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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown

White House Faces Investigation Into CIA Leak; Rush Limbaugh Outrage

Aired October 01, 2003 - 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, everyone.
Because I'm sure he would do the same for me, a few kind words tonight about Rush Limbaugh. Mr. Limbaugh, who appears on ESPN's NFL pregame program, said the other Sunday that a black quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles was overly praised because sportswriters and the NFL wanted a black quarterback to succeed. For that, people are calling for his head and demanding he be fired. A presidential hopeful we know quite well said that today.

Come on. It's an opinion. Let's just assume he's wrong, completely totally, absolutely, 100 percent wrong. So what? It's his opinion. Giving his opinion is what he's paid to do. How did it come to pass that so many people on both the right and the left started to believe we would all be better off if only the people we agreed with spoke? And, sadly, I think that's exactly where we are these days.

On now to "The Whip," which includes Mr. Limbaugh, but not at the start. We begin by talking about leaks.

Dana Bash is at the White House -- Dana, a headline.

DANA BASH, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, White House aides spent the day following instructions to find and save e-mails, phone records and the like, while officials here continue to promise full cooperation in finding who leaked the identity of a CIA operative -- Aaron.

BROWN: Dana, thank you. Get back to you at the top tonight.

Sad anniversary to take note of and other developments as well of the D.C. sniper case. Jeanne Meserve covered that today -- Jeanne, a headline.

JEANNE MESERVE, CNN HOMELAND SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, tomorrow, the first anniversary of the first sniper slaying. Today, the two men charged with those killings saw one another for the first time since their arrest.

Lee Boyd Malvo betrayed no emotion as he looked at John Allen Muhammad, the man who his attorneys say once exerted extraordinary power over his thoughts and his actions -- Aaron.

BROWN: Jeanne, thank you.

On to California next, where there are more polls and plenty of pols as well. Wow -- Kelly Wallace, a headline from you tonight.

KELLY WALLACE, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, the latest poll has Governor Gray Davis' supporters very concerned, the governor responding, bringing out a darling of the Democratic Party, while a confident Arnold Schwarzenegger spent the day focusing less on campaigning than what he would do as governor -- Aaron.

BROWN: Kelly, thank you.

And finally to Philadelphia, where, as we said, Rush Limbaugh made some news today. Michael Okwu covered the Limbaugh story and the feedback of it -- Michael, a headline.

MICHAEL OKWU, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, a mixture of sadness and a little bit of quiet resolve from Philadelphia Eagles' quarterback Donovan McNabb, who reacted for the first time to Limbaugh's statements. In the meantime, Limbaugh showed absolutely no signs of backing down -- Aaron.

BROWN: Michael, thank you. Back to you and the rest shortly.

Also ahead on the program tonight, we'll talk with George Will and Anne Garrels, two different and interesting perspectives on the war in Iraq and the aftermath. Also ahead, the story of a 2-year-old -- a 2-year-old -- left alone for weeks, after her mother was sent to jail. And later, we'll tell you about some interesting names that showed up on the national do-not-call list. This story is so good, so luscious, you won't believe it. And, as always, the call we all want to hear, the rooster that proclaims it's time for morning papers. I can feel you cringing -- all that and more in the hour ahead.

We begin with the leak, day three. The script seems pretty predictable at this point, like a movie we have all seen time and again: the White House briefing dominated by the story, lots of questions but few answers; the out-of-power party, in this case, the Democrats, demanding a special prosecutor, arguing that the attorney general can't be trusted to investigate his own administration, forgetting, perhaps, that the attorney general they don't trust would also appoint the special counsel they will trust.

And, all the while, the White House, in this case, the Bush White House, outwardly yawns and says, we have more important things to worry about.

From the White House tonight, CNN's Dana Bash.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BASH (voice-over): President Bush did not respond to reporters' questions about the issue of the day. His spokesman did lots of them, and stuck to script.

SCOTT MCCLELLAN, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: The president has directed the White House to cooperate fully. That message was sent as soon as he learned of the investigation. BASH: Early in the day, McClellan suggested full cooperation could mean taking a polygraph test, and later called that question and many others about the investigation hypothetical.

MCCLELLAN: The issue here is whether or not someone leaked classified information.

BASH: Deflecting questions like, "If the president is outraged about the leaks, why didn't he raise the issue when Robert Novak's column came out in July?" So far, officials say no one has come forward with any documents relating to former Ambassador Wilson or his wife. And no White House aide is believed to have contacted or been contacted by FBI investigators yet. Democrats, citing conflict of interest, continue to call for a special counsel.

SEN. TOM HARKIN (D), IOWA: Attorney General John Ashcroft, appointed by this president, investigating the president.

BASH: Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle wrote the president, calling for an internal investigation, demanding, among other things, they compile a list of senior officials with access to classified information and insist senior aides sign a statement denying responsibility for the leaks.

The White House spokesmen tells CNN they intend to forward Daschle's letter to the Justice Department for consideration. And he accused Democrats of being more interested in politics than facts, something friends of the White House are saying of Democrats and Ambassador Wilson.

REP. ROB PORTMAN (R), OHIO: I was told that he is a contributor to Senator Kerry's campaign. It seems to me that that is evidence that there may be some motives on their side that are not, again, entirely pure.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BASH: Here at the White House, despite ominous instructions to save e-mails and phone records, officials insist, behind the scenes, they're going about their work, a senior aide saying that the Bush White House is run very much like a business and the atmosphere is still very much businesslike -- Aaron.

BROWN: How much of the briefing today was dominated by this?

BASH: I would say about 90 percent, at least.

BROWN: Got it. Thank you. That says a lot -- Dana Bash at the White House tonight.

From one center of this controversy, the White House, to another, the man who revealed the agent in question's name in the first place. Talking today to Wolf Blitzer, syndicated columnist and CNN contributor Robert Novak says he did nothing wrong whatsoever. His information, Mr. Novak says, is that the woman wasn't really undercover in the first place. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROBERT NOVAK, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: I have sources that tell me that she was never an analyst -- I mean, never an operative. She was never covert. Put it that way. She was never covert. She was always what they call light covert, that is, she was covered -- she was working under the cover of another government agency, but she was not a covert operator.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: The other issue that's come out is this article that appeared in "Newsday," the newspaper on Long Island, July 22, after your July 14 column. The reporters said this. They were following up on your story: "Novak, in an interview, said his sources had come to him with the information. 'I didn't dig it out. It was given to me,' he said. 'They thought it was significant, they gave me the name, and I used it.'"

NOVAK: Now, they -- these reporters made a bad mistake. They said they came to me with the information. I never told them that. And that's not in quotes, is it?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: Mr. Novak's side of the story.

We should add here, there is some dispute about whether Ms. Wilson was undercover or not. Mr. Novak, as you heard, says she was not. Others disagree, including Larry Johnson, a former CIA undercover employee, who says she was in fact was for 30 years, until the leak.

Still on the subject of employees of the CIA, a number of them have been on the ground in Iraq now for months supervising the work of hundreds of others who have been looking for chemical and biological weapons, weapons of mass destruction. The man in charge of all those searches is scheduled to appear tomorrow before the House, Senate Intelligence Committees to bring their members up to date. Advance information suggests it won't take altogether too long to do that.

Covering this story for us, national security correspondent David Ensor.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DAVID ENSOR, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The testimony will be behind closed doors, but the stakes will be high for the man the CIA hired to find Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, whose team has yet to find any.

SEN. RICHARD DURBIN (D), ILLINOIS: Here we are, five months after the fact, after thousands of our inspectors have combed all of those sites and others and have come up empty.

ENSOR: The question is why? Given evidence chemical weapons at a minimum were there after the 1991 war, are they still hidden or were they destroyed secretly by Saddam so as to keep the world guessing? CHARLES DUELFER, FORMER U.N. WEAPONS INSPECTOR: I think to a certain extent he may have been bluffing.

ENSOR: But David Kay won't argue Saddam was bluffing, U. S officials say. He will report finding dual-use facilities that could be converted to weapons production on short notice and a massive program to conceal them from arms inspectors.

The U.S. military's heavy-handed approach to Iraqi scientists, like Mahdi Obeidi, may have made Kay's work harder, some experts argue. Obeidi was arrested by troops in front of his family, even after offering to tell the CIA what he knew.

DUELFER: Many of the potential people who could cooperate I think probably have been scared off.

ENSOR: U.S. officials say they recognize that congressmen, especially those opposed to the war, will likely put out their version of Kay's closed-door testimony, even if he does not. They're considering putting out a summary of his main points to make sure they get out their version as well.

David Ensor, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Two more American soldiers died in Iraq today. The first, a woman, died in Tikrit after a convoy went over a mine, or perhaps that's some sort of improvised bomb lobbed at it. The other soldier was shot while on patrol in Baghdad.

That's what it's like there these days, death around one corner or another on the same day in the same place or in places not far apart. Terrible things are happening and good things are happening and many other things that may be neither or perhaps or both. A day in the life of Baghdad is complex and contradictory.

