm than boarding a commercial airliner.

SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER (D), NEW YORK: I'm just utterly appalled that people on terrorist watch lists can buy guns. What are we doing to ourselves?

MESERVE: A new report from the Government Accountability Office says last year background checks on gun buyers found 58 matches with government terrorist watch lists. In 47 of those cases, the person listed went on to get his or her gun. Being on a list of suspected terrorists does not disqualify a buyer the way a felony conviction or mental illness would.

ROBERT MUELLER, FBI DIRECTOR: We ought to look at the law and see what modifications could be made.

MESERVE: If someone on the watch list is trying to buy a gun, the FBI is notified but by law the records of the transaction are destroyed after 24 hours. Gun control advocates argue that this could hamper terrorism investigations.

SEN. FRANK LAUTENBERG (D), NEW JERSEY: It's incomprehensible. If you put this question to the American people and say, should we go out of our way to help a terrorist get a gun and conceal his background, absolutely not.

MESERVE: Experts estimate there are more than 50,000 names on the often criticized government watch lists, watch lists that have kept the likes of Senator Ted Kennedy from flying. What is needed, says one expert, is discretion.

RICHARD FALKENRATH, CNN SECURITY ANALYST: There's a wide range of different reasons that people get on watch lists. Not all of them, it seems to me, should be disqualifying for buying a gun.

MESERVE: But Sanford Abrams has a different point of view. He sells guns.

SANFORD ABRAMS, MARYLAND GUN DEALER: There's no right to fly an airplane in this country. There is a right to own a firearm.

MESERVE: A collision between constitutional rights and the war on terror.

For CNN's America Bureau, Jeanne Meserve, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: On now to an item that raises a chill no matter what. If the allegations, which involve child abuse are true, it is a horror story. If not, it's a witch hunt. Either way, a quite town in France known for mild weather, good wine and gentle light is undergoing a rude awakening. Here's CNN's Jim Bittermann.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JIM BITTERMANN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Every day the police vans bring 66 residents of Angers to court. They are on trial for multiple counts of pedophilia, sex with children. It's the largest criminal trial in French history, so large that a special courtroom has been constructed to try crimes that are horrifying.

(on camera): According to investigators, over the course of three years here, 45 children, ranging in age from six months to 16 years old, were repeatedly sexually abused and raped, sometimes by members of their own family, sometimes in exchange for payments, such as small amounts of money, food, alcohol and, in one case, a car tire.

(voice-over): Those who have read through the 25,000 pages of evidence say it is difficult to overestimate the impact this case has had.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: To me this is a global failure, failure of the social services and failure of the society itself, failure of us all.

BITTERMANN: Those who live around the three family groups, who are alleged to be at the center of the pedophilia ring, are terrified. Fifteen-year-old Florian Ribas knew his neighbors were poor and unemployed but he did not know that they may have been abusing their children.

FLORIAN RIBAS, NEIGHBOR (through translator): It's left a mark on me. They live just across the street and I said to myself that could have been me.

BITTERMANN: At a class break at a nearby school, 15-year-old Marie Minyot (ph) says she's scared. "We could never imagine that this could happen near us. We think about it all the time."

And classmates Eric Radiarison (ph) and Helene Gammard (ph) report that especially younger school children are no longer allowed out freely that parents as never before are now picking up their kids from school.

Over at Patrice Martan's (ph) bar, there's a fear of a different sort. His customers talk about the case all the time and worry there will now be false accusations of child abuse.

"It's a psychosis," he says. "Just about everyone can be accused. All you have to do is say hello to a child and someone will say that you're a pedophile."

BITTERMANN: The local newspaper editor says the affair has left people stupefied.

MICHEL PATEAU, LA NOUVELLE REPUBLIQUE (through translator): The first reaction by the president of the regional council was that's not us. That's not Angers. We are not like that.

BITTERMANN: Said a lawyer representing eleven of the children that you don't even know you have victims and pedophiles around you, truly it is shameful, shameful, shameful.

The thick old Roman walls of Angers hid many things but so too, people here are learning, do the modern ones.

Jim Bittermann CNN, Angers, France.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Much more coming up on the program in the hour ahead, starting with one of the most terrifying parts of daily life in Iraq, the checkpoints.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): They are meant to stop deadly attacks but innocent people can become targets.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): In my personal opinion, people fear these checkpoints more than they fear other attacks and explosions.

BROWN: As the CEO of a major corporation gets his walking papers, we'll look at the gray zone of office romance. When is it OK? When is it not? And how do you know?

They found a battered camera in the debris of the tsunami.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Kevin was the one who had the forethought to say, hey wait, it has a blue chip in it so you never know. Something might be recorded on the card.

BROWN: The images on the chip would haunt them. Finding the truth would lead them halfway around the world.

And 60 years after the death of Anne Frank, images of her life and those she loved.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It really is family life, I think, as they knew it before everything became so bad for them really.

BROWN: Photographs taken by Anne Frank's father before his world collapsed.

From New York and around the world this is NEWSNIGHT.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(NEWSBREAK)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: A reminder that moment for moment serving in Iraq is no less dangerous than serving in Vietnam. Then and now life goes by in a series of encounters, some routine, some deadly, with only a split second to decide which is which.

Many such encounters play out at roadside checkpoints. Today an American general was named to lead the investigation into the shooting at a checkpoint last week along the road to the airport in Baghdad, an Italian journalist wounded, her security guard killed, the facts hotly disputed save one, whether driving a car or manning a machine gun, a checkpoint is a nervous corner of a nerve-racking war; from Baghdad tonight CNN's Nic Robertson.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN SR. INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): At a U.S. checkpoint a year ago, I saw the aftermath of an Iraqi shot when he failed to stop. At the time, the soldiers feared he might have been an insurgent and they tried to disable his car to save their lives.

Later that year and 65 miles away, Miqdad Abdull, a former Iraqi general says a similar thing happened to him. He points to the windshield of his car where he says he was shot at by U.S. soldiers at a checkpoint.

MIQDAD ABDULL, FORMER IRAQI GENERAL (through translator): The first shot was a killer shot and this I know from my experience. I ducked and the shooting lasted for about another 15 seconds.

ROBERTSON: He shows photographs of the many bullet holes through the windshield of his car and of his own injuries, laid out police maps and a note apparently written by a U.S. Army officer.

It reads, "This vehicle failed to stop for a coalition traffic point. The vehicle was engaged and hit by small arms fire." He claims not to have seen the warning for him to stop.

ABDULL (through translator): In my personal opinion, people fear these checkpoints more than they fear other attacks and explosions.

ROBERTSON: This day at a checkpoint on the highway to Baghdad International Airport, the most dangerous road in Iraq, two Iraqi drivers get confused about how to proceed.

(on camera): This is exactly where Iraqi drivers worry the most, they say. They're coming into a checkpoint here and what they say they fear is that they may be mistaken for a suicide bomber and that's why this area, they say, is the most dangerous because they could be shot at.

(voice-over): No one has an accurate account of how many Iraqis and others have been injured in this way but commanders say they are committed to avoiding casualties.

