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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown

Bush May Retain Attorney in Plame Investigation; Chalabi May Have Passed Key Info to Iran; New Iraqi Government Holds Cabinet Meeting

Aired June 02, 2004 - 22:00   ET

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

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


AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening again everyone.
The president yesterday said that he had no role in picking the new Iraqi government and we suspect that is a technical truth as opposed to an absolute truth.

The absolute truth would acknowledge that the United States, the Coalition Provisional Authority in particular, had a large hand in choosing the names at the top of the government, which may turn out to be a blessing or may turn out to be a curse.

U.N. Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi is the consummate diplomat and someone asked if the U.S. had essentially handpicked the new Iraqi prime minister. He said you better ask the Americans.

To be successful this new government must not be seen as an American puppet government. It must be seen as independent. A little anti-Americanism might help on the Iraqi streets even as it might enrage many here.

Iraq again plays a large role in the program and the whip, but the road to Iraq runs first through the White House and another story breaking late tonight, CNN's Suzanne Malveaux with the watch tonight, Suzanne a headline.

SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Well, Aaron, President Bush has consulted an attorney and may retain him, this for the criminal investigation into who leaked the identity of a covert CIA operative.

Now officials say this does not mean that the president has become the focus of this investigation. What it does mean, however, is that he may be anticipating that he'll be questioned.

BROWN: Suzanne, we'll get to you at the top tonight.

Next to a spy story and a former darling of many in Washington and Tehran as well as it happens, CNN's David Ensor with that for us, David a headline.

DAVID ENSOR, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, knowledgeable sources say Ahmed Chalabi gave Iran a key piece of intelligence, the fact that the U.S. had cracked the codes used by Iranian intelligence to communicate. Now, the FBI is looking for who told Chalabi -- Aaron.

BROWN: David, thank you.

In Baghdad, down to business for the interim government and business as usual for the insurgents, Harris Whitbeck again with the duty tonight, so Harris the headline from there.

HARRIS WHITBECK, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, the new interim government here gets right to work holding its first cabinet meeting and getting more expressions of support from the U.N. diplomat who helped form it.

BROWN: Thank you.

And finally to the question of Saudi charities and support for international terror, another promise today to break the connection between the two, CNN's Kelli Arena covering, Kelli a headline.

KELLI ARENA, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Saudi Arabia is tightening its control on charitable donations sent overseas but some say to really fight the war on terror the Saudis need nothing less than a cultural revolution -- Aaron.

BROWN: Kelli, thank you. We'll get back to you and the rest in a moment or two.

Also on the program tonight, 15 years after the Chinese protesting for democracy were driven from Tiananmen Square by tanks, many who left the country are returning to take part in China's exploding economy.

And NEWSNIGHT's Beth Nissen examines a best-selling book on punctuation. No, we're not kidding.

And, of course, we'll have the morning papers!

All that and more in the hour ahead, two information leaks though top the broadcast tonight. We begin with the case of Valerie Plame, the CIA officer whose name was leaked to reporter Bob Novak last year after her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, had written critically of the administration's case against Iraq.

A federal grand jury is investigating who revealed her identity, a potential federal crime. Today the White House confirmed the president has consulted private counsel in the matter.

From the White House tonight, CNN's Suzanne Malveaux.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MALVEAUX (voice-over): The White House confirms President Bush has consulted a private attorney to possibly represent him in the criminal investigation into who leaked the name of a covert CIA operative last year.

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said: "The president has had discussions with a private attorney recently in the event he is sought by the grand jury but there is no indication that President Bush is the target of the leak investigation." McClellan noted that while Mr. Bush has recently spoken to Washington attorney Jim Sharp he has not yet retained him.

The leak first appeared in print last July that anonymous senior administration officials had exposed the identity of CIA Operative Valerie Plame. Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson had publicly accused the president of using bogus intelligence to make the case for invading Iraq and Wilson suspected the White House was seeking revenge.

Wilson had been hired by the CIA to investigate reports that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa. Mr. Bush used that information in his 2003 State of the Union speech as part of his case to go to war.

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

MALVEAUX: Since January, a federal grand jury has been hearing testimony from administration and government officials to try to find who leaked Plame's identity, a federal crime. It has combed through thousands of pages of documents turned over by the White House and called witnesses but returned no indictments.

McClellan said: "The president has always encouraged everyone in the White House to cooperate with the investigation and that would mean him too."

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MALVEAUX: Now, clearly the investigation has become a political football during this election season. This evening the Democratic National Committee putting out a statement saying that they are urging President Bush to come forward with all of the information that he knows and to come clean with the American people -- Aaron.

BROWN: I guess two questions, maybe one and a half. Does this tell us anything about where -- how far along the investigation is and, question two while we're at it, does this mean the president will willingly go before the grand jury even if he's not subpoenaed, do we know?

MALVEAUX: Two things here. First of all, what it indicates is that they have moved farther along that they are much farther along than before or anticipated, also that the president, because I did ask White House officials, that the president would be willing to cooperate as he has said before with the grand jury.