Here's CNN's Harris Whitbeck.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

HARRIS WHITBECK, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The day got off to a good start. Eager young students showing up for long-delayed first day of a new school year. Freshly painted classrooms, a lot of donated supplies from the United States. But even while school was in session, this confrontation outside a Baghdad police station.

Out of work, Iraqi soldiers and policemen showed up, apparently thinking they would get jobs. Instead, they say they were asked to pay bribes to get applications. Protesters threw stones and Iraqi police fired back.

Then, after school let out, right before afternoon prayers in this Baghdad mosque, a group of Shiites gathered to protest an incursion by U.S. forces the night before. The soldiers had been looking for illegal weapons. A U.S. military patrol drove by and stopped, protesters threw stones, the soldiers fired their weapons.

Enraged, the cleric and his followers took over another Iraqi police station nearby, raising their flag over the building."We won't let anyone in," he says."We won't let anyone take it back. It now belongs to us."

U.S. Apache attack helicopters were called in. They hovered over the mosque and the occupied police station.

(on camera): The sheik says this police station is now under his control. The police officers inside have fled. Many here wonder when stability will ever come to Iraq.

Harris Whitbeck, CNN, Baghdad.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: It's been a year -- a year -- since the people of the District of Columbia and Virginia and Maryland and, by extension, the whole country, began living in fear of a bullet coming out of nowhere.

Before that fear ended, 13 people had been shot; 10 of them died. The two men arrested for those killings did something in court today they have not done in a year. They looked at each other.

Here is CNN's Jeanne Meserve.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MESERVE (voice-over): Candles of commemoration on the eve of the anniversary of the first sniper shooting.

CHARLES MOOSE, MONTGOMERY COUNTY POLICE CHIEF: We now consider them suspects in the string of shootings in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia.

MESERVE: When the rampage ended, there were 10 dead, three wounded, two in custody. Those two, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, were face-to-face for the first time since their arrest in a Virginia courtroom Wednesday. Malvo, his attorneys claim, was under Muhammad's spell at the time of the murders and was apprehensive about the encounter.

CRAIG COOLEY, ATTORNEY FOR MALVO: I think from was a degree of nervousness, a degree of concern, if not fear.

MESERVE: With heavy security around the court and the courtroom, the two made eye contact. But there were no words exchanged, no gestures made.

DYLAN MOORE, "POTOMAC NEWS": Anti-climactic, I think, would be how I would describe it. I was expecting more emotion or some sort of reaction between the two of them. And there was nothing.

MESERVE: Malvo was in court so prosecutors could determine whether he would testify in Muhammad's trial, just two weeks away. Malvo willingly answered questions about his name, age, and place and date of birth. But when queried about Muhammad, he invoked his right to avoid self-incrimination.

COOLEY: It's appropriate for us to take every step that protects his right to have a fair trial in his courtroom.

MESERVE: Appearances in court, it turns out, can be important for victims, as well as the accused.

PAUL LARUFFA, SNIPER VICTIM: As soon as I sat in the car, I just saw a shadow to my left. Before I had a chance to even turn my head, the window broke and shots came in. And that was it.

MESERVE: Paul LaRuffa was shot before the sniper spree, though his shooting has been linked with the others. And his stolen laptop was found with Muhammad and Malvo. He made a point of going to one of Malvo's early pretrial hearings.

LARUFFA: It's a hard feeling to describe when you see somebody that you're pretty sure is the person that was 18 inches away and tried to kill you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MESERVE: Hard, LaRuffa says, but therapeutic. LaRuffa has already marked the anniversary of his shooting with a toast to his own survival. Most of the relatives of sniper victims who were not so lucky are passing this painful time privately -- Aaron.

BROWN: And, again, the first of those trials starts?

MESERVE: October 14, two weeks from today.

BROWN: Jeanne, thank you very much -- Jeanne Meserve in Washington.

Still ahead on the program tonight: a couple of dandies, including the Rush Limbaugh uproar, and telemarketers who apparently don't like being telemarketed.

Up next: the story of a 2-year-old left alone for weeks while her mother was in jail.

And later, columnist George Will will be here to say the administration should admit it got it wrong on weapons of mass destruction.

We take a break. This is NEWSNIGHT on CNN.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Armed with polls showing his comfortably ahead, Arnold Schwarzenegger talked less like a candidate and more like a governor today. He wasn't so much as asking for votes as telling voters what he was going to do once he was elected, his first 100 days, he said. On the other hand, the man who would have to be kicked out first is not quite ready to give up either.

Here again, CNN's Kelly Wallace.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WESLEY CLARK (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I stand with Governor Gray Davis.

WALLACE (voice-over): When you are in a fight for your political life, it's no surprise you turn to a former military commander who also happens to be the current darling of the Democratic Party.

CLARK: I'm here to support all of you who agree with me that you must vote "no" on this recall.

WALLACE: What Democrats must do, if Governor Davis is to pull off an upset, is vote in large numbers to defeat the recall. But the latest poll of likely voters shows some troubling signs for Davis with three key targets: women, moderate Democrats and union members. Their support of the recall going up, not down, in the latest "Los Angeles Times" poll. So Davis tries a new tactic.

GOV. GRAY DAVIS (D), CALIFORNIA: If we don't unite as voters, then we are looking at the real prospect of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and...

WALLACE: The Davis team says its internal polling shows a tight race, with the embattled governor needing to pick up the support of an additional three percent of California voters to hold on to his job. But Schwarzenegger is looking the part of a confident front-runner, focusing not on his rival, but on what he would do in his first 100 days as governor.

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER (R), CALIFORNIA GUBERNATORIAL CANDIDATE: We are ready to return California to the people. Thank you very much, and god bless all of you. Thank you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WALLACE: And Schwarzenegger reiterated many of his campaign pledges, including repealing the state's car tax and the new law providing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.

But now, analysts say, this all comes down to getting out the vote. So get ready for the road trips. Schwarzenegger will be on a bus beginning tomorrow, Davis on a plane this weekend, both men trying to get all their supporters to the polls -- Aaron.

BROWN: It's all Tuesday night.

Thank you, Kelly, very much -- Kelly Wallace in Los Angeles.

We mentioned this story briefly last night, too briefly, we think. In Florida, a child is recovering, a 2-year-old, recovering from being left home alone for weeks while her mother was in jail. This is not about some grand failure of the courts or some state agency in charge of child welfare. More money from the state wouldn't have changed this -- just one story, one child, one mother, one horrible set of circumstances.

Here's CNN's Susan Candiotti.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SUSAN CANDIOTTI, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A little girl in the arms of her father after a remarkable story of survival.

OGDEN LEE, FATHER OF BREANNA: I can't explain it. I'm just happy she's OK.

CANDIOTTI: Police say no thanks to the 2-year-old's mother. She appeared in court in shackles one day after the toddler was discovered alone in their apartment, after police say the little girl somehow fended for herself for nearly three weeks.

JOHN RUTHERFORD, JACKSONVILLE SHERIFF'S OFFICE: She's a very tenacious little girl. She was actually able to open the refrigerator, literally emptied out all of the contents of the refrigerator.

CANDIOTTI: The mother got into trouble last month after she allegedly attacked a nail salon employee with a box cutter and made off with about $200 in cash. Police arrested Dakeysha Lee at work two days later. She was taken to jail September 10. All the while, police say, the mother made no mention of her daughter, possibly afraid she would get into even more trouble.

RUTHERFORD: It could have been a tragedy. Thank the lord it's not.

CANDIOTTI: Neighbors wondering how it could have happened.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I can't believe that they would leave a child like that. And nobody knew?

CANDIOTTI (on camera): There are a lot of unanswered questions. Police say one theory suggests the little girl was able to survive for as long as she did because she might have been left alone before.

(voice-over): The couple was living apart, in the process of divorce. Last year, Lee charged her husband with domestic battery, but the charges were dropped. Now she is charged with child abuse, assault and petty theft, bond set at $170,000.

On Thursday, she'll be in court to enter a plea. Lee's husband, meantime, granted temporary custody of Breanna, under state supervision.

LEE: She's happy to be with her father. I'm going to do whatever it takes to maybe clear this. Children are elastic, so I got her. I'm happy I got her.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: All right, say bye-bye.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Bye-bye.

CANDIOTTI (voice-over): Susan Candiotti, Jacksonville, Florida.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Still ahead on NEWSNIGHT: the Rush Limbaugh flap. Did ESPN get more than it bargained for when it hired him as a sports commentator? And then a truly wonderful story about the do-not-call list and some of the names on it.

We'll take a break first. From New York, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Back in July, ESPN announced it was hiring Rush Limbaugh to appear on its Sunday "NFL Countdown" show to -- quote -- "spark debate on the program." This past Sunday, some controversial comments by Mr. Limbaugh failed to spark any debate on the program, shockingly, but have caused plenty of problems for Mr. Limbaugh since.

