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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown

Israel Will Accept an International Fact Finding Mission Into Jenin

Aired April 19, 2002 - 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: And good evening again, everyone. We've done lots of crazy things with this page over the last seven months or so, but we've never flinched and we won't flinch tonight. So let's talk about last night for a few moments.

I think this program, NEWSNIGHT, did too much on Robert Blake's arrest last night. There are lots of reasons for that. Most of them are good. If breaking news is the mother's milk of a network like CNN, and NEWSNIGHT last night was the network. We're not separate from the network and that's as it should be.

And there's something challenging about pulling off the coverage. It's seat of the pants, no scripts, trying to keep conversation interesting. You're on the air for a long time, and it was interesting, I thought, along the way.

The discussion on media and trials and especially about our priorities in the post September 11th era, were spot on, but NEWSNIGHT did too much. I walked into the house very late, and my wife looked at me sleepy-eyed and said, "why?" Guilty pleasures is the best answer I have.

The program seemed like an entire meal of chocolate, all dessert. I wouldn't serve up a program that was all Brussels sprouts, just important and dry. The NEWSNIGHT meal should be balanced. Chocolate ought not be the entree. So I think we spent too much time on it.

I know that mostly because there were too many things that we should have reported and didn't, the Canadians who died in the friendly fire incident, the plane in Milan. There was Jenin and the White House struggles with finding yet another Mid East policy.

We should have done those too. They were important. But we didn't. Breaking news is like heroin to us. It feels good at first, but it's dangerous and addicting. For the most part, the balance between just interesting and important stuff we work really hard to make interesting, has been about right.

I don't think you'll find this program is going to be taken prisoner by the Blake case or anything else. We're a general news program. We received hundreds of e-mails from viewers last night, hundreds of them, and not one raved about our Blake coverage. But there's something else you should know. The program's ratings last night were the highest we've had since November, the day the American Airlines plane crashed here in New York. So both sides of the camera have some decisions to make, we do and so do you. As an old actor once said, that's the name of that tune.

On to the whip we go. A new security warning from the FBI issued today. CNN's Kelli Arena is in Washington. Kelli, a headline please.

KELLI ARENA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Aaron this latest threat against banks in the northeast. Now, while the information is sketchy, you'll be very surprised at the source.

BROWN: Kelli, thank you, we're back to you. Christiane Amanpour visited what's left of the refugee camp in Jenin today. She's back in Jerusalem now, so Christiane, we await the headline from you.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, the headline is that after a lot of international pressure, the Israeli foreign minister has told the United Nations that he would accept an international fact-finding mission into what happened at Jenin.

And while the Israeli troops have now pulled out of the refugee camp, that central part, which I literally flattened, is now the site of residents coming back to try to find wounded and maybe even dead, but there is no heavy lifting equipment, nothing to help them move the rubble.

BROWN: Christiane, thank you. We're getting a better picture of what might have sent a passenger train off the rails in Florida. Susan Candiotti is in Putnam County, Florida. Susan 24 plus hours later what's the headline?

SUSAN CANDIOTTI, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good evening, Aaron. The engineer says he saw something wrong with the train's tracks that made him slam on the brakes. We'll tell you what investigators are doing to try to find out exactly what he saw -- Aaron.

BROWN: Susan, thank you, back with all of you shortly. Also on the menu tonight, a reunion of the Class of '67, where memory lane runs through Oakland and Detroit and Watts, and the memories are a protest and police and tear gas. We like this story a lot.

We'll also look at a terrific new documentary about Ansel Adams, who said so much with just the colors black and white. Filmmaker Rick Burns will join us a little bit later, and we'll show a piece of the film as well.

And also tonight, Boston's Fenway Park, the old park turns 90 and we'll take a look there, not a bad way to end the program and to end the week. But there is something missing tonight. We'll deal with the ratings on Monday.

We begin with a kind of queasy, uncertain feeling that comes from yet another government security warning. The uncertainty is not knowing for sure that anything will happen. The queasiness comes from knowing what might.

It's been a while since the last warnings. Today's came through the FBI, and although it is still unsubstantiated, it was enough for the attorney general to cancel a trip overseas.

In case you're wondering, we're still at what the homeland defense people call threat condition yellow. At least tonight, it feels like a very different shade. Here again is CNN's Kelli Arena.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ARENA (voice over): U.S. officials say the threat against financial institutions in the northeast came in part from information supplied by Abu Zubaydah, one of Osama bin Laden's top lieutenants currently in U.S. custody.