MAJ. GEN. WILLIAM WEBSER, COMMANDER 3RD ID: We've trained our soldiers and we continue to retrain them on techniques of causing a vehicle to slow down and stop far enough away where it doesn't present the threat of an explosive device.

ROBERTSON: And in Iraq, explosive devices like that go off 40 to 60 times every day. The threat that worries the soldiers the most is the suicide car bomber, so every time a car comes close to them, they told me, it's a critical moment where self preservation forces a fast decision.

WEBSTER: If the vehicle looks like a threat of lethal force to the soldier guarding the position, then we may fire warning shots into the ground next to the vehicle and then we instruct our soldiers to engage the engine block if they possibly can to disable the vehicle and try not to kill anyone.

ROBERTSON: On Iraq's roads, on both sides of the checkpoint, caution remains the watch word.

Nic Robertson, CNN, Baghdad.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Word tonight the U.S. military is weighing the possibility of abandoning the Abu Ghraib Prison, a military spokesman telling the Associated Press the prison has simply come under insurgent attack too many times for comfort. There are plans, he says, for removing so-called high value prisoners and putting them up at a new facility, new prison, at Baghdad International Airport.

On to Lebanon where a massive rally, organized by the militant group Hezbollah, filled a square in the central part of Beirut today. Tens of thousands of protesters, this is the biggest march yet, turned out this time to show support for Syria and to reject a U.N. resolution calling for Syrian troops to immediately withdraw from Lebanon.

Today's rally follows three weeks of anti-Syrian demonstrations set off by the assassination of Lebanon's former prime minister. Yesterday, the presidents of Syria and Lebanon agreed to withdraw the troops gradually according to a 1989 accord. Today's demonstration though, a reminder that nothing, absolutely nothing about the Middle East is simple.

Coming up on the program tonight a question, when is hanky panky kinky, if you will, the dos and don'ts of office romance, business ethics and common sense, the story at Boeing and just may be at your company too, a much needed break first though.

From New York this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Romance in the office, when is it OK, when is it inappropriate? Corporate America likely to reexamine the rules now that Harry Stonecipher has been forced out as Boeing's chief executive for having an affair with a female executive.

He was hired 15 months ago, pulled out of retirement to polish Boeing's image following a series of ethical missteps by the company and its employees, including a series of interoffice affairs by his predecessor.

My goodness, what's going on there? In fact, last summer, Boeing agreed to pay $72.5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by female employees alleging discrimination.

This morning, Mr. Stonecipher was quoted in the "Wall Street Journal" as saying, "We set -- Hell, I set a higher standard here. I violated my own standards. I used poor judgment.

Should it have been a firing offense? The affair was brief. The woman was not a direct subordinate. There's no evidence the former Boeing CEO gave her any favors, so what's the crime and what are the rules?

Lisa Mainiero is a professor of management at Fairfield University in Connecticut, the author of "Office Romance, Love, Power and Sex in the Workplace," and made her way from Connecticut to be with us tonight. Thank you.

LISA A. MAINIERO, AUTHOR, "OFFICE ROMANCE": It's an honor.

BROWN: Would it have mattered if he or they both were single?

MAINIERO: Not necessarily because this is a romance that crossed organizational lines. What my research showed is that any romance that crossed the organizational hierarchy so that you have a higher level person involved with a lower level employee is always trouble.

BROWN: Even if there are relationships in complex organizations where the lines of authority aren't that direct where I'm not directly someone's supervisor, though I may be in a superior position?

MAINIERO: That's a good point, because, in fact, often, romances occur between someone who is at a lower level and someone who is two or three, four steps above that person in a different area of the company. The issue has to do with sexual favors being traded for some aspect of what the person wants from the corporation.

BROWN: Well, power.

MAINIERO: Power, promotions, favorable business trips, raises that should not have been granted, etcetera. What -- the issue is, is sex being traded for power?

BROWN: Most companies, I assume -- I haven't looked at most companies' H.R. books, but I assume they have a policy that says a supervisor cannot have a relationship with someone who's directly subordinate. Are companies trying to figure out in a written way when it is OK? Because it's going to happen. I mean...

MAINIERO: Yes.

BROWN: People spend eight, 10 hours at the office. It's going to happen. MAINIERO: It's going to happen, and it does. Cupid does shoot arrows on company time.

BROWN: Yes.

MAINIERO: And it happens very frequently, especially now in this time when people are delaying the age of marriage. You're not going to find your spouse at your university, necessarily, anymore. So, in fact, people are finding their future partner in their workplaces.

BROWN: "The Wall Street Journal" tried to sort of this out and said today on its editorial page that men and women in the workplace no longer have the margin for misjudgment they once did. The implication is that we're at a time of sort of ethical hypersensitivity.

Are we in a time of ethical hypersensitivity or ethical hypersensitivity or romantic hypersensitivity, whatever?

(LAUGHTER)

MAINIERO: Whatever it may be.

BROWN: Yes.

MAINIERO: I think the stakes are higher these days in light of Enron and some of the other ethical violations that we've seen in companies in the news recently.

Boeing, in particular, has -- I was very impressed with a 30-page document, their ethical code of conduct. That's pretty rare. Usually, what happens is, you have a few statements in a company policy manual and you leave it at that.

BROWN: Yes.

MAINIERO: But this was very specific.

BROWN: What they said here was, they said, well, it's not about the sex, which, of course, makes me believe it is about the sex. But they said it's not about the sex. It's about a lack of judgment that he violated...

MAINIERO: Yes.

BROWN: ... a paragraph that says you'll never do anything that embarrasses the company.

MAINIERO: Yes, or create a conflict of interest. That's in there as well.

Yes. Very often, the upper-level person is accused of a lack of business judgment. The lower-level person is accused of sleeping his or her way to the top. It's a no-win situation for both parties.

BROWN: Just real quickly, is it unusual for the woman to survive this and the man to get fired?

MAINIERO: Not as much anymore.

BROWN: OK.

MAINIERO: It used to be a gender issue, that it was always the woman who was fired. Not as much anymore.

BROWN: Nice to meet you. Thanks for coming in.

MAINIERO: Thank you.

BROWN: Appreciate it.

Still to come on the program, a battered camera that survived the tsunami and the haunting images it contained, a remarkable search for the truth.

And morning papers coming up as well.

Around the world, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: We showed you this earlier. President Bush met at the White House today with two of his predecessors for an update on the tsunami relief effort.

Former Presidents George H.W. Bush -- that would be the president's father, I think -- And President Clinton handed the president a report on their campaign to raise private donations and collected $1 billion almost to help the victims across South Asia. It's all private money. It's been a pretty remarkable effort by the two former presidents.

Even as they do, stories keep emerging, along with images that won't soon fade from memory. Some were captured on a camera discovered by a missionary from Seattle who found that camera in the rubble. It contained photos of a couple who did not survive. But who were they? Did they have family? The missionary was determined to find out, not just because he is a man of God who wanted to comfort people in grief, but because he knew firsthand what it means to suffer unbearable loss.