Here is CNN's Michael Okwu.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

OKWU (voice-over): If ESPN was looking for buzz in giving conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh a commentary job, they found it. Sunday, Limbaugh said Philadelphia Eagles' quarterback Donovan McNabb is overrated because he's black.

RUSH LIMBAUGH, RADIO TALK SHOW HOST: The media has been very desirous that a back quarterback doing well. We're interested in black coaches and black quarterbacks doing well.

OKWU: Wednesday, McNabb said it's a sad step backwards.

DONOVAN MCNABB, PHILADELPHIA EAGLES QUARTERBACK: It's pretty heavy. You know, something that obviously I've been going through ever since I was young. You know, through high school, through college, and through the NFL, that, you know, you figure that it would have been over by now.

CANDIOTTI: The thorny subject was issue No. 1 on talk radio.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: These guys, I don't know if they're doing this for ratings or if this is still just 1954. It's hard for me to understand, but I don't understand it.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You don't get angry with a skunk for stinking. You don't get angry with a dog for barking. So don't get angry if Rush Limbaugh says something that is racist.

OKWU: From McNabb's teammates, outrage and incredulity. Despite the quarterback's shaky start this season, a three-time Pro-Bowler, McNabb has led the Eagles to two consecutive NFC title games. TROY VINCENT, PHILADELPHIA EAGLES: Does Rush care? Maybe not. That's what they paid him to come on the set to do.

OKWU: On Limbaugh's ABC radio show, no signs of backing down.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

LIMBAUGH: All this is really oriented around the fact that I was right. All this has become the tempest that it is, is because I must have been right about something.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

OKWU: Meanwhile, ESPN issued a statement, saying, "We have communicated to Mr. Limbaugh that his comments were insensitive and inappropriate."

(END VIDEOTAPE)

OKWU: Politicians and presidential candidates are now even weighing in, calling for Mr. Limbaugh to be taken off the air. In the meantime, NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue, we are told by the Eagles organization, called Donovan McNabb after practice this afternoon to offer his support -- Aaron.

BROWN: Just to be clear, what Mr. Limbaugh said, or didn't say, he did not say that Donovan McNabb is the quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles because he's black. That's not what he said, right?

OKWU: No, he did not say that he's their quarterback because he is black. But he suggested that McNabb has been given an easy pass by the media, that he's been made into a much greater quarterback because the public wants to see a successful black quarterback -- Aaron.

BROWN: OK. Just to be clear.

Michael, thank you. It's an interesting tale.

It does not happen off, we admit. But sometimes, life is simply too perfect. Every now and then, a story comes along and you find yourself looking to the heavens in thanks. This is that story. It involves the do-not-call list and some of the people who signed up, hoping to avoid those annoying little calls. And you sometimes say there is no good news.

Here is CNN's Maria Hinojosa.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MARIA HINOJOSA, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): We decided to see just who has registered on that do-not-call list.

(on camera): Michael Sherman.

(voice-over): Sherman is the chairman of the Direct Marketing Association.

(on camera): There we go. He's registered.

(voice-over): And doesn't want to be bothered by telemarketers, even though the association he heads up represents telemarketers and pushed hard to defeat the federal do-not-call list.

According to an investigation by Jack Dolan of "The Hartford Courant," at least 11 top executives of the Direct Marketing Association are on the do-not-call list themselves. Michael Sherman told CNN his family -- quote -- "just moved to a new home and were getting a lot of calls from movers."

JIM GUEST, CONSUMERS UNION: The executives of the telemarketing firms, their jobs are to defend the interests of the telemarketing firms. But what they're really showing us is, when push comes to shove, in their private lives, in their homes, they don't want these telemarketing calls anymore than anybody else does.

HINOJOSA: Telemarketers love to get people on the line right away. That's why they call you at home during dinner. But telemarketing executives?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Leave a message. I'll try and get back to you as soon as I can.

HINOJOSA: We wanted to talk to them about putting their names on the do-not-call list. But they wouldn't talk to us. Some put us on hold for what seemed like forever.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He's on another line at the moment.

HINOJOSA (on camera): OK. We can hold.

(voice-over): We waited patiently for a while, a long while, just to ask a vice president of West Corp., one of the country's largest telemarketers, why her boss had been on the do-not-call list. She wouldn't answer that, so I tried another.

(on camera): What's the kind of call that you would take, that you would like to take from a telemarketer?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Boy, that's a tough question.

HINOJOSA (voice-over): Yes, it is. Just ask Jerry Seinfeld.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "SEINFELD")

JERRY SEINFELD, ACTOR: Hello.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Hi, would you be interested in switching over to TMI long distance service?

SEINFELD: Oh, gee, I can't talk right now. Why don't you give me your home number and I'll call you later?

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Well, I'm sorry. We're not allowed to do that.

SEINFELD: Oh, I guess you don't want people calling you at home.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: No.

SEINFELD: Well, now you know how I feel.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HINOJOSA: We tried to find out whether Jerry Seinfeld had registered on the do-not-call list, but he couldn't take our call.

Maria Hinojosa, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Still to come on NEWSNIGHT, we'll check morning papers. And up next, a conversation with George Will, who think it's time for the Bush administration to admit it was wrong about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

This is NEWSNIGHT.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: And lots left to do on NEWSNIGHT this day, including a conversation with George Will and NPR's Anne Garrels. And then there are morning papers, too.

We'll take a break, then be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: We began the program tonight talking about opinions. And for the next few minutes, we offer the opinions of one of the country's leading conservative thinkers, George Will. One of the things we like about Mr. Will, even when we don't agree with him, is that he is such an independent thinker. Whatever script he's following, it's a script he wrote himself. His latest collection of columns is out in paperback -- paperback -- that would be paperback. And it is called "With a Happy Eye, But."

We spoke with Mr. Will earlier today.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Mr. Will, you wrote today in your column today that it's time for the administration to say, we were wrong on weapons of mass destruction. They don't seem quite prepared to do that yet.

GEORGE WILL, AUTHOR, "WITH A HAPPY EYE, BUT": They don't.

Both sides in this argument have dug in to untenable positions. The critics of the administration seem to be saying, if the mistakes were made, the mistakes had to arise from bad motives, hence the Kennedy accusation that the war was launched on a fraud, consciously concocted in Texas, probably over a barbecue sometime.

On the other side, I think, largely in response to that, the administration is being unreasonably obdurate, where both sides ought to say we all as Americans ought to have an enormous stake in figuring out how we misread the intelligence and how we can read intelligence better in the future, because this misreading goes back to the Clinton administration. It crosses the Atlantic to the French, German secret services and all the rest.

BROWN: Do you think that the administration, in and effort to persuade basically oversold some things -- weapons of mass destruction -- and undersold other things -- the cost of the reconstruction?

WILL: I don't think, in the cost of reconstruction, they undersold consciously. I think they did anticipate that Iraq sitting on a large lake of oil would be a self-financing occupation. And they did not, I think, understand the damage done to civil society by 30 years of rule by the Baath Party. By civil society, I mean, newspapers, the civic vocabulary of argument and all the rest.

With regard to the weapons of mass destruction, I think, at every point, they took the evidence they had and, with good reason, put the worst possible interpretation on it. This was what you would do after 9/11. But the result was a kind of pyramid of mistakes that became rather large.

BROWN: Among the most intriguing things that I've seen recently is something you wrote. And you shaped it the other day as a question to the secretary of state.

Let me read it to you. "Is it your view that the destruction he, Saddam, wrought and the torture and the mass graves were sufficient grounds for this war, absent the evidence of weapons?" Let me ask you that question. Absent the evidence of weapons, were those other reasons good enough reasons for the United States to wage a war?

WILL: I'm inclined to think not.

John Quincy Adams famously warned the United States against going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. That Saddam Hussein was a monster is universally recognized. However, he is not the only monster in the world. And the question is, you have to connect, it seems to me, an American national interest with the ancillary and dispensable virtue of getting rid of monsters. Otherwise, we'll be much too busy.

BROWN: It seems to me, the argument the administration makes now is, well, we'll see on the weapons. We're not sure. We'll see. But this guy was such a bad guy and he killed so many people and he was so destabilizing in the region that the world is, in fact, better off. Is the world in fact better off?

WILL: Oh, I think the world is better off, if you mean, by some normal utilitarian calculus, that we have subtracted more pain and added more pleasure to the world, certainly, the world is better off. The world would have been better off if we had intervened in Rwanda and stopped the genocide there. There are questions of the overstretch of our capacity to do this, however.

There is another side, and a more interesting, a more promising side to the administration argument. And that is, not only is the world better off because we're rid of him, but there will be a positive good. We will have a transformative, exemplary society built in Iraq, which will be the first pluralist functioning secular democracy in the world and it will be a benign contagion that will infect the world with our values.

That's a large leap. It's an act of faith. It may be true. If true, it's wonderful. If not, then, retrospectively, you have to say, the war wasn't the productive enterprise we hoped for.