The official stressed the information is not specific, and that no target was mentioned. Sources say the information indicated a possible motive attack, a suicide bombing.

JOHN ASHCROFT, ATTORNEY GENERAL: We have no information about a threat to any specific institution. The alert has been provided to law enforcement and financial institutions who have been requested to report any threats or suspicious activities to the local FBI office.

ARENA: Sources say they are treating what Zubaydah tells them with considerable caution and the FBI underscores the threats are unconfirmed.

Still, Attorney General John Ashcroft abruptly cancelled a planned trip to Europe. He was due to leave Saturday morning, and the threat warning was sent to banks and law enforcement in 12 northeastern states and the District of Columbia.

ROBERT MUELLER, FBI DIRECTOR: In this case, we probably would say the banks should not close, but should be on heightened alert, looking at persons coming into banks, being suspicious of persons that aren't ordinarily in banks.

ARENA: One of the nation's biggest financial institutions Bank of America says: "Unless the threat escalates, it's business as usual."

The threat level for both the northeast region and the nation has not changed as a result of the new information. It remains at yellow, which is an elevated level of risk.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ARENA: Now while the threat information is being looked at with some caution, what may be most important is that the highest-ranking al Qaeda operative in custody is talking, Aaron, and that is something that law enforcement is quite pleased about.

BROWN: If he is telling the truth.

ARENA: Exactly, and as one official said today, you know this man is very good at lying and can be misleading.

BROWN: Kelli, thank you. Kelli Arena working the Justice Department today, condition yellow, threat alert.

On to the Middle East, a number of new developments, in Gaza a man blew himself up at an Israeli checkpoint. That's the first suicide bombing in Gaza in five months. Also in Gaza, a firefight with Israeli forces left two Palestinians dead. They were dressed in Israeli uniforms and carrying Kalashnikov rifles.

On the West Bank, Israeli soldiers shot and killed two Palestinian boys who were out after curfew. And then there is Jenin the troops, the Israeli troops have pulled back. Many questions remain. There is no doubt in the destruction and the death and the dislocation, those are all very real and indisputable. As for the rest, whether a massacre took place or just a very ugly battle, we can not yet say.

Tonight, the U.S. Security Council has voted to send a fact- finding team to Jenin. The vote was unanimous, the United States dropping its objections after language calling for a peacekeeping force and a more formal investigation was removed. CNN's Christiane Amanpour spent the day in Jenin and this is the story she's filing.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR (voice over): It's early morning after Israeli tanks and troops finally pull out of Jenin. A woman and her child, clutching his stuffed toy, are among the stunned residents of the refugee camp, coming back to see just what they survived. All over this scene of massive destruction, people say to each other, thank God that you are still alive.

In the piles of pulverized concrete and twisted metal, women and old men scrabble with their hands in search of belongings, and where there's a stench, they search for anyone who might be buried.

It's a futile effort with just a plank of wood they can not winch away the concrete slabs. "If they thought we were human, they wouldn't have done this to us" said this old man, "and now no one is helping us."

Indeed, here they wonder why they are not yet getting the kind of emergency international aid they've seen rushed to earthquake victims all over the world. The U.N. says Israel bears some responsibility for launching a search and rescue operation.

AMANPOUR (on camera): There is a strong smell of rotting bodies and under many of the piles in this area of devastation, but people may never know the true extent of their casualties unless they get in proper heavy lifting equipment to move the rubble.

AMANPOUR (voice over): The war of the body count is almost as fierce as the fighting itself, 23 Israeli soldiers and a still unknown number of Palestinians. Israeli press reconstruction suggests the army attacked from the edge of the camp with tank and machine gun fire, trying to get its infantry in, but failed because of armed resistance and then started attacking houses with Apache helicopters and tanks, until Palestinian fighters were forced deeper and deeper into the camp, here where the final destruction took place.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Last night, President Bush says that Ariel Sharon, the prime minister of Israel is the peace man, but you can see the actions of the peace man. Hundreds of houses were destroyed.

AMANPOUR: Some residents say they never got any warning, but others like Saed (ph), his wife and four children say they were told to get out.

"We were here in our house for a week" he said, "until they called us on loud speakers saying they were going to strike with F- 16s."