Here's CNN's Frank Buckley.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

FRANK BUCKLEY, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Amidst the tons of debris left behind by the tsunami, a smashed-up digital camera found near this spot by Baptist missionary Christian Pilet and his friend, Cameron Craig. They were about to throw it away.

CHRISTIAN PILET, BAPTIST MISSIONARY: Cameron was the one who had the forethought to say, hey, wait, it has the chip in it still. And you never know. Something might be recorded on the card. And so he pulled it. We put it in our pocket and on we went.

BUCKLEY: Something was there, what appeared to be a record of the final days in the life of this happy couple. But who were they? And then there was this. Taken on December 26, the wave in the distance is the tsunami before it hit. It was among a disturbing sequence of images that captured the moments of terror as the waters rushed ashore.

First, the waters go out, then a change. The water is rushing back. The wave is getting closer. Some begin to sense danger.

C. PILET: Then you see a Thai woman starting to run.

BUCKLEY: One person just stares as the wave approaches.

C. PILET: And the last picture, as best I can figure, it was probably only 100 feet in front of them as they took this picture. And it fills, it fills the horizon. It just fills the whole picture.

BUCKLEY: The photos, they determined, must have been taken by that couple in the pictures.

C. PILET: Cameron and I were -- I think the only word is devastated. Up to that point, we had been looking mainly at rubble, mainly at things that had been destroyed. But somehow now we felt a connection with some people who had been there. And it was as if we had inadvertently heard their last comments, their last conversation and then heard it suddenly stopped.

BUCKLEY: Pilet was determined to find out who these people were. He searched the disaster area. These are his pictures. He went to embassies, but no one could identify this couple, whose lives, like so many others, suddenly ended.

Weeks after the disaster, Pilet arrived home to his own family in North Bend, Washington. He was jet-lagged and exhausted, but still determined to identify the couple in the pictures. And now he had his wife, Nicole, at his side. On the very day Christian arrived home with the photos, Nicole went on the Internet to search.

NICOLE PILET, WIFE OF CHRISTIAN: First, I went to Google.

BUCKLEY: She showed us what she did, which keyword she typed in. And before Pilet had even fallen asleep, she had a hit.

N. PILET: It was the very first Web site I found.

C. PILET: I remember kind of falling asleep as I heard her clicking and her saying, I think that's the guy.

N. PILET: If it isn't him, it's his twin, because it looks just like the man from the pictures.

BUCKLEY: When Christian saw this photo on a tsunami missing persons Web site, he agreed. It said the couple was John and Jackie Knill of Vancouver, British Columbia. (on camera): The Pilets discovered that, incredibly, the couple in the photographs found halfway around the world had lived just a few hours up the road in Vancouver. Almost immediately, Christian got into his car and drove to Canada to deliver those photographs.

BUCKLEY (voice-over): Pilet knew how important that would be to those who loved John and Jackie Knill, because, once, Pilet himself had experienced a sudden loss.

C. PILET: My first wife passed away suddenly from an aneurysm several years ago. And after she passed away, somebody came up to me within half a day and told me, did you know that the message she was given, the speech she was giving at that moment had been recorded? And then they handed me a copy of this tape.

And, for me, hearing my wife's voice and hearing her last comments before she fell down and was no more were breathtaking and comforting and awesome.

BUCKLEY: Pilet hoped he could provide a similar comfort to the rightful owners of these photographs, and he did. These are the sons of John and Jackie Knill.

PATRICK KNILL, SON: And I know they were together because they were always together.

BUCKLEY: To this Baptist missionary, the photos were a gift from God and a gift from two parents to their children.

C. PILET: I think John and Jackie, by doing this, actually gave their sons something and their family something that is priceless.

BUCKLEY: But the story isn't over, because the Knills' camera also captured these images of others who were there when the tsunami hit, a Thai father and his two daughters, a young couple and others people the Knills befriended.

C. PILET: We very much would like to identify them just to be able to get this kind of closure as well to their families.

BUCKLEY: Maybe they survived, but, if they didn't, someone is out there wondering how their loved ones spent their final hours. Maybe the photos will speak to them, the way John and Jackie Knill spoke to their sons one last time.

Frank Buckley, CNN, North Bend, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Ahead on the program tonight, a young girl seen through the eyes of her father, Anne Frank in still photos, 60 years now since she died, her world of childhood, love and loss.

We take a break first. This is NEWSNIGHT on CNN.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ERICA HILL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Coming to you from the Headline News studios in Atlanta, I'm Erica Hill with your news update at quarter past the hour.

And we begin with a developing story out of Iraq, where a large explosion was heard in Baghdad. You can see it now. This is in the central area of the city, a large, black, thick plume of smoke rising. It is believed to have been a car bomb. Again, live pictures you're looking at here of Baghdad, just about 6:45 in the morning local time there. The explosion apparently, according to wire reports, also fired by some automatic weapons fire. Again, this developing story, a large explosion in the center of Baghdad, believed to be a car bomb. We'll continue to update you on that.

Meantime, back in this country, Mount Saint Helens is at it again. A large plume of smoke erupted from its crater in Southwest Washington this afternoon. It reportedly reached up to 36,000 feet high. Local TV reports say along with the smoke came a 2.0 magnitude earthquake. No immediate reports, though, of damage or injuries.

A spokesman for Michael Jackson says he felt better about how his trial went today. Defense attorneys for the pop singer got a chance to grill his accuser's brother in court. The boy admitted on the stand that the adult magazine that had been entered into evidence was not the one he claimed Jackson showed him. Lawyers also raised doubts about the boy's account of how Jackson allegedly molested his mother.

A federal grand jury has indicted three people in what is considered to be one of North America's largest counterfeit credit card scams. The suspects allegedly stole credit card numbers and rung up millions of dollars in purchases over four years. If convicted, each suspect could get up to five years in prison and have to reimburse the money stolen from banks and lenders.

Wal-Mart and other retailers are asking Congress to lengthen truck driver work days from 14 to 16 hours. The Republican congressman sponsoring the measure says the extended workday will improve both safety and efficiency. But labor unions and safety advocates say longer trucker hours would make roadways more dangerous for all drivers.

Those are the headlines. I'm Erica Hill.

Now back to NEWSNIGHT with Aaron Brown.

BROWN: Sixty years ago this month, Anne Frank was murdered by the Nazis at Buchenwald. We don't know the exact date of her death, but, all these years later, Anne Frank remains known to the world over because of her diary, the horror of the war and the Nazi plan to murder the Jews of Europe as seen through the eyes of a scared, but hopeful teenage girl.

Tonight, a remembrance of who she was join who she might have been one day in still photos taken by her father.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) HANS WESTRA, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, ANNE FRANK HUIS AMSTERDAM: Anne Frank has given the six million victims a face. For many people, they read the diary when they're young. And "The Diary of Anne Frank" is, for many people, the first experience of the dark side of mankind.

She writes about her surroundings and how difficult it is to grow up in such an environment where you are not accepted as what you are.

ELISABETH FEERICK, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, THE ANNE FRANK CENTER USA: Anne received her diary on her 13th birthday, which was in June. And it was in July that they had to go into hiding.