BROWN: One quick domestic political question. Has the ground shifted at all, in your view, for the Democrats? Are they in any position, do you think, to defeat the president?

WILL: I don't think so, for several reasons.

Last quarter, from April, May, June, the economy grew at 3.3 percent, which is really quite healthy, better than the 2.4 percent last year. The economy is getting stronger and stronger, after some tremendous shocks over the last three years. Iraq, the progress will be slow, but it will be progress. And a year from now, it will look very different. And you have to have a reason to displace an incumbent president. And I still think they're looking -- the Democrats, all 10 of them -- for that reason.

BROWN: We're always pleased to have you on the program. It's nice to see you again. We've known each other a while now. And I enjoy having you. I hope you will come back soon.

WILL: I hope so.

BROWN: Thank you, George Will.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Talked to Mr. Will earlier tonight.

A quick number of items from around the country before we head to break. As we heard the other night from CNN's Barbara Starr, there are a great many American wounded service men and women at military hospitals around the world. And until today, they were required to reimburse the government for meals they received while they were in the hospital getting treatment, the bill being presented on discharge. That policy received so much criticism -- imagine that -- that, today, the president signed into law legislation that eliminates it.

It's not a lot of money, about $8.10 a day, I think. But the very idea of asking for any money at all seemed to many to be absurd.

Outside Chicago, at least seven people died, 16 others hurt when a tour bus collided with some tractor-trailers and a pickup truck on I-90 west of the city, a chain-reaction accident, police saying one of the trailer trucks failed to stop about half a mile from a toll booth, plowing into the other trucks and then the mini tour bus.

And Robert Kardashian -- quick, think; who is it? -- has died. He is longtime friend and onetime lawyer for O.J. Simpson. Mr. Kardashian died of cancer in Los Angeles. He was 59. Mr. Simpson told CNN tonight -- quote -- "It's shocking when a friend close to you passes. I loved Bobby."

Ahead on NEWSNIGHT: "Naked in Baghdad," the story of life as a reporter under fire, the story told by NPR's Anne Garrels.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Anne Garrels, a fine journalist who spent the days and weeks before the fall of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, her job as a correspondent for National Public Radio.

To NPR's audience, she was the voice of the war, though, in many respects, it was not the war, but life that she was reporting on. She has written an extraordinarily good book about her experiences there called "Naked in Baghdad." It's not so much about the details of the military campaign, but about the people and the conditions in Iraq as the world watched and waited for what seemed like an inevitable war.

We talked with her recently.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Well, I don't normally start interviews this way, but perhaps we ought to explain the title of the book.

ANNE GARRELS, AUTHOR, "NAKED IN BAGHDAD": "Naked in Baghdad," you mean?

BROWN: Yes, I do.

(LAUGHTER)

GARRELS: Well, I was -- it's sort of a literal and figurative title. I was naked because I had no protection. And, also, in order to protect my satellite phone from being confiscated from Saddam's thugs, I had this perhaps delirious idea that I should broadcast naked in the dark, so that, when the security guys came to the door, I could beg for a few minutes and perhaps hide the phone, so they wouldn't find it.

BROWN: Was there -- did you go through a long sort of hand- wringing over whether to stay? You were there before the war started. It was clear the war was coming. Did you know you would stay?

GARRELS: Yes. I was pretty sure. I had been there from October on for several months.

And the last two weeks were hard. I'm not going to say they were easy, because we were all running around talking to each other: Are you staying? Are you going? Some journalists lost it. Others were begging their bosses or hoping their bosses would pull them out, so they could leave with dignity. And others were defying their bosses by staying.

I was pretty sure, because I had this extraordinary Iraqi who had worked for me, that it was worth the gamble.

BROWN: Oddly, I think, right now -- I mean, we're still very close to this. This is going to be thought of as the great television war broadcast in real time, live much of the time. Tell me about being a radio reporter in all of that. Was it discouraging or the opposite?

GARRELS: Oh, the opposite.

I mean, television, I mean -- and American television left Baghdad. They didn't stay. So, in essence, I was left to create pictures with words. And I think it worked very well. And there was a sort of intimacy and a lack of hysteria, perhaps, in the way I was able to report the war.

BROWN: Did you ever think, man, I wish I had a camera with me?

GARRELS: No.

BROWN: Not at all?

GARRELS: Curiously, and even when I -- and when I recorded the sounds, they sounded like kind of pop, pop, pops. They didn't reflect really the reality, in a curious way.

What was important really wasn't the dramatic pictures. It was listening to Iraqis, listening to what they had to say about themselves. They predicted very well what has happened. They predicted the looting. They predicted the fracturing in the society. They predicted how nervous they were about what happened when the strong man went.

They talked about their ambivalence about why the Americans were coming. And that was, frankly, as important as the dramatic boom, boom pictures.

BROWN: Weigh in on this one, if you will. I'm sure you know, John Burns, "The New York Times" correspondent, has made a fair amount of splash arguing essentially that too many news organizations kowtowed to the regime, trading access for accuracy or a total picture. Do you have a feel for the truth of that?

GARRELS: I completely agree with John.

There is no question that many news organizations and journalists from around the world, not just Americans, pulled their punches in order to keep getting visas.

BROWN: Just because they wanted to be there? GARRELS: Yes.

I mean, as one reporter who refused to cover protests by the families of political prisoners who had not been released by Saddam when he had this general release, this reporter looked at me and said, "I'm here for the big story." The irony is, that reporter did not in fact stay for the war.

BROWN: It's very nice to talk to you. The book is a terrific read. Congratulations on that. And congratulations also for some stunning work under the worst of circumstances. It's nice to meet you.

GARRELS: Thank you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Anne Garrels from NPR.

Quickly a number of stories making news around the world.

At the U.N. tonight, American diplomats are circulating a revised draft resolution on Iraq. The hope is, the new language will convince some other countries to contribute both money and troops to the postwar effort. CNN has learned that the language calls for a multinational force under what's called a unified command -- read that, American -- and the day-to-day running of the country would be taken over in stages by the Iraqis themselves.

In Jerusalem, the Israeli Cabinet approved the next phase of that fence in the West Bank, designed to serve, the Israelis say, as a security barrier against Palestinian terrorists. Palestinians, of course, do not see it that way. They believe the portion of the barrier already built cuts off tens of thousands of law-abiding citizens in the West Bank from each other. The cost estimate of this latest phase is around $1 billion.

Another day in Moscow for first lady Laura Bush. She spent a lot of time reading to Russian schoolchildren. She also brought with her three well known American authors, including R.L. Stine the writer of the wildly popular -- and pretty scary, if you want my opinion -- "Goosebumps" series. His books have been translated into Russian, which is good news for those children, I would think.

BROWN: Still ahead on NEWSNIGHT: the rooster -- oh, my -- and morning papers.

But a break first. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(ROOSTER CROWING)

BROWN: Time to check morning papers from around the country.

And if there's a theme in them today, I can't figure it out. But maybe you will, in which case, then you can come up here and do this tomorrow, if you think it's so easy.

We'll start with "The New York Times." Pretty good story up in the corner. "Officials Say Bush' -- as in Mr. Bush or as in President Bush, if you prefer -- "Seeks $600 million to Hunt Iraq Arms," included in the $87 billion. "New Request is in Addition to $300 Million Already Spent. No success so far," says "The Times." And this, of course, on the day when David Kay, the weapons inspector, testifies before Congress -- or behind closed doors, actually, on weapons.

Also on the front page of "The Times": "Attorney General is Closely Leaked to Inquiry Figures." Rove was a consultant. This is the leak story. And one of those just cool features, I think, in "The Times." Other papers do it, but "The Times" seems to do it most often, this out of China. "Chinese Girl's Toil Brings Pain, Not Riches," life in the sweatshops of China, to get us products probably we wear or use or whatever.

"The Miami Herald," the story we reported a bit earlier, "Dad Given Custody of Girl, 2, Left Alone." That's a front-page story in my book any day. They also front-page the playoff series as "All Even."

What did I -- "San Antonio Express-News." I like this because they led with what is a big local story out there. "Two Valley Cities Vie to Land Boeing Plant." Boeing is going to start a new airplane. And they're shopping to see what cities will offer them the best deal. It's like stadiums for airplanes.

"The Times Herald-Record" for up in the Hudson Valley and the Catskill, leads with Rush. "Rush to Judgment." Get it? "Clark, Dean Want Limbaugh Fired For Remarks About Quarterback." I think the remarks, actually, were about sportswriters.

"The Boston Herald" headlines, "Who Did It?" It's a local crime story. "Mother I.D.ed, as Cops Fear There Will be More Bodies."

Where's "The Sun-Times"? We always end on "The Sun-Times." The weather tomorrow in Chicago is, frisky. "Garbage Workers Walk in Stink" -- Get it? -- "Over Paychecks."

That's the program. That's morning papers. We're all back here tomorrow, 10:00 Eastern time. Be kind to me and join us. We'll see you tomorrow.