The Israeli press reports carrier counts by some of their soldiers. One called this Vietnam. Others admit they used Palestinian camp residents as human shields as they went house-to-house searching for armed militants and booby-traps. The Israeli army insists the use of human shields, which violates the rules of war, is not their policy.

With the battle for Jenin over now, all that's left for the residents who are left is to report their missing and wonder where they're going to live.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR (on camera): And on Friday, as the final Israeli troops and tanks pulled out of that camp, some 35 Palestinian bodies that had been pulled out of the rubble over the past week, were buried in a common grave. And as we say, there is this notion that there may be an inquiry.

U.S. President George Bush has said he backs an investigation into the conflicting body count and now the Israeli Foreign Minister says that he would welcome an investigation if one was launched, but that may put him at odds with the prime minister whose spokesman has already dismissed any notion of an inquiry here. Aaron.

BROWN: And, Christiane, just for your benefit, let me repeat that the U.N. Security Council did vote to send a fact-finding mission to Jenin just a short time ago.

Let me ask you, you've seen a lot of things in our years in a lot of different places, and I assume you were somewhat prepared for what you saw in Jenin. Was it vastly different that what you expected it to be?

AMANPOUR: The level of destruction in that area, which is about as people have described it, about one mile square, just under one mile square, was actually devastating. I didn't expect to see the amount of houses completely leveled.

But I think the thing that has happened is that we won't know and we don't know how many dead, how many wounded there are underneath that rubble, if indeed there are that many.

But one of the things that has compounded the suspicion about what's happened is the fact that the Israelis for many, many days even after the fighting refused to let journalists in, refused to let international observers in, refused to let the U.N. For 11 days here, the U.N. here was asking to go in.

So no matter what actually happened, and perhaps one day it will be discovered, that has compounded the suspicion and no matter what happens in the future, Jenin will remain for the Palestinians a place of myth and legend and perhaps even a place of revenge. Something very bad happened in terms of the destruction, but the impact I think will last beyond that.

BROWN: Christiane, yes I couldn't agree more. Thank you a lot. Later in the broadcast, we're going to talk more about Jenin. We'll go back to Jerusalem. We'll talk with a forensic pathologist who works with

Amnesty International on loan from Gundy (ph) University in Scotland. He has been in Jenin, and we will get his impressions as well. That's coming up in just a little bit.

We move on to Florida first and a theory on what turned a train full of vacationers and their cars into a half a mile of wreckage. Tonight, a massive federal investigation is underway, so we turn again to CNN's Susan Candiotti who is on the scene. Susan, again good evening.

CANDIOTTI: Hello, Aaron. First of all, an eerie look at this hour of the work that's still going on in that passenger train that's lit up over my shoulder that derailed.

First of all, the number of fatalities has been revised downward from six last night to four this day. Three of the four people who died were ejected from the train. Among the dead, a husband and a wife. Only 12 people remain hospitalized.

Meantime investigators are trying to figure out exactly what made the engineer hit the brakes.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CANDIOTTI (voice over): Just before Amtrak's auto train crunched together like an accordion, it was picking up speed, going 56 miles an hour, just under the 60 mile per hour limit. Then, according to the engineer, he saw something he didn't like.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He saw a misalignment in the track that caused him to react by putting on his brakes.

CANDIOTTI: Passengers on cell phones frantically called for help. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: In the car I was in, there was a man with his head split open, a woman with a broken arm. There's a couple of elderly people who are pinned under their seat, and that's just in my car."

CANDIOTTI: Investigators spent the day inspecting rails, peering at cars, taking measurements of what's been described as a screeching 30-second long stop, looking for evidence to back up the engineer's claims, but not ruling out any explanation for what sent 21 of the 40 cars off the rails.

GEORGE BLACK, NTSB ROAD WORKER: We will examine essentially every inch of the rail that's in this area.

CANDIOTTI: That includes matching marks on wheels with marks on the underside of the cars. This stretch of CSX tracks has been tested, inspected, or repaired at least six times in the last five months, including the day of the accident.

The engineer has been meeting with the National Transportation Safety Board and voluntarily submitted to a required drug test. Results are pending.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CANDIOTTI (on camera): The engineer also told investigators that he saw what he called a sun kink. Now that's a rare condition when there's a sudden change in temperature that can cause the rails on the track to suddenly expand and go out of alignment.