There is not an anticipation that he would be subpoenaed to go before the grand jury. There are many different ways they could get information from the president. The White House likes to call it kind of visiting or sitting down.

They can submit questions. There are all kinds of ways they could do it. What this does indicate, Aaron, is that there is an anticipation that perhaps the president will be asked some questions involving this leak investigation.

BROWN: Suzanne, thank you, Suzanne Malveaux at the White House tonight.

On now to leak number two. Ahmed Chalabi was a White House darling until he wasn't. Tonight, the former Iraqi exile is at the center of a spy scandal that has all the elements of an espionage thriller, a secret code cracked, that secret told and a vigorous denial by the man who stands accused of doing the leaking and just to make things a bit more interesting, Iran, of the evil empire is at the center of it all.

Here again, CNN's David Ensor.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ENSOR (voice-over): Knowledgeable sources say Ahmed Chalabi gave Iran a key piece of intelligence, the fact that the U.S. had cracked the codes used by Iranian intelligence. The revelation could close down a critical national security asset, a window into what Iranian intelligence is up to.

REP. JANE HARMAN (D), INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE: The fact that we broke the Iranian code was communicated by him to the Iranians. That's as bad as it gets. That is absolute, you know, class A treachery.

ENSOR: Sources say an Iranian official in Baghdad sent a cable to Tehran about a conversation he'd had with Chalabi, who has been open about his efforts to build ties in Iran.

The cable quoted Chalabi warning that the Americans knew Iran's secret code. According to "The New York Times" it even quoted Chalabi saying the American official who told him this was "drunk."

KENNETH POLLACK, CNN ANALYST, SABAN CENTER AT BROOKINGS INSTITUTION: If these charges are borne out what seems to have happened is that someone got a little bit too chummy with Chalabi and forgot that he was someone who really wasn't an American or working for the United States. He was someone who was working for himself and who would use whatever information we passed to him for whatever purpose would serve his interests, not necessarily ours.

ENSOR: An urgent FBI investigation into who could have leaked the information to Chalabi will focus on officials he has been in contact with, including top Pentagon officials like Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz but officials say it will also cover many more like staff in Baghdad who worked for the National Security Agency, the nation's code breakers and eavesdroppers.

In Iraq, Chalabi called the charge "stupid and false" but legal experts say the Iraqi could be prosecuted under U.S. law and he could be vulnerable to arrest if he ever enters U.S. territory again. (END VIDEOTAPE)

ENSOR: U.S. officials say the CIA will conduct a damage assessment but first the FBI must try to figure out who told Chalabi that the U.S. was monitoring Iranian intelligence communications -- Aaron.

BROWN: David, thank you, David Ensor tonight.

Some of the details of the leak were first described yesterday by Jane Mayer, a correspondent for "The New Yorker" magazine whose article on the allegations appears in the magazine's current issue. Jane joins us from Washington. It's good to have you with us tonight. Why would he do this?

JANE MAYER, "NEW YORKER" MAGAZINE STAFF REPORTER: Well, he's been -- first of all, I'm not sure that he did do this so we shouldn't jump to conclusions. These are just allegations.

BROWN: If he did this why would he do it?

MAYER: But why he would do it, Chalabi has been close with Iran for years. His family has many, many generations of ties to Iran and he is a Shiite. He's a secular Shiite but he has very close relations with a lot of the so-called reformers in Iran.

And he also at this point is kind of maneuvering once again politically and he's trying to be separating himself from the U.S. and prove that he's got sort of independent credentials to the Shiite community that he needs to get backing from in Iraq.

BROWN: Let me try it just a little bit differently. Assuming for a second all of this is true, assuming that, how does it help him in Iraq if he is seen as a good friend of the Iranians?

MAYER: That's a good question because after all the two countries have been at war bitterly, you know, in the recent past.

BROWN: Yes.

MAYER: But there are a number of the Shiite -- members of the Shiite community that are -- that have close ties to Iran and, of course, and those would be the base of any kind of political ambitions that Chalabi might have in his own country. So, there's that possibility that he is trying to prove himself to the Shiite community there.

BROWN: Mr. Chalabi used to deny that he had any political ambitions at all in his native country. He doesn't deny that anymore, does he?

MAYER: Well, I asked him not very long ago, about three weeks ago and he had said he wasn't a candidate and I said never and he said "well never is a very long time." So, he's also told other people sort of privately over the years, including Scott Ritter, who I interviewed for this piece, that he imagined the day that he might be running Iraq himself and, if so, he would be in charge of the oil concessions and he would take care of all his friends, he told Ritter.

BROWN: The United States has taken good care of him over the years. A lot of money has been funneled to him to his organization, over the last month or so things have turned a bit. Does he have any friends in Washington left?

MAYER: He does. He's got a very good friend in Richard Perle, who used to be the head of the Defense Policy Board here who's not a member of the administration and there is a kind of a clique of people in the Defense Department that still are big backers of Chalabi's and who say that this is just -- it's impossible for them to imagine that he would have double dealt the U.S. on this -- in this particular way.