Good night for all of us at NEWSNIGHT.

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





Limbaugh Outrage>


Aired October 1, 2003 - 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, everyone.
Because I'm sure he would do the same for me, a few kind words tonight about Rush Limbaugh. Mr. Limbaugh, who appears on ESPN's NFL pregame program, said the other Sunday that a black quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles was overly praised because sportswriters and the NFL wanted a black quarterback to succeed. For that, people are calling for his head and demanding he be fired. A presidential hopeful we know quite well said that today.

Come on. It's an opinion. Let's just assume he's wrong, completely totally, absolutely, 100 percent wrong. So what? It's his opinion. Giving his opinion is what he's paid to do. How did it come to pass that so many people on both the right and the left started to believe we would all be better off if only the people we agreed with spoke? And, sadly, I think that's exactly where we are these days.

On now to "The Whip," which includes Mr. Limbaugh, but not at the start. We begin by talking about leaks.

Dana Bash is at the White House -- Dana, a headline.

DANA BASH, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, White House aides spent the day following instructions to find and save e-mails, phone records and the like, while officials here continue to promise full cooperation in finding who leaked the identity of a CIA operative -- Aaron.

BROWN: Dana, thank you. Get back to you at the top tonight.

Sad anniversary to take note of and other developments as well of the D.C. sniper case. Jeanne Meserve covered that today -- Jeanne, a headline.

JEANNE MESERVE, CNN HOMELAND SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, tomorrow, the first anniversary of the first sniper slaying. Today, the two men charged with those killings saw one another for the first time since their arrest.

Lee Boyd Malvo betrayed no emotion as he looked at John Allen Muhammad, the man who his attorneys say once exerted extraordinary power over his thoughts and his actions -- Aaron.

BROWN: Jeanne, thank you.

On to California next, where there are more polls and plenty of pols as well. Wow -- Kelly Wallace, a headline from you tonight.

KELLY WALLACE, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, the latest poll has Governor Gray Davis' supporters very concerned, the governor responding, bringing out a darling of the Democratic Party, while a confident Arnold Schwarzenegger spent the day focusing less on campaigning than what he would do as governor -- Aaron.

BROWN: Kelly, thank you.

And finally to Philadelphia, where, as we said, Rush Limbaugh made some news today. Michael Okwu covered the Limbaugh story and the feedback of it -- Michael, a headline.

MICHAEL OKWU, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, a mixture of sadness and a little bit of quiet resolve from Philadelphia Eagles' quarterback Donovan McNabb, who reacted for the first time to Limbaugh's statements. In the meantime, Limbaugh showed absolutely no signs of backing down -- Aaron.

BROWN: Michael, thank you. Back to you and the rest shortly.

Also ahead on the program tonight, we'll talk with George Will and Anne Garrels, two different and interesting perspectives on the war in Iraq and the aftermath. Also ahead, the story of a 2-year-old -- a 2-year-old -- left alone for weeks, after her mother was sent to jail. And later, we'll tell you about some interesting names that showed up on the national do-not-call list. This story is so good, so luscious, you won't believe it. And, as always, the call we all want to hear, the rooster that proclaims it's time for morning papers. I can feel you cringing -- all that and more in the hour ahead.

We begin with the leak, day three. The script seems pretty predictable at this point, like a movie we have all seen time and again: the White House briefing dominated by the story, lots of questions but few answers; the out-of-power party, in this case, the Democrats, demanding a special prosecutor, arguing that the attorney general can't be trusted to investigate his own administration, forgetting, perhaps, that the attorney general they don't trust would also appoint the special counsel they will trust.

And, all the while, the White House, in this case, the Bush White House, outwardly yawns and says, we have more important things to worry about.

From the White House tonight, CNN's Dana Bash.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BASH (voice-over): President Bush did not respond to reporters' questions about the issue of the day. His spokesman did lots of them, and stuck to script.

SCOTT MCCLELLAN, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: The president has directed the White House to cooperate fully. That message was sent as soon as he learned of the investigation. BASH: Early in the day, McClellan suggested full cooperation could mean taking a polygraph test, and later called that question and many others about the investigation hypothetical.

MCCLELLAN: The issue here is whether or not someone leaked classified information.

BASH: Deflecting questions like, "If the president is outraged about the leaks, why didn't he raise the issue when Robert Novak's column came out in July?" So far, officials say no one has come forward with any documents relating to former Ambassador Wilson or his wife. And no White House aide is believed to have contacted or been contacted by FBI investigators yet. Democrats, citing conflict of interest, continue to call for a special counsel.

SEN. TOM HARKIN (D), IOWA: Attorney General John Ashcroft, appointed by this president, investigating the president.

BASH: Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle wrote the president, calling for an internal investigation, demanding, among other things, they compile a list of senior officials with access to classified information and insist senior aides sign a statement denying responsibility for the leaks.

The White House spokesmen tells CNN they intend to forward Daschle's letter to the Justice Department for consideration. And he accused Democrats of being more interested in politics than facts, something friends of the White House are saying of Democrats and Ambassador Wilson.

REP. ROB PORTMAN (R), OHIO: I was told that he is a contributor to Senator Kerry's campaign. It seems to me that that is evidence that there may be some motives on their side that are not, again, entirely pure.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BASH: Here at the White House, despite ominous instructions to save e-mails and phone records, officials insist, behind the scenes, they're going about their work, a senior aide saying that the Bush White House is run very much like a business and the atmosphere is still very much businesslike -- Aaron.

BROWN: How much of the briefing today was dominated by this?

BASH: I would say about 90 percent, at least.

BROWN: Got it. Thank you. That says a lot -- Dana Bash at the White House tonight.

From one center of this controversy, the White House, to another, the man who revealed the agent in question's name in the first place. Talking today to Wolf Blitzer, syndicated columnist and CNN contributor Robert Novak says he did nothing wrong whatsoever. His information, Mr. Novak says, is that the woman wasn't really undercover in the first place. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROBERT NOVAK, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: I have sources that tell me that she was never an analyst -- I mean, never an operative. She was never covert. Put it that way. She was never covert. She was always what they call light covert, that is, she was covered -- she was working under the cover of another government agency, but she was not a covert operator.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: The other issue that's come out is this article that appeared in "Newsday," the newspaper on Long Island, July 22, after your July 14 column. The reporters said this. They were following up on your story: "Novak, in an interview, said his sources had come to him with the information. 'I didn't dig it out. It was given to me,' he said. 'They thought it was significant, they gave me the name, and I used it.'"

NOVAK: Now, they -- these reporters made a bad mistake. They said they came to me with the information. I never told them that. And that's not in quotes, is it?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: Mr. Novak's side of the story.

We should add here, there is some dispute about whether Ms. Wilson was undercover or not. Mr. Novak, as you heard, says she was not. Others disagree, including Larry Johnson, a former CIA undercover employee, who says she was in fact was for 30 years, until the leak.

Still on the subject of employees of the CIA, a number of them have been on the ground in Iraq now for months supervising the work of hundreds of others who have been looking for chemical and biological weapons, weapons of mass destruction. The man in charge of all those searches is scheduled to appear tomorrow before the House, Senate Intelligence Committees to bring their members up to date. Advance information suggests it won't take altogether too long to do that.

Covering this story for us, national security correspondent David Ensor.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DAVID ENSOR, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The testimony will be behind closed doors, but the stakes will be high for the man the CIA hired to find Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, whose team has yet to find any.

SEN. RICHARD DURBIN (D), ILLINOIS: Here we are, five months after the fact, after thousands of our inspectors have combed all of those sites and others and have come up empty.

ENSOR: The question is why? Given evidence chemical weapons at a minimum were there after the 1991 war, are they still hidden or were they destroyed secretly by Saddam so as to keep the world guessing? CHARLES DUELFER, FORMER U.N. WEAPONS INSPECTOR: I think to a certain extent he may have been bluffing.

ENSOR: But David Kay won't argue Saddam was bluffing, U. S officials say. He will report finding dual-use facilities that could be converted to weapons production on short notice and a massive program to conceal them from arms inspectors.

The U.S. military's heavy-handed approach to Iraqi scientists, like Mahdi Obeidi, may have made Kay's work harder, some experts argue. Obeidi was arrested by troops in front of his family, even after offering to tell the CIA what he knew.

DUELFER: Many of the potential people who could cooperate I think probably have been scared off.

ENSOR: U.S. officials say they recognize that congressmen, especially those opposed to the war, will likely put out their version of Kay's closed-door testimony, even if he does not. They're considering putting out a summary of his main points to make sure they get out their version as well.

David Ensor, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Two more American soldiers died in Iraq today. The first, a woman, died in Tikrit after a convoy went over a mine, or perhaps that's some sort of improvised bomb lobbed at it. The other soldier was shot while on patrol in Baghdad.

That's what it's like there these days, death around one corner or another on the same day in the same place or in places not far apart. Terrible things are happening and good things are happening and many other things that may be neither or perhaps or both. A day in the life of Baghdad is complex and contradictory.