However, investigators say from the National Transportation Safety Board that the temperatures this day were in the '80s and that a freight train used these same rails without any problem just about eight minutes before the auto train went through. However, they're not ruling anything out.

The point though, Aaron, is the engineer saw something that made him slam on the brakes, and now investigators are trying to get to the bottom of it.

BROWN: Susan, thank you. CNN's Susan Candiotti who stays awfully busy in central Florida tonight. A quick note from Washington before we go to break, the Justice Department has decided to seek the death penalty in the case of Brian Regan. Regan is accused of trying to sell secrets to Libya and Iraq when he worked for the National Reconnaissance Office.

This is the first time the government has sought the death penalty since federal capital punishment in a spying case since federal capital punishment was restored. That's the first time they sought the death penalty.

In a moment, we'll revisit the question of Jenin, with one of the many aid workers who are arriving there, trying to help determine what, in fact, happened. This is NEWSNIGHT from New York.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: It's one thing to see the pictures of destruction in Jenin. It's another thing I guess to get there firsthand. Christiane, just a few moments ago, gave us a feel for what is going on there.

We're joined now by a forensic pathologist, with Amnesty International, who has been in Jenin as well, Dr. Derrick Pounder joins us from Jerusalem. It's early morning there. We appreciate your getting up to chat with us tonight.

Is it possible from your experience moving through the camp, to determine if the Israeli number, that dozens were killed, is anywhere near accurate?

DERRICK POUNDER, AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL: Well, at the present time, there's no way of knowing exactly how many were killed, but there are some basic facts which might give us an indication.

Everyone agrees that there were hundreds of Palestinian combatants in the camp. The area of destruction is extensive, and the Israeli Defense Forces themselves lost 25 dead. So we must expect substantial numbers of dead amongst the Palestinian combatants as well as civilians in this densely populated part of the city of Jenin.

BROWN: And there's no doubt in your mind, I gather, that civilians did in fact perish there?

POUNDER: Oh, absolutely no doubt whatsoever from two sources. First of all, the eyewitness accounts of those who managed to escape the incursion, and also the examination of some of the bodies of the dead. For example, I myself saw the body of a man of 52, who was wearing sandals. So he was clearly not a combatant when he was killed.

BROWN: How do you evaluate the truthfulness of some of the eyewitnesses? Obviously, this is a very volatile place and a very volatile time. How do you decide that they're telling you the truth?

POUNDER: Well, Amnesty International interviewed people who had fled the camp and fled to neighboring villages to the west of the camp a week ago. And prior to the extensive international media attention and prior to many of the statements, which are being made now, those statements of the eyewitnesses taken a week ago were consistent and they were credible.

BROWN: Talk about, there were I believe two hospitals in Jenin, weren't there? Did you get to see what condition they were in and what was going on there?

POUNDER: Yes, we got to the main city hospital, which actually straddles the boundary between the refugee camp and the city proper. It's immediately adjacent to the refugee camp, and that hospital contained the bodies of the dead.

The staff of the hospital had treated the walking wounded, but the remarkable thing that was absent in the hospital was anybody severely injured, which means that the severely injured never managed to get to hospital. They died.

BROWN: We stayed very tight on the facts here. Let me ask you to give me an opinion, I guess here. Is it your opinion, do you have an opinion whether the term massacre applies?

POUNDER: Amnesty International is not using the term massacre for a variety of reasons. First of all, it's a very emotional term. It's not used in international law. It's not used in forensic medicine, and the use of the term tends to stop people looking further at the facts, and we are encouraging people to look at the facts and see where the facts lead us. WE are calling for an international commission of inquiry to establish those facts.

BROWN: Amnesty, in 20 seconds or less, does Amnesty International believe international law was violated there?

POUNDER: Yes. We think that the evidence thus far shows that international law of armed conflict, international humanitarian law and international human rights law was violated, and it's for others to judge on the basis of a full exploration of the facts the severity of those violations.

BROWN: Dr. Pounder, thank you again for joining us. We appreciate your insight. Again, the U.N. Security Council voted tonight to send a mission to Jenin, so there will be at least one more investigation of some sort into what happened there.

Coming up, still in Oklahoma City seven years later, silence and sadness and 168 names. That's coming up later on NEWSNIGHT from New York.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Ground Zero on this Friday night in New York. A big thunderstorm rolled through the city a short time ago, but it didn't stop the work, which goes on.