Otto took pictures of his family right up to the moment, almost, they had to go into hiding. He loved not just taking the photographs, but trying artistic angles, playing with light and shade. The settings for these pictures were chosen on trips, in school, the girls playing outside. He has a great number of photographs of Anne and Margot with their friends, birthday parties, or the babies that have just come home from the hospital.

It's really his family life, I think, as they knew it, before everything became so bad for them. He didn't take any photos while they were in hiding. They were discovered and arrested in August of '44.

WESTRA: And the end of October 1944, Anne and her sister were transported back into Germany to Bergen-Belsen. And there, she died somewhere in March 1944, a couple of weeks before the liberation of the camp.

FEERICK: He returned from the camps and came to Amsterdam, and then found out that the girls had not survived. He never took another photo again after that.

Arnold Newman obtained the permission from Otto to take a photograph. And they went to the museum, I think, the first day it was opened. As they went up and climbed up to the attic, Otto went into this very sad and withdrawn mold and mind-set, obviously. And as he leaned against a post, the clocks from the Wester Tower, which is right outside this building, began to chime.

And Anne, indeed, writes of these clocks and the tower bells. And she finds it so reassuring that they -- that she hears them so frequently. And Otto is reminded of the passages in the diary and really broke down when he heard the bells.

This was a normal family with dreams, with love, with a family life of traditions, of culture, the joy of being together, of building an existence. This was a very protective set of parents wanting their children to have the best, to live in love.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Sixty years.

Morning papers after the break. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(ROOSTER CROWING)

BROWN: OK, time to check morning papers from around the country, around the world. Not a lot of time tonight, so we've got to move very quickly. So stay with me here.

"The Examiner," that's the free paper in Washington, D.C. "A Last Gasp in Lebanon. Hezbollah Rallies Nearly 500,000 Protesters, as Bush Hails Mideast Democratic Stirrings." Go back to the picture here for a second, Chris (ph). I appreciate it when demonstrators in a foreign country print the signs out in English, so that American television can capture actually what they're feeling, even if they can't read it.

"The Philadelphia Inquirer." "43 Degrees of Separation." Yesterday, here in Northeast, it was beautiful. It was just -- almost 70 in Philadelphia. Today, it was cold and windy, a perfect day to be stranded at the airport. And I was.

"Dallas Morning News." Texas Titan Signing Off. Rather Leaves CBS Anchor Chair Tonight." A nice picture of Dan. A lot of cheap shots have been taken of Dan. There's kind of petty stuff going on. But Dan is a gentleman and gracious to the end. And he'll be gracious tomorrow. And we will say more about that tomorrow. But we wish him nothing but the best.

If you've got $100 million, or nearly that, I'll chip in 50, 75 bucks. The Reds are up for sale. "Three Partners." This is the lead in "The Cincinnati Enquirer." That's a big local story. Cincinnati is a great baseball town with a very rich baseball history. And the baseball team, or at least half of it, is on the market.

And "The Detroit News" leads about as local as "The Detroit News" can lead. "More Dealers Open on Saturday." This would be car dealers. I always assumed they were open on Saturday. I guess not.

The weather, by the way, tomorrow in Chicago, if you're wondering...

(CHIMES)

BROWN: Thank you -- "a meanie."

We'll wrap it up in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Good to have you with us tonight. I'm off to the Midwest tomorrow, but I will be back here tomorrow night. That's the plan. We'll see what happens, 10:00 Eastern time. "LOU DOBBS TONIGHT" next for most of you.

Until tomorrow, good night for all of us.

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 March 8, 2005 - 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.
We begin tonight with the public service that's provided whenever a president or an ex-president becomes ill. When President Clinton was diagnosed with heart disease last year, thousands of otherwise healthy Americans got a checkup. Some of them wouldn't be alive today if they hadn't.

Now, millions of Americans are learning, along with the 42nd president, that heart surgery isn't perfect and complications happen. Mr. Clinton will undergo surgery to deal with those complications on Thursday.

We have two reports tonight beginning with CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The first clues were subtle. During routine exercise near his home in New York, doctors say former President Clinton began to feel the nagging in his chest and shortness of breath.

DR. ALLAN SCHWARTZ, NY PRESBYTERIAN HOSPITAL: He had noticed over the past month or so that on steep hills he was getting winded a bit more easily. At the same time, he was starting to feel a bit of discomfort in his left chest.

GUPTA: A rare complication of fluid and scar built up in the chest will place Clinton back in the operating room on Thursday.

SCHWARTZ: This is not an emergency. This is being done to assure that he is able to continue to maintain a highly active lifestyle and that he's not at all functionally limited by his lung but this is not a medically urgent procedure.

GUPTA: Even though Schwartz called the procedure elective, it's clear that President Clinton needs the operation. His discomfort due to fluid, which is causing the thin lining outside the lungs called the pleura to thicken and collapse.

SCHWARTZ: Left untouched for a long period of time, any collection in the body potentially could be seeded with infection, although that risk is extremely low. We don't want to leave him with compromise of normal lung function. GUPTA: So, doctors will perform a procedure to shore off those thickened layers and remove fluid allowing the lung to heal and re- expand. When asked if Clinton's busy schedule, including recent trips to areas devastated by the tsunami are to blame for his condition, doctors said...

SCHWARTZ: The short answer is no.

GUPTA: And so the president kept his busy schedule and even talked about the procedure.

BILL CLINTON, FMR. PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It's a routine sort of deal and it will knock me out of commission for a week or two and then I'll be back to normal. This is no big deal. And, you know, I felt well enough to go to Asia to try to keep up with President Bush and we're going to go play golf tomorrow, so I'm not in too bad a shape.

GUPTA: Doctors do predict a routine operation and recovery in and out of the hospital in three to ten days.

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: President Clinton and President Bush are going to play golf tomorrow to raise money for the tsunami victims. It goes to show how sick he is.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Well, I have a couple of questions. This is general anesthetic. Anytime there's general anesthetic there's risk.

GUPTA: Yes, in some cases the general anesthesia may be riskier than the operation itself.

BROWN: You talked about, I think the expression you used was shoring the thickness, thinning it out by cutting away some of the lung?

GUPTA: I think the best way -- no, not cutting away some of the lung and that's one of the big risks of this actually. Think of it almost like an orange peel sort of wrapped itself around the lung. You have to sort of peel that away and sometimes that can be pretty challenging. It's pretty sticky to the lung.

BROWN: They do this by cracking open the chest again or can they do this less invasively?

GUPTA: We asked that question. What they specifically said was they want to do it with an endoscope, which basically means making a small...

BROWN: A TV camera, isn't it?

GUPTA: Yes, it's like a fiber optic little camera, little lens that goes through a small opening right into the chest wall. It has some instruments at the end of it and they can actually delicately sort of pull away this peel with that. If it doesn't work, then they do have to open up the chest though.

BROWN: I'm not sure that this, this almost sounds stupid to say it but aside from this because this is a reasonably -- any time somebody has surgery it's a reasonably important thing. Aside from this, you look at President Clinton and he looks like an ideal, in many ways, heart patient. He's lost a lot of weight. He looks -- he looked almost gaunt earlier this summer.

GUPTA: Yes.