Here's CNN's Harris Whitbeck.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

HARRIS WHITBECK, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The day got off to a good start. Eager young students showing up for long-delayed first day of a new school year. Freshly painted classrooms, a lot of donated supplies from the United States. But even while school was in session, this confrontation outside a Baghdad police station.

Out of work, Iraqi soldiers and policemen showed up, apparently thinking they would get jobs. Instead, they say they were asked to pay bribes to get applications. Protesters threw stones and Iraqi police fired back.

Then, after school let out, right before afternoon prayers in this Baghdad mosque, a group of Shiites gathered to protest an incursion by U.S. forces the night before. The soldiers had been looking for illegal weapons. A U.S. military patrol drove by and stopped, protesters threw stones, the soldiers fired their weapons.

Enraged, the cleric and his followers took over another Iraqi police station nearby, raising their flag over the building."We won't let anyone in," he says."We won't let anyone take it back. It now belongs to us."

U.S. Apache attack helicopters were called in. They hovered over the mosque and the occupied police station.

(on camera): The sheik says this police station is now under his control. The police officers inside have fled. Many here wonder when stability will ever come to Iraq.

Harris Whitbeck, CNN, Baghdad.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: It's been a year -- a year -- since the people of the District of Columbia and Virginia and Maryland and, by extension, the whole country, began living in fear of a bullet coming out of nowhere.

Before that fear ended, 13 people had been shot; 10 of them died. The two men arrested for those killings did something in court today they have not done in a year. They looked at each other.

Here is CNN's Jeanne Meserve.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MESERVE (voice-over): Candles of commemoration on the eve of the anniversary of the first sniper shooting.

CHARLES MOOSE, MONTGOMERY COUNTY POLICE CHIEF: We now consider them suspects in the string of shootings in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia.

MESERVE: When the rampage ended, there were 10 dead, three wounded, two in custody. Those two, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, were face-to-face for the first time since their arrest in a Virginia courtroom Wednesday. Malvo, his attorneys claim, was under Muhammad's spell at the time of the murders and was apprehensive about the encounter.

CRAIG COOLEY, ATTORNEY FOR MALVO: I think from was a degree of nervousness, a degree of concern, if not fear.

MESERVE: With heavy security around the court and the courtroom, the two made eye contact. But there were no words exchanged, no gestures made.

DYLAN MOORE, "POTOMAC NEWS": Anti-climactic, I think, would be how I would describe it. I was expecting more emotion or some sort of reaction between the two of them. And there was nothing.

MESERVE: Malvo was in court so prosecutors could determine whether he would testify in Muhammad's trial, just two weeks away. Malvo willingly answered questions about his name, age, and place and date of birth. But when queried about Muhammad, he invoked his right to avoid self-incrimination.

COOLEY: It's appropriate for us to take every step that protects his right to have a fair trial in his courtroom.

MESERVE: Appearances in court, it turns out, can be important for victims, as well as the accused.

PAUL LARUFFA, SNIPER VICTIM: As soon as I sat in the car, I just saw a shadow to my left. Before I had a chance to even turn my head, the window broke and shots came in. And that was it.

MESERVE: Paul LaRuffa was shot before the sniper spree, though his shooting has been linked with the others. And his stolen laptop was found with Muhammad and Malvo. He made a point of going to one of Malvo's early pretrial hearings.

LARUFFA: It's a hard feeling to describe when you see somebody that you're pretty sure is the person that was 18 inches away and tried to kill you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MESERVE: Hard, LaRuffa says, but therapeutic. LaRuffa has already marked the anniversary of his shooting with a toast to his own survival. Most of the relatives of sniper victims who were not so lucky are passing this painful time privately -- Aaron.

BROWN: And, again, the first of those trials starts?

MESERVE: October 14, two weeks from today.

BROWN: Jeanne, thank you very much -- Jeanne Meserve in Washington.

Still ahead on the program tonight: a couple of dandies, including the Rush Limbaugh uproar, and telemarketers who apparently don't like being telemarketed.

Up next: the story of a 2-year-old left alone for weeks while her mother was in jail.

And later, columnist George Will will be here to say the administration should admit it got it wrong on weapons of mass destruction.

We take a break. This is NEWSNIGHT on CNN.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Armed with polls showing his comfortably ahead, Arnold Schwarzenegger talked less like a candidate and more like a governor today. He wasn't so much as asking for votes as telling voters what he was going to do once he was elected, his first 100 days, he said. On the other hand, the man who would have to be kicked out first is not quite ready to give up either.

Here again, CNN's Kelly Wallace.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WESLEY CLARK (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I stand with Governor Gray Davis.

WALLACE (voice-over): When you are in a fight for your political life, it's no surprise you turn to a former military commander who also happens to be the current darling of the Democratic Party.

CLARK: I'm here to support all of you who agree with me that you must vote "no" on this recall.

WALLACE: What Democrats must do, if Governor Davis is to pull off an upset, is vote in large numbers to defeat the recall. But the latest poll of likely voters shows some troubling signs for Davis with three key targets: women, moderate Democrats and union members. Their support of the recall going up, not down, in the latest "Los Angeles Times" poll. So Davis tries a new tactic.

GOV. GRAY DAVIS (D), CALIFORNIA: If we don't unite as voters, then we are looking at the real prospect of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and...

WALLACE: The Davis team says its internal polling shows a tight race, with the embattled governor needing to pick up the support of an additional three percent of California voters to hold on to his job. But Schwarzenegger is looking the part of a confident front-runner, focusing not on his rival, but on what he would do in his first 100 days as governor.

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER (R), CALIFORNIA GUBERNATORIAL CANDIDATE: We are ready to return California to the people. Thank you very much, and god bless all of you. Thank you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WALLACE: And Schwarzenegger reiterated many of his campaign pledges, including repealing the state's car tax and the new law providing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.

But now, analysts say, this all comes down to getting out the vote. So get ready for the road trips. Schwarzenegger will be on a bus beginning tomorrow, Davis on a plane this weekend, both men trying to get all their supporters to the polls -- Aaron.

BROWN: It's all Tuesday night.

Thank you, Kelly, very much -- Kelly Wallace in Los Angeles.

We mentioned this story briefly last night, too briefly, we think. In Florida, a child is recovering, a 2-year-old, recovering from being left home alone for weeks while her mother was in jail. This is not about some grand failure of the courts or some state agency in charge of child welfare. More money from the state wouldn't have changed this -- just one story, one child, one mother, one horrible set of circumstances.

Here's CNN's Susan Candiotti.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SUSAN CANDIOTTI, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A little girl in the arms of her father after a remarkable story of survival.

OGDEN LEE, FATHER OF BREANNA: I can't explain it. I'm just happy she's OK.

CANDIOTTI: Police say no thanks to the 2-year-old's mother. She appeared in court in shackles one day after the toddler was discovered alone in their apartment, after police say the little girl somehow fended for herself for nearly three weeks.

JOHN RUTHERFORD, JACKSONVILLE SHERIFF'S OFFICE: She's a very tenacious little girl. She was actually able to open the refrigerator, literally emptied out all of the contents of the refrigerator.

CANDIOTTI: The mother got into trouble last month after she allegedly attacked a nail salon employee with a box cutter and made off with about $200 in cash. Police arrested Dakeysha Lee at work two days later. She was taken to jail September 10. All the while, police say, the mother made no mention of her daughter, possibly afraid she would get into even more trouble.

RUTHERFORD: It could have been a tragedy. Thank the lord it's not.

CANDIOTTI: Neighbors wondering how it could have happened.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I can't believe that they would leave a child like that. And nobody knew?

CANDIOTTI (on camera): There are a lot of unanswered questions. Police say one theory suggests the little girl was able to survive for as long as she did because she might have been left alone before.

(voice-over): The couple was living apart, in the process of divorce. Last year, Lee charged her husband with domestic battery, but the charges were dropped. Now she is charged with child abuse, assault and petty theft, bond set at $170,000.

On Thursday, she'll be in court to enter a plea. Lee's husband, meantime, granted temporary custody of Breanna, under state supervision.

LEE: She's happy to be with her father. I'm going to do whatever it takes to maybe clear this. Children are elastic, so I got her. I'm happy I got her.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: All right, say bye-bye.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Bye-bye.

CANDIOTTI (voice-over): Susan Candiotti, Jacksonville, Florida.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Still ahead on NEWSNIGHT: the Rush Limbaugh flap. Did ESPN get more than it bargained for when it hired him as a sports commentator? And then a truly wonderful story about the do-not-call list and some of the names on it.

We'll take a break first. From New York, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Back in July, ESPN announced it was hiring Rush Limbaugh to appear on its Sunday "NFL Countdown" show to -- quote -- "spark debate on the program." This past Sunday, some controversial comments by Mr. Limbaugh failed to spark any debate on the program, shockingly, but have caused plenty of problems for Mr. Limbaugh since.