We got a glimpse today, for lack of a better word I guess of the demographics, the statistics of the people who died on the 11th of September down there. It is a portrait of this country in many ways.

Let's take a quick look at the map. Of course, 2,825 people are believed to have died at the Trade Center. Most of them were men, but 609 women died. Most of them were White, as you can see, almost 76 percent, and most of them were young in their 30s and 40s.

Look at that little silver line there. I don't know if you can see it, one victim was a man in his 80s.

Here's another set of numbers tonight, seven years and 168 people. Seven years ago today, just before 10:00 in the morning Eastern time, there came the dreadful news of an awful explosion. The Murrah Building in Oklahoma City had been bombed. Seven years later, the bombing and the dead were remembered. (VIDEOCLIP OF OKLAHOMA CITY)

BROWN: Oklahoma City today. Oklahoma City's taught us a lot about the pain that survivors experience of these terrorist attack. A lot of divorces, depression, suicide and attempted suicides connected to the blast there. It is something that concerns obviously medical professionals in New York City as well.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I could sense then sort of starting to - their anxiety level went up.

BROWN (voice over): Reliving 9/11 happens every day around here. There is the horror, the pain, the guilt of surviving from one patient after another.

As the Director of the Traumatic Stress Program in New York's Mount Sinai Hospital, Dr. Robert Grossman counsels many people, people for whom September 11th still feels like yesterday, an unending, unrelenting, unforgiving yesterday.

DR. ROBERT GROSSMAN, MT. SINAI HOSPITAL: There's one of an individual, as the building is collapsing, he's running with many others, and he passed people as he's running. And he feels guilty that he didn't go slower and didn't pull people with him somehow.

Then there's another woman that we saw who feels guilty because she was running late for a meeting that she was going to have with a client and she told her partner, you really have to be there on time and I'll get there a little later. And of course she arrived a little later, and by that time her partner was already cut off above the impact area.

BROWN: Patricia Fagan worked for an insurance company on the 93rd floor of the South Tower. She and her sister Eileen would commute together every day -- two hours by bus from Thams (ph) River, New Jersey into the city.

EILEEN FAGAN, LOST SISTER ON 9-11: We'd talk on the way in, we'd talk on the way home. Pat was a talker. I mean, and that was her job, too. She talked constantly over the phone and stuff. But Pat was a person -- if you read a job description and they said they were looking for a person with attention to detail, that was Pat.

BROWN: You know the story now. On September 11, the two sisters got off the bus at the Port Authority and said goodbye. It would be their last. Patricia Fagan died that day. Her body never found. Eileen lost her sister, her companion on those long commutes. She lost her best friend.

FAGAN: I had a little guilt because Pat was so good at taking care of everything. And I do go once a month for counseling. And it's really wonderful, because it pretty much makes you in touch with the reality of the situation and things that you should be doing and need to do, but it's just really an incredible sadness and an incredible gap in my life. You know, she just, you know, filled up a lot of space where there were fun and things to do, and because that's the way she was.

BROWN: Some day the sorrow will be less acute, but seven months is a long way from some day. Grieving takes time. And so now there is still a rich sense of loss, some sense of guilt and a great deal of fear.

DR. EMILY STEIN, PSYCHOLOGIST: Many people are not necessarily struggling with feeling guilty about surviving. They are just scared about living and scared about what that means in this environment right now and in this world, and when the next awful thing is going to happen, and how they can go on in a world that is so different than the world in which they imagined being.

BROWN: We learned a lot about this post-traumatic pain in the year after Oklahoma City. There is no timetable for this. Six months for some, six years for others. Little steps for many, giant steps for a few. A road to travel without a map.

GROSSMAN: We are seeing many people that after four treatments over a one-month period once a week, they are having about a three- quarter reduction in their symptoms, and they are feeling better to an equal extent.

STEIN: And I think an event like this and memory of it, where we were, who we spoke to first, what we were wearing, I think for many of us that never, ever goes away and we'll just always remember.