BROWN: He looks a little healthier now to me.

GUPTA: I think he has put on some weight since the summer and, you know, when we first heard the story this morning that he was going back to the O.R., the first thing that anyone considers is have one of those areas that he had operated back in September has it re-closed up again, the graft that was -- the bypass? It turns out that that's not the case. We asked specifically about that. He's had stress tests. He's had other tests. All those graphs look like they're open.

BROWN: Let me ask you one other thing that's not necessarily in your area of expertise but close. What is the psychological effect, do you think, of -- I mean the heart surgery itself, heart issues themselves have psychological effect, mortality issues, and now he's got to go back for another one. Is there a concern about the psychology of the second operation?

GUPTA: You know, a lot of surgeons probably don't pay enough attention to that. My father actually had bypass surgery many years ago and I know afterwards it did affect him psychologically in a good way I think. It made him you know, exercise more and eat better.

You know it's a brush with mortality the first time around. The second time around I think the doctors have reassured the former president that, you know, he's not going to die from this. This is something he will probably get through pretty safety but I think it certainly does have an impact any time you go back in the second time.

BROWN: Thank you.

GUPTA: Thank you.

BROWN: Good to see you.

As you heard a moment ago, the president is in Florida tonight. He'll play a charity golf event tomorrow with President Bush, the first, and Greg Norman, which will raise nearly $2 million for victims of the tsunami. Perhaps the very definition of the love-him or hate- him former president, he has seemed of late to find his place and his role.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): There is no real job description for an ex- president and when Bill Clinton became one, he joined an elite group with unique challenges, a task complicated by his relative youth he was just 54, and the controversy that dogged him to his last days in office and beyond.

JOHN HARRIS, "WASHINGTON POST": There's no question for the first year at least and really maybe more than that, there was quite a lot of controversy swirling around Bill Clinton that did make it harder for him to make this transition from a political figure to a more apolitical or statesman like figure.

BROWN: It is not necessarily easy being a statesman when you're treated like a rock star, as the former president seemed to be in his adopted New York home. And while he was trying to find his place, there were bills to pay, $10 million in legal fees, most of it wiped out in a year of speech making.

Like most every president before him, there was a book deal. President Bush had one. Nixon wrote several. So has President Carter. But none received the kind of advance that Bill Clinton received, money that made the former president wealthy and perhaps with wealth and a little more age has come understanding.

DAVID GERGEN, KENNEDY SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT: It strikes me that in the last year or two he has found his voice again as a former president and now he's one of the most interesting and provocative and moving speakers in our public life.

BROWN: So, he's worked on getting drugs to AIDS patients in Africa, worked to bring development to the third world. He has tried to get above it all without actually being completely divorced from his clear passion for politics.

HARRIS: Bill Clinton wants to be above politics. He wants to be a statesman like figure. At the same time, he's acutely interested in Democratic politics of 2008 and what happens to his wife. So, it's a very delicate balance.

BROWN: In some ways he is a man who can't live with it, politics, and can't live without it. He clearly craves a larger stage and a higher purpose. His library is open. He seems at ease with old adversaries and they with him. His wife is now the family political star and he, with one major heart surgery down and another heart surgery coming, seems more at ease with his current job, former president, than ever.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: And, again, President Clinton will have surgery Thursday here in New York.

"Security Watch" now and a question if the government considers you too dangerous to board a commercial airliner should you be able to buy a gun? Okay, should is a loaded question, though most people would say no, Second Amendment or not but according to the Government Accountability Office that's exactly what 47 people on the government's watch list did last year.

Here's CNN's Jeanne Meserve.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JEANNE MESERVE, CNN HOMELAND SECURITY CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A person on a terrorist watch list might have an easier time buying a high-powered firearm than boarding a commercial airliner.

SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER (D), NEW YORK: I'm just utterly appalled that people on terrorist watch lists can buy guns. What are we doing to ourselves?

MESERVE: A new report from the Government Accountability Office says last year background checks on gun buyers found 58 matches with government terrorist watch lists. In 47 of those cases, the person listed went on to get his or her gun. Being on a list of suspected terrorists does not disqualify a buyer the way a felony conviction or mental illness would.

ROBERT MUELLER, FBI DIRECTOR: We ought to look at the law and see what modifications could be made.

MESERVE: If someone on the watch list is trying to buy a gun, the FBI is notified but by law the records of the transaction are destroyed after 24 hours. Gun control advocates argue that this could hamper terrorism investigations.

SEN. FRANK LAUTENBERG (D), NEW JERSEY: It's incomprehensible. If you put this question to the American people and say, should we go out of our way to help a terrorist get a gun and conceal his background, absolutely not.

MESERVE: Experts estimate there are more than 50,000 names on the often criticized government watch lists, watch lists that have kept the likes of Senator Ted Kennedy from flying. What is needed, says one expert, is discretion.

RICHARD FALKENRATH, CNN SECURITY ANALYST: There's a wide range of different reasons that people get on watch lists. Not all of them, it seems to me, should be disqualifying for buying a gun.

MESERVE: But Sanford Abrams has a different point of view. He sells guns.

SANFORD ABRAMS, MARYLAND GUN DEALER: There's no right to fly an airplane in this country. There is a right to own a firearm.

MESERVE: A collision between constitutional rights and the war on terror.

For CNN's America Bureau, Jeanne Meserve, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: On now to an item that raises a chill no matter what. If the allegations, which involve child abuse are true, it is a horror story. If not, it's a witch hunt. Either way, a quite town in France known for mild weather, good wine and gentle light is undergoing a rude awakening. Here's CNN's Jim Bittermann.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JIM BITTERMANN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Every day the police vans bring 66 residents of Angers to court. They are on trial for multiple counts of pedophilia, sex with children. It's the largest criminal trial in French history, so large that a special courtroom has been constructed to try crimes that are horrifying.

(on camera): According to investigators, over the course of three years here, 45 children, ranging in age from six months to 16 years old, were repeatedly sexually abused and raped, sometimes by members of their own family, sometimes in exchange for payments, such as small amounts of money, food, alcohol and, in one case, a car tire.

(voice-over): Those who have read through the 25,000 pages of evidence say it is difficult to overestimate the impact this case has had.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: To me this is a global failure, failure of the social services and failure of the society itself, failure of us all.

BITTERMANN: Those who live around the three family groups, who are alleged to be at the center of the pedophilia ring, are terrified. Fifteen-year-old Florian Ribas knew his neighbors were poor and unemployed but he did not know that they may have been abusing their children.

FLORIAN RIBAS, NEIGHBOR (through translator): It's left a mark on me. They live just across the street and I said to myself that could have been me.

BITTERMANN: At a class break at a nearby school, 15-year-old Marie Minyot (ph) says she's scared. "We could never imagine that this could happen near us. We think about it all the time."

And classmates Eric Radiarison (ph) and Helene Gammard (ph) report that especially younger school children are no longer allowed out freely that parents as never before are now picking up their kids from school.

Over at Patrice Martan's (ph) bar, there's a fear of a different sort. His customers talk about the case all the time and worry there will now be false accusations of child abuse.