Here is CNN's Michael Okwu.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

OKWU (voice-over): If ESPN was looking for buzz in giving conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh a commentary job, they found it. Sunday, Limbaugh said Philadelphia Eagles' quarterback Donovan McNabb is overrated because he's black.

RUSH LIMBAUGH, RADIO TALK SHOW HOST: The media has been very desirous that a back quarterback doing well. We're interested in black coaches and black quarterbacks doing well.

OKWU: Wednesday, McNabb said it's a sad step backwards.

DONOVAN MCNABB, PHILADELPHIA EAGLES QUARTERBACK: It's pretty heavy. You know, something that obviously I've been going through ever since I was young. You know, through high school, through college, and through the NFL, that, you know, you figure that it would have been over by now.

CANDIOTTI: The thorny subject was issue No. 1 on talk radio.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: These guys, I don't know if they're doing this for ratings or if this is still just 1954. It's hard for me to understand, but I don't understand it.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You don't get angry with a skunk for stinking. You don't get angry with a dog for barking. So don't get angry if Rush Limbaugh says something that is racist.

OKWU: From McNabb's teammates, outrage and incredulity. Despite the quarterback's shaky start this season, a three-time Pro-Bowler, McNabb has led the Eagles to two consecutive NFC title games. TROY VINCENT, PHILADELPHIA EAGLES: Does Rush care? Maybe not. That's what they paid him to come on the set to do.

OKWU: On Limbaugh's ABC radio show, no signs of backing down.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

LIMBAUGH: All this is really oriented around the fact that I was right. All this has become the tempest that it is, is because I must have been right about something.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

OKWU: Meanwhile, ESPN issued a statement, saying, "We have communicated to Mr. Limbaugh that his comments were insensitive and inappropriate."

(END VIDEOTAPE)

OKWU: Politicians and presidential candidates are now even weighing in, calling for Mr. Limbaugh to be taken off the air. In the meantime, NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue, we are told by the Eagles organization, called Donovan McNabb after practice this afternoon to offer his support -- Aaron.

BROWN: Just to be clear, what Mr. Limbaugh said, or didn't say, he did not say that Donovan McNabb is the quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles because he's black. That's not what he said, right?

OKWU: No, he did not say that he's their quarterback because he is black. But he suggested that McNabb has been given an easy pass by the media, that he's been made into a much greater quarterback because the public wants to see a successful black quarterback -- Aaron.

BROWN: OK. Just to be clear.

Michael, thank you. It's an interesting tale.

It does not happen off, we admit. But sometimes, life is simply too perfect. Every now and then, a story comes along and you find yourself looking to the heavens in thanks. This is that story. It involves the do-not-call list and some of the people who signed up, hoping to avoid those annoying little calls. And you sometimes say there is no good news.

Here is CNN's Maria Hinojosa.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MARIA HINOJOSA, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): We decided to see just who has registered on that do-not-call list.

(on camera): Michael Sherman.

(voice-over): Sherman is the chairman of the Direct Marketing Association.

(on camera): There we go. He's registered.

(voice-over): And doesn't want to be bothered by telemarketers, even though the association he heads up represents telemarketers and pushed hard to defeat the federal do-not-call list.

According to an investigation by Jack Dolan of "The Hartford Courant," at least 11 top executives of the Direct Marketing Association are on the do-not-call list themselves. Michael Sherman told CNN his family -- quote -- "just moved to a new home and were getting a lot of calls from movers."

JIM GUEST, CONSUMERS UNION: The executives of the telemarketing firms, their jobs are to defend the interests of the telemarketing firms. But what they're really showing us is, when push comes to shove, in their private lives, in their homes, they don't want these telemarketing calls anymore than anybody else does.

HINOJOSA: Telemarketers love to get people on the line right away. That's why they call you at home during dinner. But telemarketing executives?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Leave a message. I'll try and get back to you as soon as I can.

HINOJOSA: We wanted to talk to them about putting their names on the do-not-call list. But they wouldn't talk to us. Some put us on hold for what seemed like forever.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He's on another line at the moment.

HINOJOSA (on camera): OK. We can hold.

(voice-over): We waited patiently for a while, a long while, just to ask a vice president of West Corp., one of the country's largest telemarketers, why her boss had been on the do-not-call list. She wouldn't answer that, so I tried another.

(on camera): What's the kind of call that you would take, that you would like to take from a telemarketer?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Boy, that's a tough question.

HINOJOSA (voice-over): Yes, it is. Just ask Jerry Seinfeld.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "SEINFELD")

JERRY SEINFELD, ACTOR: Hello.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Hi, would you be interested in switching over to TMI long distance service?

SEINFELD: Oh, gee, I can't talk right now. Why don't you give me your home number and I'll call you later?

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Well, I'm sorry. We're not allowed to do that.

SEINFELD: Oh, I guess you don't want people calling you at home.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: No.

SEINFELD: Well, now you know how I feel.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HINOJOSA: We tried to find out whether Jerry Seinfeld had registered on the do-not-call list, but he couldn't take our call.

Maria Hinojosa, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Still to come on NEWSNIGHT, we'll check morning papers. And up next, a conversation with George Will, who think it's time for the Bush administration to admit it was wrong about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

This is NEWSNIGHT.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: And lots left to do on NEWSNIGHT this day, including a conversation with George Will and NPR's Anne Garrels. And then there are morning papers, too.

We'll take a break, then be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: We began the program tonight talking about opinions. And for the next few minutes, we offer the opinions of one of the country's leading conservative thinkers, George Will. One of the things we like about Mr. Will, even when we don't agree with him, is that he is such an independent thinker. Whatever script he's following, it's a script he wrote himself. His latest collection of columns is out in paperback -- paperback -- that would be paperback. And it is called "With a Happy Eye, But."

We spoke with Mr. Will earlier today.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Mr. Will, you wrote today in your column today that it's time for the administration to say, we were wrong on weapons of mass destruction. They don't seem quite prepared to do that yet.

GEORGE WILL, AUTHOR, "WITH A HAPPY EYE, BUT": They don't.

Both sides in this argument have dug in to untenable positions. The critics of the administration seem to be saying, if the mistakes were made, the mistakes had to arise from bad motives, hence the Kennedy accusation that the war was launched on a fraud, consciously concocted in Texas, probably over a barbecue sometime.

On the other side, I think, largely in response to that, the administration is being unreasonably obdurate, where both sides ought to say we all as Americans ought to have an enormous stake in figuring out how we misread the intelligence and how we can read intelligence better in the future, because this misreading goes back to the Clinton administration. It crosses the Atlantic to the French, German secret services and all the rest.

BROWN: Do you think that the administration, in and effort to persuade basically oversold some things -- weapons of mass destruction -- and undersold other things -- the cost of the reconstruction?

WILL: I don't think, in the cost of reconstruction, they undersold consciously. I think they did anticipate that Iraq sitting on a large lake of oil would be a self-financing occupation. And they did not, I think, understand the damage done to civil society by 30 years of rule by the Baath Party. By civil society, I mean, newspapers, the civic vocabulary of argument and all the rest.

With regard to the weapons of mass destruction, I think, at every point, they took the evidence they had and, with good reason, put the worst possible interpretation on it. This was what you would do after 9/11. But the result was a kind of pyramid of mistakes that became rather large.

BROWN: Among the most intriguing things that I've seen recently is something you wrote. And you shaped it the other day as a question to the secretary of state.

Let me read it to you. "Is it your view that the destruction he, Saddam, wrought and the torture and the mass graves were sufficient grounds for this war, absent the evidence of weapons?" Let me ask you that question. Absent the evidence of weapons, were those other reasons good enough reasons for the United States to wage a war?

WILL: I'm inclined to think not.

John Quincy Adams famously warned the United States against going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. That Saddam Hussein was a monster is universally recognized. However, he is not the only monster in the world. And the question is, you have to connect, it seems to me, an American national interest with the ancillary and dispensable virtue of getting rid of monsters. Otherwise, we'll be much too busy.

BROWN: It seems to me, the argument the administration makes now is, well, we'll see on the weapons. We're not sure. We'll see. But this guy was such a bad guy and he killed so many people and he was so destabilizing in the region that the world is, in fact, better off. Is the world in fact better off?

WILL: Oh, I think the world is better off, if you mean, by some normal utilitarian calculus, that we have subtracted more pain and added more pleasure to the world, certainly, the world is better off. The world would have been better off if we had intervened in Rwanda and stopped the genocide there. There are questions of the overstretch of our capacity to do this, however.

There is another side, and a more interesting, a more promising side to the administration argument. And that is, not only is the world better off because we're rid of him, but there will be a positive good. We will have a transformative, exemplary society built in Iraq, which will be the first pluralist functioning secular democracy in the world and it will be a benign contagion that will infect the world with our values.

That's a large leap. It's an act of faith. It may be true. If true, it's wonderful. If not, then, retrospectively, you have to say, the war wasn't the productive enterprise we hoped for.