FAGAN: It was so sudden and so tragic. I was standing in the street watching those buildings go down and I just, you know, really couldn't tell myself that her life was going down with all that steel and water.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: It was so sudden, wasn't it? Coming up in a bit on NEWSNIGHT, remembering the bad old days at a reunion of radicals. It's Friday night in New York City.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Chances are the most memorable thing to happen in your 35th class reunion will be your old sweetheart won't recognize you -- or worse, you won't recognize her. Such are reunions, most reunions, but not this one. Not one that -- no one, rather, at this reunion talked about the prom, that's for sure, and the fight song was "Burn Baby Burn." Here's CNN's Candy Crowley.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CANDY CROWLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Reunions are all pretty much the same.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Remember that night? (UNINTELLIGIBLE). And the whole hill got cleaned. CROWLEY: Old pictures.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Because we was the (UNINTELLIGIBLE) gang out there.

CROWLEY: And old friends in different places.

BILL JENNINGS, FORMER BLACK PANTHER PARTY LEADER: Many people who are in like city council people, doctors, lawyers, work in health care, some doing research, some have everyday factory jobs, you know.

CROWLEY: It is the old memories that distinguish one reunion from another.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's me when they arrested me.

CROWLEY: This is a reunion of the Black Panther Party, founded 35 years ago in the seething streets of urban America.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: America has historically reserved the most barbaric treatment for non-white people.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CROWLEY: Enraged by police brutality, impatient with the creative non-violence of Martin Luther King, Bobby Seale co-founded the Black Panthers.

BOBBY SEALE, CO-FOUNDER, BLACK PANTHER PARTY: This is a dynamic of youthful people crossing these racial lines, dealing with these grassroots programs, critiquing and criticizing the government for all its institutionalized racist backwardness, and the illegal war that's going on.

CROWLEY: They monitored police activity in the black community, read the great philosophers, fed poor children and set up free health clinics, but what much of America saw were young blacks, angry and armed. What caught the headlines were the shoot-outs with police. Bobby Rush founded the Chicago chapter.

REP. BOBBY RUSH, FORMER BLACK PANTHER PARTY MEMBER: We readily participated to a certain extent in violence and violent activities in terms of making sure that we had the right to defend ourselves against what we called the wanton brutality of the police departments all across the country.

CROWLEY: This Panther reunion was a tribute in relic and rhetoric to time and people now gone. Eldridge Cleaver, author of the prison book "Soul on Ice" eventually renounced his past and became a Republican. He died of a heart attack in 1998. Panther co-founder Hewey Newton struggled with drug addiction and was shot to death by a crack dealer in the late '80s.

About 30 ex-Panthers are in jail now, serving mostly life terms for murder. Most at the reunion consider them political prisoners.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How are you doing? Good seeing you, OK.

CROWLEY: Now passionately anti-gun, U.S. Congressman Bobby Rush is running for his sixth term, a 55-year-old who assumed he would be dead by the age of 30.

RUSH: I was living from season to season in the city of Chicago. I knew that if I could make it through the summer, then the police wouldn't be as aggressive. They wouldn't as vicious because of the cold weather. You know, so if I could live through the summer, I might be able to make it through the winter.

CROWLEY: Bobby Seale is on the speaking circuit. He wrote a cook book, "Barbecuing With Bobby," to fund a youth jobs program. When he looks back, it's not the guns or the fear he remembers most, but the heady energy of ideas and of believing that the world could change.

SEALE: I thought this was the most fantastic thing. When I look back on it, I miss it, I miss the experience.

CROWLEY: Candy Crowley, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: We can hand out the award for the most memorable piece of the night. When we come back, filmmaker Ric Burns join us on photographer Ansel Adams. This is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: You can travel out West, visit the great national parks, stand in the shadow of half dome at Yosemite and still think to yourself, it looks so much smaller than the Ansel Adams poster. Ansel Adams, who would have been 100 this year, had a way of doing that. He took photographs of nature which he loved dearly that aren't really about nature but about something more. A new documentary on Adams' life and his work airs this Sunday on PBS. Here is a quick look.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When I'm ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my mind's eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I'm interested in expressing something which is built up from within rather than just extracted from without.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When he photographed the wild landscape, especially in his own special home wild landscape in the high Sierra and Yosemite, he felt some consonance with that material that was very profound, very deep, very mystical, perhaps almost religious although he would certainly object to that very strongly because he was not, in any conventional sense, a religious person.

And then you tried to find a way to make a picture that is consonant with your sense of your relationship to that experience, not just a place. It's an experience. Especially in Ansel's case, it has to do with that time, that moment, that evanescent disappearing thing.