"It's a psychosis," he says. "Just about everyone can be accused. All you have to do is say hello to a child and someone will say that you're a pedophile."

BITTERMANN: The local newspaper editor says the affair has left people stupefied.

MICHEL PATEAU, LA NOUVELLE REPUBLIQUE (through translator): The first reaction by the president of the regional council was that's not us. That's not Angers. We are not like that.

BITTERMANN: Said a lawyer representing eleven of the children that you don't even know you have victims and pedophiles around you, truly it is shameful, shameful, shameful.

The thick old Roman walls of Angers hid many things but so too, people here are learning, do the modern ones.

Jim Bittermann CNN, Angers, France.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Much more coming up on the program in the hour ahead, starting with one of the most terrifying parts of daily life in Iraq, the checkpoints.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): They are meant to stop deadly attacks but innocent people can become targets.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): In my personal opinion, people fear these checkpoints more than they fear other attacks and explosions.

BROWN: As the CEO of a major corporation gets his walking papers, we'll look at the gray zone of office romance. When is it OK? When is it not? And how do you know?

They found a battered camera in the debris of the tsunami.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Kevin was the one who had the forethought to say, hey wait, it has a blue chip in it so you never know. Something might be recorded on the card.

BROWN: The images on the chip would haunt them. Finding the truth would lead them halfway around the world.

And 60 years after the death of Anne Frank, images of her life and those she loved.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It really is family life, I think, as they knew it before everything became so bad for them really.

BROWN: Photographs taken by Anne Frank's father before his world collapsed.

From New York and around the world this is NEWSNIGHT.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(NEWSBREAK)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: A reminder that moment for moment serving in Iraq is no less dangerous than serving in Vietnam. Then and now life goes by in a series of encounters, some routine, some deadly, with only a split second to decide which is which.

Many such encounters play out at roadside checkpoints. Today an American general was named to lead the investigation into the shooting at a checkpoint last week along the road to the airport in Baghdad, an Italian journalist wounded, her security guard killed, the facts hotly disputed save one, whether driving a car or manning a machine gun, a checkpoint is a nervous corner of a nerve-racking war; from Baghdad tonight CNN's Nic Robertson.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN SR. INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): At a U.S. checkpoint a year ago, I saw the aftermath of an Iraqi shot when he failed to stop. At the time, the soldiers feared he might have been an insurgent and they tried to disable his car to save their lives.

Later that year and 65 miles away, Miqdad Abdull, a former Iraqi general says a similar thing happened to him. He points to the windshield of his car where he says he was shot at by U.S. soldiers at a checkpoint.

MIQDAD ABDULL, FORMER IRAQI GENERAL (through translator): The first shot was a killer shot and this I know from my experience. I ducked and the shooting lasted for about another 15 seconds.

ROBERTSON: He shows photographs of the many bullet holes through the windshield of his car and of his own injuries, laid out police maps and a note apparently written by a U.S. Army officer.

It reads, "This vehicle failed to stop for a coalition traffic point. The vehicle was engaged and hit by small arms fire." He claims not to have seen the warning for him to stop.

ABDULL (through translator): In my personal opinion, people fear these checkpoints more than they fear other attacks and explosions.

ROBERTSON: This day at a checkpoint on the highway to Baghdad International Airport, the most dangerous road in Iraq, two Iraqi drivers get confused about how to proceed.

(on camera): This is exactly where Iraqi drivers worry the most, they say. They're coming into a checkpoint here and what they say they fear is that they may be mistaken for a suicide bomber and that's why this area, they say, is the most dangerous because they could be shot at.

(voice-over): No one has an accurate account of how many Iraqis and others have been injured in this way but commanders say they are committed to avoiding casualties.

MAJ. GEN. WILLIAM WEBSER, COMMANDER 3RD ID: We've trained our soldiers and we continue to retrain them on techniques of causing a vehicle to slow down and stop far enough away where it doesn't present the threat of an explosive device.

ROBERTSON: And in Iraq, explosive devices like that go off 40 to 60 times every day. The threat that worries the soldiers the most is the suicide car bomber, so every time a car comes close to them, they told me, it's a critical moment where self preservation forces a fast decision.

WEBSTER: If the vehicle looks like a threat of lethal force to the soldier guarding the position, then we may fire warning shots into the ground next to the vehicle and then we instruct our soldiers to engage the engine block if they possibly can to disable the vehicle and try not to kill anyone.

ROBERTSON: On Iraq's roads, on both sides of the checkpoint, caution remains the watch word.

Nic Robertson, CNN, Baghdad.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Word tonight the U.S. military is weighing the possibility of abandoning the Abu Ghraib Prison, a military spokesman telling the Associated Press the prison has simply come under insurgent attack too many times for comfort. There are plans, he says, for removing so-called high value prisoners and putting them up at a new facility, new prison, at Baghdad International Airport.

On to Lebanon where a massive rally, organized by the militant group Hezbollah, filled a square in the central part of Beirut today. Tens of thousands of protesters, this is the biggest march yet, turned out this time to show support for Syria and to reject a U.N. resolution calling for Syrian troops to immediately withdraw from Lebanon.

Today's rally follows three weeks of anti-Syrian demonstrations set off by the assassination of Lebanon's former prime minister. Yesterday, the presidents of Syria and Lebanon agreed to withdraw the troops gradually according to a 1989 accord. Today's demonstration though, a reminder that nothing, absolutely nothing about the Middle East is simple.

Coming up on the program tonight a question, when is hanky panky kinky, if you will, the dos and don'ts of office romance, business ethics and common sense, the story at Boeing and just may be at your company too, a much needed break first though.

From New York this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Romance in the office, when is it OK, when is it inappropriate? Corporate America likely to reexamine the rules now that Harry Stonecipher has been forced out as Boeing's chief executive for having an affair with a female executive.

He was hired 15 months ago, pulled out of retirement to polish Boeing's image following a series of ethical missteps by the company and its employees, including a series of interoffice affairs by his predecessor.

My goodness, what's going on there? In fact, last summer, Boeing agreed to pay $72.5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by female employees alleging discrimination.

This morning, Mr. Stonecipher was quoted in the "Wall Street Journal" as saying, "We set -- Hell, I set a higher standard here. I violated my own standards. I used poor judgment.

Should it have been a firing offense? The affair was brief. The woman was not a direct subordinate. There's no evidence the former Boeing CEO gave her any favors, so what's the crime and what are the rules?

Lisa Mainiero is a professor of management at Fairfield University in Connecticut, the author of "Office Romance, Love, Power and Sex in the Workplace," and made her way from Connecticut to be with us tonight. Thank you.

LISA A. MAINIERO, AUTHOR, "OFFICE ROMANCE": It's an honor.

BROWN: Would it have mattered if he or they both were single?

MAINIERO: Not necessarily because this is a romance that crossed organizational lines. What my research showed is that any romance that crossed the organizational hierarchy so that you have a higher level person involved with a lower level employee is always trouble.

BROWN: Even if there are relationships in complex organizations where the lines of authority aren't that direct where I'm not directly someone's supervisor, though I may be in a superior position?