BROWN: One quick domestic political question. Has the ground shifted at all, in your view, for the Democrats? Are they in any position, do you think, to defeat the president?

WILL: I don't think so, for several reasons.

Last quarter, from April, May, June, the economy grew at 3.3 percent, which is really quite healthy, better than the 2.4 percent last year. The economy is getting stronger and stronger, after some tremendous shocks over the last three years. Iraq, the progress will be slow, but it will be progress. And a year from now, it will look very different. And you have to have a reason to displace an incumbent president. And I still think they're looking -- the Democrats, all 10 of them -- for that reason.

BROWN: We're always pleased to have you on the program. It's nice to see you again. We've known each other a while now. And I enjoy having you. I hope you will come back soon.

WILL: I hope so.

BROWN: Thank you, George Will.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Talked to Mr. Will earlier tonight.

A quick number of items from around the country before we head to break. As we heard the other night from CNN's Barbara Starr, there are a great many American wounded service men and women at military hospitals around the world. And until today, they were required to reimburse the government for meals they received while they were in the hospital getting treatment, the bill being presented on discharge. That policy received so much criticism -- imagine that -- that, today, the president signed into law legislation that eliminates it.

It's not a lot of money, about $8.10 a day, I think. But the very idea of asking for any money at all seemed to many to be absurd.

Outside Chicago, at least seven people died, 16 others hurt when a tour bus collided with some tractor-trailers and a pickup truck on I-90 west of the city, a chain-reaction accident, police saying one of the trailer trucks failed to stop about half a mile from a toll booth, plowing into the other trucks and then the mini tour bus.

And Robert Kardashian -- quick, think; who is it? -- has died. He is longtime friend and onetime lawyer for O.J. Simpson. Mr. Kardashian died of cancer in Los Angeles. He was 59. Mr. Simpson told CNN tonight -- quote -- "It's shocking when a friend close to you passes. I loved Bobby."

Ahead on NEWSNIGHT: "Naked in Baghdad," the story of life as a reporter under fire, the story told by NPR's Anne Garrels.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Anne Garrels, a fine journalist who spent the days and weeks before the fall of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, her job as a correspondent for National Public Radio.

To NPR's audience, she was the voice of the war, though, in many respects, it was not the war, but life that she was reporting on. She has written an extraordinarily good book about her experiences there called "Naked in Baghdad." It's not so much about the details of the military campaign, but about the people and the conditions in Iraq as the world watched and waited for what seemed like an inevitable war.

We talked with her recently.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Well, I don't normally start interviews this way, but perhaps we ought to explain the title of the book.

ANNE GARRELS, AUTHOR, "NAKED IN BAGHDAD": "Naked in Baghdad," you mean?

BROWN: Yes, I do.

(LAUGHTER)

GARRELS: Well, I was -- it's sort of a literal and figurative title. I was naked because I had no protection. And, also, in order to protect my satellite phone from being confiscated from Saddam's thugs, I had this perhaps delirious idea that I should broadcast naked in the dark, so that, when the security guys came to the door, I could beg for a few minutes and perhaps hide the phone, so they wouldn't find it.

BROWN: Was there -- did you go through a long sort of hand- wringing over whether to stay? You were there before the war started. It was clear the war was coming. Did you know you would stay?

GARRELS: Yes. I was pretty sure. I had been there from October on for several months.

And the last two weeks were hard. I'm not going to say they were easy, because we were all running around talking to each other: Are you staying? Are you going? Some journalists lost it. Others were begging their bosses or hoping their bosses would pull them out, so they could leave with dignity. And others were defying their bosses by staying.

I was pretty sure, because I had this extraordinary Iraqi who had worked for me, that it was worth the gamble.

BROWN: Oddly, I think, right now -- I mean, we're still very close to this. This is going to be thought of as the great television war broadcast in real time, live much of the time. Tell me about being a radio reporter in all of that. Was it discouraging or the opposite?

GARRELS: Oh, the opposite.

I mean, television, I mean -- and American television left Baghdad. They didn't stay. So, in essence, I was left to create pictures with words. And I think it worked very well. And there was a sort of intimacy and a lack of hysteria, perhaps, in the way I was able to report the war.

BROWN: Did you ever think, man, I wish I had a camera with me?

GARRELS: No.

BROWN: Not at all?

GARRELS: Curiously, and even when I -- and when I recorded the sounds, they sounded like kind of pop, pop, pops. They didn't reflect really the reality, in a curious way.

What was important really wasn't the dramatic pictures. It was listening to Iraqis, listening to what they had to say about themselves. They predicted very well what has happened. They predicted the looting. They predicted the fracturing in the society. They predicted how nervous they were about what happened when the strong man went.

They talked about their ambivalence about why the Americans were coming. And that was, frankly, as important as the dramatic boom, boom pictures.

BROWN: Weigh in on this one, if you will. I'm sure you know, John Burns, "The New York Times" correspondent, has made a fair amount of splash arguing essentially that too many news organizations kowtowed to the regime, trading access for accuracy or a total picture. Do you have a feel for the truth of that?

GARRELS: I completely agree with John.

There is no question that many news organizations and journalists from around the world, not just Americans, pulled their punches in order to keep getting visas.

BROWN: Just because they wanted to be there? GARRELS: Yes.

I mean, as one reporter who refused to cover protests by the families of political prisoners who had not been released by Saddam when he had this general release, this reporter looked at me and said, "I'm here for the big story." The irony is, that reporter did not in fact stay for the war.

BROWN: It's very nice to talk to you. The book is a terrific read. Congratulations on that. And congratulations also for some stunning work under the worst of circumstances. It's nice to meet you.

GARRELS: Thank you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Anne Garrels from NPR.

Quickly a number of stories making news around the world.

At the U.N. tonight, American diplomats are circulating a revised draft resolution on Iraq. The hope is, the new language will convince some other countries to contribute both money and troops to the postwar effort. CNN has learned that the language calls for a multinational force under what's called a unified command -- read that, American -- and the day-to-day running of the country would be taken over in stages by the Iraqis themselves.

In Jerusalem, the Israeli Cabinet approved the next phase of that fence in the West Bank, designed to serve, the Israelis say, as a security barrier against Palestinian terrorists. Palestinians, of course, do not see it that way. They believe the portion of the barrier already built cuts off tens of thousands of law-abiding citizens in the West Bank from each other. The cost estimate of this latest phase is around $1 billion.

Another day in Moscow for first lady Laura Bush. She spent a lot of time reading to Russian schoolchildren. She also brought with her three well known American authors, including R.L. Stine the writer of the wildly popular -- and pretty scary, if you want my opinion -- "Goosebumps" series. His books have been translated into Russian, which is good news for those children, I would think.

BROWN: Still ahead on NEWSNIGHT: the rooster -- oh, my -- and morning papers.

But a break first. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(ROOSTER CROWING)

BROWN: Time to check morning papers from around the country.

And if there's a theme in them today, I can't figure it out. But maybe you will, in which case, then you can come up here and do this tomorrow, if you think it's so easy.

We'll start with "The New York Times." Pretty good story up in the corner. "Officials Say Bush' -- as in Mr. Bush or as in President Bush, if you prefer -- "Seeks $600 million to Hunt Iraq Arms," included in the $87 billion. "New Request is in Addition to $300 Million Already Spent. No success so far," says "The Times." And this, of course, on the day when David Kay, the weapons inspector, testifies before Congress -- or behind closed doors, actually, on weapons.

Also on the front page of "The Times": "Attorney General is Closely Leaked to Inquiry Figures." Rove was a consultant. This is the leak story. And one of those just cool features, I think, in "The Times." Other papers do it, but "The Times" seems to do it most often, this out of China. "Chinese Girl's Toil Brings Pain, Not Riches," life in the sweatshops of China, to get us products probably we wear or use or whatever.

"The Miami Herald," the story we reported a bit earlier, "Dad Given Custody of Girl, 2, Left Alone." That's a front-page story in my book any day. They also front-page the playoff series as "All Even."

What did I -- "San Antonio Express-News." I like this because they led with what is a big local story out there. "Two Valley Cities Vie to Land Boeing Plant." Boeing is going to start a new airplane. And they're shopping to see what cities will offer them the best deal. It's like stadiums for airplanes.

"The Times Herald-Record" for up in the Hudson Valley and the Catskill, leads with Rush. "Rush to Judgment." Get it? "Clark, Dean Want Limbaugh Fired For Remarks About Quarterback." I think the remarks, actually, were about sportswriters.

"The Boston Herald" headlines, "Who Did It?" It's a local crime story. "Mother I.D.ed, as Cops Fear There Will be More Bodies."

Where's "The Sun-Times"? We always end on "The Sun-Times." The weather tomorrow in Chicago is, frisky. "Garbage Workers Walk in Stink" -- Get it? -- "Over Paychecks."

That's the program. That's morning papers. We're all back here tomorrow, 10:00 Eastern time. Be kind to me and join us. We'll see you tomorrow.

Good night for all of us at NEWSNIGHT.

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