I don't think Ansel was ever self consciously concerned with personal expression. It's wanting to go join something else. Ansel, I think, the issue was to understand and become part of something that was larger and to make a picture that demonstrated that there was some, actually some communion going on.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: Ansel Adams documentary on PBS this weekend is the latest work of Ric Burns. It's nice to have you back. Congratulations. If that's a sample of what you are offering, that's terrific.

RIC BURNS, PRODUCER, "ANSEL ADAMS: A DOCUMENTARY FILM": Thank you. Good to be here.

BROWN: Did Mr. Adams set out to be a great photographer of nature or was he like shooting high school senior class portraits and just, it happened?

BURNS: You know, he actually set out to be a pianist. He was a hyperactive, dyslexic kid who was really an only child, who seemed to be in a lot of trouble. When he was 12 years old, he sat down at a piano for the first time and taught himself how to read music at sight within months. And clearly art, the process of making beauty one way or the other, was rehabilitative to him. It saved his life, I think, that and the loving attention of an extraordinary father. And it wasn't until he a few years later that he was first given a camera, when he first went to Yosemite. And for 15 years, he thought he was going to be a pianist. And then, he finally began to discover in his own 20s, in the late 1920's, that he could do something with a camera that he couldn't do even with a piano.

BROWN: He discovered it in his 20s. When did the rest of the world discover it?

BURNS: You know, once he finished teaching himself how to make a photograph, how to actually translate the feelings he had inside onto that little black and white image, he actually achieved meteoric recognition amongst photographers. It was a small community of photographers in those day and there wasn't really the kind of mass public for photography really until the post-war period.

BROWN: He was selling his work to the big magazines?

BURNS: He was selling his work -- he made his livelihood as a commercial photographer, so he worked for Polaroid or Kenicot Copper (ph) by day, and then when he saved up a little bit of money to go out on his own, he would do his own fine art photography, which, in an important way, didn't bring him in any money until the very end of his life. And then the money came in like it was an oil gusher.

BROWN: It did?

BURNS: Oh, big time. He really -- his ship came in in the 1970's.

BROWN: These would be exhibited in galleries and the like.

BURNS: It would be exhibited in galleries, in Alfred Steigletz's gallery in New York, famously in the 1930s. He really made it amongst fine arts photographers. But even then, it wasn't something a man got rich on.

BROWN: Let me ask you a couple of quick ones. Was he a happy person?

BURNS: He was a complicated person. He was driven. He had a lot of demons and he got them under control. I think one of the fascinating, and to me, moving things about him is how he managed to -- he was always doubting, always searching, always restless, worked everyday of his life. I mean, he was a workaholic (UNINTELLIGIBLE).

Something was chasing him or he was chasing something else. And he had the stamina and the ability to keep it under control. But, I mean, really, until the year before he died in his mid 80s, he was still working, still looking for that thing which he saw out there in the landscape.

BROWN: Forty seconds, no more, OK? Did he shoot stuff in color and we just don't know about it?

BURNS: He did, but he never really liked it. He did it for commercial reasons. He felt photography was an exploration not only of the outer world but of the inner world. And that the abstraction of black and white photography was the key to getting inside, sort of making a photograph which was a record not only of a scene, of a natural scene, but of the experience you had of it.

BROWN: How long did you work on this?

BURNS: About 14 months.

BROWN: When did you finish it?

BURNS: About a month ago.

BROWN: Feel like you're giving birth to a baby on Sunday?

BURNS: Every time. Every time.

BROWN: Nice to see you again.

BURNS: Good to see you.

BROWN: Best of luck. I hope it does terrifically well.

BURNS: Thanks for having me.

BROWN: It's a great subject idea. Thank you. Ric Burns with us tonight. When we come back, the green monster turns 90. One of the oldest parks in the old ball game when NEWSNIGHT wraps itself up for another week.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Perhaps the greatest form of fame in the 21st century is to be known by a single name. Madonna. Cher. Ringo. Dylan. You know the list, which consists mostly of celebrated people, but there are also places you can conjure up with one name only. Say the name, and people know at once not only where you mean but what you mean as well. A place. A spirit. A whole world, all in a single word.