MAINIERO: That's a good point, because, in fact, often, romances occur between someone who is at a lower level and someone who is two or three, four steps above that person in a different area of the company. The issue has to do with sexual favors being traded for some aspect of what the person wants from the corporation.

BROWN: Well, power.

MAINIERO: Power, promotions, favorable business trips, raises that should not have been granted, etcetera. What -- the issue is, is sex being traded for power?

BROWN: Most companies, I assume -- I haven't looked at most companies' H.R. books, but I assume they have a policy that says a supervisor cannot have a relationship with someone who's directly subordinate. Are companies trying to figure out in a written way when it is OK? Because it's going to happen. I mean...

MAINIERO: Yes.

BROWN: People spend eight, 10 hours at the office. It's going to happen. MAINIERO: It's going to happen, and it does. Cupid does shoot arrows on company time.

BROWN: Yes.

MAINIERO: And it happens very frequently, especially now in this time when people are delaying the age of marriage. You're not going to find your spouse at your university, necessarily, anymore. So, in fact, people are finding their future partner in their workplaces.

BROWN: "The Wall Street Journal" tried to sort of this out and said today on its editorial page that men and women in the workplace no longer have the margin for misjudgment they once did. The implication is that we're at a time of sort of ethical hypersensitivity.

Are we in a time of ethical hypersensitivity or ethical hypersensitivity or romantic hypersensitivity, whatever?

(LAUGHTER)

MAINIERO: Whatever it may be.

BROWN: Yes.

MAINIERO: I think the stakes are higher these days in light of Enron and some of the other ethical violations that we've seen in companies in the news recently.

Boeing, in particular, has -- I was very impressed with a 30-page document, their ethical code of conduct. That's pretty rare. Usually, what happens is, you have a few statements in a company policy manual and you leave it at that.

BROWN: Yes.

MAINIERO: But this was very specific.

BROWN: What they said here was, they said, well, it's not about the sex, which, of course, makes me believe it is about the sex. But they said it's not about the sex. It's about a lack of judgment that he violated...

MAINIERO: Yes.

BROWN: ... a paragraph that says you'll never do anything that embarrasses the company.

MAINIERO: Yes, or create a conflict of interest. That's in there as well.

Yes. Very often, the upper-level person is accused of a lack of business judgment. The lower-level person is accused of sleeping his or her way to the top. It's a no-win situation for both parties.

BROWN: Just real quickly, is it unusual for the woman to survive this and the man to get fired?

MAINIERO: Not as much anymore.

BROWN: OK.

MAINIERO: It used to be a gender issue, that it was always the woman who was fired. Not as much anymore.

BROWN: Nice to meet you. Thanks for coming in.

MAINIERO: Thank you.

BROWN: Appreciate it.

Still to come on the program, a battered camera that survived the tsunami and the haunting images it contained, a remarkable search for the truth.

And morning papers coming up as well.

Around the world, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: We showed you this earlier. President Bush met at the White House today with two of his predecessors for an update on the tsunami relief effort.

Former Presidents George H.W. Bush -- that would be the president's father, I think -- And President Clinton handed the president a report on their campaign to raise private donations and collected $1 billion almost to help the victims across South Asia. It's all private money. It's been a pretty remarkable effort by the two former presidents.

Even as they do, stories keep emerging, along with images that won't soon fade from memory. Some were captured on a camera discovered by a missionary from Seattle who found that camera in the rubble. It contained photos of a couple who did not survive. But who were they? Did they have family? The missionary was determined to find out, not just because he is a man of God who wanted to comfort people in grief, but because he knew firsthand what it means to suffer unbearable loss.

Here's CNN's Frank Buckley.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

FRANK BUCKLEY, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Amidst the tons of debris left behind by the tsunami, a smashed-up digital camera found near this spot by Baptist missionary Christian Pilet and his friend, Cameron Craig. They were about to throw it away.

CHRISTIAN PILET, BAPTIST MISSIONARY: Cameron was the one who had the forethought to say, hey, wait, it has the chip in it still. And you never know. Something might be recorded on the card. And so he pulled it. We put it in our pocket and on we went.

BUCKLEY: Something was there, what appeared to be a record of the final days in the life of this happy couple. But who were they? And then there was this. Taken on December 26, the wave in the distance is the tsunami before it hit. It was among a disturbing sequence of images that captured the moments of terror as the waters rushed ashore.

First, the waters go out, then a change. The water is rushing back. The wave is getting closer. Some begin to sense danger.

C. PILET: Then you see a Thai woman starting to run.

BUCKLEY: One person just stares as the wave approaches.

C. PILET: And the last picture, as best I can figure, it was probably only 100 feet in front of them as they took this picture. And it fills, it fills the horizon. It just fills the whole picture.

BUCKLEY: The photos, they determined, must have been taken by that couple in the pictures.

C. PILET: Cameron and I were -- I think the only word is devastated. Up to that point, we had been looking mainly at rubble, mainly at things that had been destroyed. But somehow now we felt a connection with some people who had been there. And it was as if we had inadvertently heard their last comments, their last conversation and then heard it suddenly stopped.

BUCKLEY: Pilet was determined to find out who these people were. He searched the disaster area. These are his pictures. He went to embassies, but no one could identify this couple, whose lives, like so many others, suddenly ended.

Weeks after the disaster, Pilet arrived home to his own family in North Bend, Washington. He was jet-lagged and exhausted, but still determined to identify the couple in the pictures. And now he had his wife, Nicole, at his side. On the very day Christian arrived home with the photos, Nicole went on the Internet to search.

NICOLE PILET, WIFE OF CHRISTIAN: First, I went to Google.

BUCKLEY: She showed us what she did, which keyword she typed in. And before Pilet had even fallen asleep, she had a hit.

N. PILET: It was the very first Web site I found.

C. PILET: I remember kind of falling asleep as I heard her clicking and her saying, I think that's the guy.

N. PILET: If it isn't him, it's his twin, because it looks just like the man from the pictures.

BUCKLEY: When Christian saw this photo on a tsunami missing persons Web site, he agreed. It said the couple was John and Jackie Knill of Vancouver, British Columbia. (on camera): The Pilets discovered that, incredibly, the couple in the photographs found halfway around the world had lived just a few hours up the road in Vancouver. Almost immediately, Christian got into his car and drove to Canada to deliver those photographs.

BUCKLEY (voice-over): Pilet knew how important that would be to those who loved John and Jackie Knill, because, once, Pilet himself had experienced a sudden loss.

C. PILET: My first wife passed away suddenly from an aneurysm several years ago. And after she passed away, somebody came up to me within half a day and told me, did you know that the message she was given, the speech she was giving at that moment had been recorded? And then they handed me a copy of this tape.

And, for me, hearing my wife's voice and hearing her last comments before she fell down and was no more were breathtaking and comforting and awesome.

BUCKLEY: Pilet hoped he could provide a similar comfort to the rightful owners of these photographs, and he did. These are the sons of John and Jackie Knill.

PATRICK KNILL, SON: And I know they were together because they were always together.

BUCKLEY: To this Baptist missionary, the photos were a gift from God and a gift from two parents to their children.

C. PILET: I think John and Jackie, by doing this, actually gave their sons something and their family something that is priceless.

BUCKLEY: But the story isn't over, because the Knills' camera also captured these images of others who were there when the tsunami hit, a Thai father and his two daughters, a young couple and others people the Knills befriended.

C. PILET: We very much would like to identify them just to be able to get this kind of closure as well to their families.

BUCKLEY: Maybe they survived, but, if they didn't, someone is out there wondering how their loved ones spent their final hours. Maybe the photos will speak to them, the way John and Jackie Knill spoke to their sons one last time.

Frank Buckley, CNN, North Bend, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Ahead on the program tonight, a young girl seen through the eyes of her father, Anne Frank in still photos, 60 years now since she died, her world of childhood, love and loss.

We take a break first. This is NEWSNIGHT on CNN.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ERICA HILL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Coming to you from the Headline News studios in Atlanta, I'm Erica Hill with your news update at quarter past the hour.

And we begin with a developing story out of Iraq, where a large explosion was heard in Baghdad. You can see it now. This is in the central area of the city, a large, black, thick plume of smoke rising. It is believed to have been a car bomb. Again, live pictures you're looking at here of Baghdad, just about 6:45 in the morning local time there. The explosion apparently, according to wire reports, also fired by some automatic weapons fire. Again, this developing story, a large explosion in the center of Baghdad, believed to be a car bomb. We'll continue to update you on that.

Meantime, back in this country, Mount Saint Helens is at it again. A large plume of smoke erupted from its crater in Southwest Washington this afternoon. It reportedly reached up to 36,000 feet high. Local TV reports say along with the smoke came a 2.0 magnitude earthquake. No immediate reports, though, of damage or injuries.

A spokesman for Michael Jackson says he felt better about how his trial went today. Defense attorneys for the pop singer got a chance to grill his accuser's brother in court. The boy admitted on the stand that the adult magazine that had been entered into evidence was not the one he claimed Jackson showed him. Lawyers also raised doubts about the boy's account of how Jackson allegedly molested his mother.

A federal grand jury has indicted three people in what is considered to be one of North America's largest counterfeit credit card scams. The suspects allegedly stole credit card numbers and rung up millions of dollars in purchases over four years. If convicted, each suspect could get up to five years in prison and have to reimburse the money stolen from banks and lenders.

Wal-Mart and other retailers are asking Congress to lengthen truck driver work days from 14 to 16 hours. The Republican congressman sponsoring the measure says the extended workday will improve both safety and efficiency. But labor unions and safety advocates say longer trucker hours would make roadways more dangerous for all drivers.

Those are the headlines. I'm Erica Hill.

Now back to NEWSNIGHT with Aaron Brown.

BROWN: Sixty years ago this month, Anne Frank was murdered by the Nazis at Buchenwald. We don't know the exact date of her death, but, all these years later, Anne Frank remains known to the world over because of her diary, the horror of the war and the Nazi plan to murder the Jews of Europe as seen through the eyes of a scared, but hopeful teenage girl.

Tonight, a remembrance of who she was join who she might have been one day in still photos taken by her father.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) HANS WESTRA, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, ANNE FRANK HUIS AMSTERDAM: Anne Frank has given the six million victims a face. For many people, they read the diary when they're young. And "The Diary of Anne Frank" is, for many people, the first experience of the dark side of mankind.

She writes about her surroundings and how difficult it is to grow up in such an environment where you are not accepted as what you are.

ELISABETH FEERICK, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, THE ANNE FRANK CENTER USA: Anne received her diary on her 13th birthday, which was in June. And it was in July that they had to go into hiding.

Otto took pictures of his family right up to the moment, almost, they had to go into hiding. He loved not just taking the photographs, but trying artistic angles, playing with light and shade. The settings for these pictures were chosen on trips, in school, the girls playing outside. He has a great number of photographs of Anne and Margot with their friends, birthday parties, or the babies that have just come home from the hospital.

It's really his family life, I think, as they knew it, before everything became so bad for them. He didn't take any photos while they were in hiding. They were discovered and arrested in August of '44.

WESTRA: And the end of October 1944, Anne and her sister were transported back into Germany to Bergen-Belsen. And there, she died somewhere in March 1944, a couple of weeks before the liberation of the camp.

FEERICK: He returned from the camps and came to Amsterdam, and then found out that the girls had not survived. He never took another photo again after that.

Arnold Newman obtained the permission from Otto to take a photograph. And they went to the museum, I think, the first day it was opened. As they went up and climbed up to the attic, Otto went into this very sad and withdrawn mold and mind-set, obviously. And as he leaned against a post, the clocks from the Wester Tower, which is right outside this building, began to chime.

And Anne, indeed, writes of these clocks and the tower bells. And she finds it so reassuring that they -- that she hears them so frequently. And Otto is reminded of the passages in the diary and really broke down when he heard the bells.

This was a normal family with dreams, with love, with a family life of traditions, of culture, the joy of being together, of building an existence. This was a very protective set of parents wanting their children to have the best, to live in love.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Sixty years.

Morning papers after the break. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(ROOSTER CROWING)

BROWN: OK, time to check morning papers from around the country, around the world. Not a lot of time tonight, so we've got to move very quickly. So stay with me here.

"The Examiner," that's the free paper in Washington, D.C. "A Last Gasp in Lebanon. Hezbollah Rallies Nearly 500,000 Protesters, as Bush Hails Mideast Democratic Stirrings." Go back to the picture here for a second, Chris (ph). I appreciate it when demonstrators in a foreign country print the signs out in English, so that American television can capture actually what they're feeling, even if they can't read it.

"The Philadelphia Inquirer." "43 Degrees of Separation." Yesterday, here in Northeast, it was beautiful. It was just -- almost 70 in Philadelphia. Today, it was cold and windy, a perfect day to be stranded at the airport. And I was.

"Dallas Morning News." Texas Titan Signing Off. Rather Leaves CBS Anchor Chair Tonight." A nice picture of Dan. A lot of cheap shots have been taken of Dan. There's kind of petty stuff going on. But Dan is a gentleman and gracious to the end. And he'll be gracious tomorrow. And we will say more about that tomorrow. But we wish him nothing but the best.

If you've got $100 million, or nearly that, I'll chip in 50, 75 bucks. The Reds are up for sale. "Three Partners." This is the lead in "The Cincinnati Enquirer." That's a big local story. Cincinnati is a great baseball town with a very rich baseball history. And the baseball team, or at least half of it, is on the market.

And "The Detroit News" leads about as local as "The Detroit News" can lead. "More Dealers Open on Saturday." This would be car dealers. I always assumed they were open on Saturday. I guess not.

The weather, by the way, tomorrow in Chicago, if you're wondering...

(CHIMES)

BROWN: Thank you -- "a meanie."

We'll wrap it up in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Good to have you with us tonight. I'm off to the Midwest tomorrow, but I will be back here tomorrow night. That's the plan. We'll see what happens, 10:00 Eastern time. "LOU DOBBS TONIGHT" next for most of you.

Until tomorrow, good night for all of us.

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