And here is one. At 90 years old, we take you to an aging but still wondrous place called Fenway. The work of a NEWSNIGHT producer who still needs two names, Sarah Coyle.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Red Sox up. Joe Conan (ph) hassles to the third base coaching box. Play ball. Williams is on deck. The crowd is tense and eager. It's a line drive over second. Score, Johnny, score.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: $2 here. Souvenir game programs, $2. Sox royals game only $2 here.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I've never been to another park in the country, and I don't want to go to another park in the country.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's awesome. Get to like catch foul balls and stuff like. It's awesome. Seeing the green monster, Manny, Newmar (ph), Pedro. All those good players.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The wall's awesome. So many good hits off of it and everything. You just remember all the players over the years. Who can play the wall and who can't. Rice. Getting booed and all the people, just a great place to be.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What's Fenway? It's a church.

KEN BURNS, DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER, "BASEBALL": Fenway is a connection to the game and to our own history. And as you sit in a seat in Fenway park and sip your beer and eat your peanuts and your hot dog and watch the play, you feel and apprehend all the glorious paths that's taken place there.

DAN SHAUGHNESSY, BOSTON GLOBE SPORTS COLUMNIST: When you go back through microfilm and try to read up on the first week of Fenway park, it's not quite highlighted the way you'd like, because the Titanic went down that same week in the North Atlantic. And of course, 1912 ended up being this wonderful season in Boston baseball history, where they won the World Series, they had great performances from Hall of Fame players, and it really was a good-luck building in its first year. It's interesting; it was considered large. You know, some of the sports writer thought it was, you know, the fans were too far away and it was too big a theater for baseball.

Fenway is wedged in between five streets. As the hitters got stronger, the ball was, you know, more conducive to hitting. The dead ball era was over, and guys started hitting long balls. They had to find a way to make this competitive and not too easy. So that's why the wall goes up. Because they can't go out, so they go up. And of course, that became the thing that people recognize most about Fenway park.

Inside the wall at one time was the only manually operated scoreboard in baseball. And I think that as the park gets older and there is more nostalgia about it, you have more instances of players going in to look around, sign their names.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: With fire, spirit and grim resolution, he took his place on the Red Sox firing line.

SHAUGHNESSY: There has been no shortage of star material players here. Ted Williams, he was bombastic. He played baseball at a time when baseball was the only game that mattered, 1939 to 1960. He's a God-like figure, and remains such, in the city of Boston, and is the most famous player associated with Fenway park, bar none.

Babe Ruth goes down as a top 10 player in the Red Sox history. He was a great pitcher for the Red Sox. Unfortunately, they only had him between 1914 and 1919. Calli Stromsky (ph), (UNINTELLIGIBLE), guys from the early days, Tro Speaker (ph), Harry Hooper (ph), Duffy Lewis (ph), Johnny Pesky.

JOHNNY PESKY, RED SOX, 1942-1954: This park was always kept up real nice. It's always been clean, and it's nice coming into this place. It's a comfortable place. And the fans -- the fans in Boston are just simply great.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All these people in the ballpark.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Oh, it's great. I love the park. But particularly (UNINTELLIGIBLE) mostly every game. I've gone to all other places, I like the other places, but I love coming here. Because we are so close to the field. You know, some of these places where the bleachers are, you need binoculars to watch the ball game.

At Fenway park, they don't do too much of bunting and all that stuff. They are always looking for the home-run ball, a big hit. At so many games, I mean, they have been down like sometimes 10 runs and come back and win, and then they'd up, and they lose. And I can't understand it, but that's the way baseball is.

BURNS: Baseball is so much like life that we have to realize that this game is as much about loss as it is about gain. Remember, you fail seven times out of 10, and you are still a .300 hitter and you're probably heading to Cooperstown. I do think we have to be clear-eyed and realists and know that Fenway park, like you, like me, will not last forever.

SHAUGHNESSY: This place is on its last legs, I suppose. So you build a new park, with great modern amenities and old-timey feel, but you can't say Babe Ruth played here, Ted Williams played here, this is where the '46 World Series was. Can't do that. Can't replicate that.

BURNS: Baseball is the only sport that is accompanied every decade of the life of this country for the last 150, 160 years. And when you are in a park, you feel like you are in the presence of an important heritage. And I think Fenway more than any other spot in the baseball world does that to you, reminds you of this wonderful, utterly American continuum that we are all a part of.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's a long ball. A very long ball. It's in. It's in for a home run.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: At 1:00 o'clock tomorrow afternoon, open a beer and toast Fenway. It will be 90 tomorrow.

Have a great weekend. We'll see you all back here on Monday. Good night from all of us at NEWSNIGHT.

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