You know and also you've got Chalabi saying it's stupid and it is a little bit on the kind of bizarre side that if this was a compromise channel of communications that they then would have gone ahead and sent a message of that kind of importance on a channel that they knew was being eavesdropped on by the U.S.

So, there are a lot of questions to be answered here and, you know, it's very hard when you're covering intelligence matters like this to get to the bottom of anything. We, as reporters, just have to rely on whatever our best sources tell us.

BROWN: Does he have -- are the long knives out for him in Washington right now?

MAYER: I think they've gone right, you know, they're not just after him but they've gone right through him.

BROWN: Yes.

MAYER: He -- the president just yesterday was sidestepping completely any kind of friendship or relationship with Chalabi saying, you know, he barely knew him and met him in a rope line.

And, in fact, he's had a tremendous influence in this administration I think and he set out to do that. He had a very specific and deliberate plan to woo this administration and to try to talk the U.S. into going into this war.

And, he's a brilliant strategist. He's, you know, got a Ph.D. in math from -- he went to both MIT and the University of Chicago and he studied American politics and he made a list of 150 people he needed to know in the U.S. and got to know them. And, he's been -- he's a very seductive personality. I enjoyed interviewing him. He's very, very quick, a lot of fun to talk to.

BROWN: Yes. That part of the piece where he talks about sort of all the work he did leading up to the war in Iraq is a fascinating part of the piece in "The New Yorker" magazine, nice piece of work and nice to have you with us tonight. Thank you.

MAYER: Thanks so much.

BROWN: Thank you.

Not so long ago, it wasn't a stretch to imagine Mr. Chalabi would be in a much different place today with say, oh, a seat in the new Iraqi government, if you want. That's not how the chips fell, of course. Iraq's new leaders did get down to business today without Mr. Chalabi. On their first day in office everything was different yet nothing had changed.

Here's CNN's Harris Whitbeck.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WHITBECK (voice-over): Iraq's new interim cabinet meets as a quasi governing body for the first time. The focus remained security and stability. Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said his government would rely on a multinational force in Iraq under the control of the United Nations but the force may be headed by a U.S. commander.

Another bomb exploded in a residential neighborhood of Baghdad Wednesday. At least five people died and 37 wounded.

And, in Kufa, near the holy city of Najaf, more skirmishes between U.S. forces and militia loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Mortars were fired at U.S. troops in the city and at their base nearby.

U.N. Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, in a news conference carried on Iraqi TV, said that if security doesn't improve in the next six months there will be a problem. Then, he asked the Iraqi people to support the new government.

LAKHDAR BRAHIMI, U.N. SPECIAL ENVOY: I would appeal to the Iraqi people, as I said yesterday, to give this government a chance. There is a lot of talent in the cabinet.

WHITBECK: Iraqis have said they will support their new government if they feel it is truly in control.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WHITBECK: But many Iraqis question how sovereign the new government really will be. The United States has said it will grant full sovereignty on June 30th. But with tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq and not under direct Iraqi control, the meaning of full sovereignty remains an open question -- Aaron.

BROWN: And feelings towards the new government have they settled in the media, have they settled on the street, or is it a kind of well let's see what happens on the first of July?

WHITBECK: Well, it's kind of a let's see what happens on the first of July but it's also a lot -- expressions of a lot more optimism that I've detected in other times that I've been here, Aaron. People are certainly willing to give the new government the benefit of the doubt. They are happy that they are Iraqis who will be in the seats of power. Although they're not entirely sure that they are fully in those seats of power, they are glad that things have taken the turn that they have.

BROWN: Harris, thank you, Harris Whitbeck in Baghdad tonight.

Ahead on NEWSNIGHT, Saudi Arabia cracks down on terrorism support at home. Is it too little too late?

And a book on semicolons and quotations marks hits the best seller list. Has the entire world gone mad?

From New York, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Some more news from the Middle East tonight. In the Saudi capital of Riyadh, two U.S. Army officers came under fire today. One suffered minor injuries a group that claims to have links to al Qaeda taking responsibility for that attack this as Saudi officials announce that their security forces have killed two suspected militants tied to the weekend attacks in Khobar. It's not clear if they were among the attackers who escaped on Sunday.

It's fair to say that Saudi Arabia is one of the more complicated corners of the new normal. Most of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudis, a number of Saudi charities are believed to have funded al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

Today, Saudi officials said again they are taking steps to crack down on the flow of money to the killers. They've asked the U.N. Security Council to block assets of one Saudi charity believed to have channeled such funds.

They also said they will consolidate all domestic charities into one new entity, better control over where the donations go, a familiar promise, so is anything different this time?

Here's CNN's Kelli Arena.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ARENA (voice-over): The weekend attacks in Khobar are a painful reminder Saudi Arabia has a very real stake in the war on terror.

ADEL AL-JUBEIR, SAUDI FOREIGN POLICY ADVISER: The actions of al Qaeda that we see in the kingdom have grown more desperate. They have gone from targeting hard targets and high value targets to targeting the innocent but as they grow more desperate our resolve grows stronger.

ARENA: U.S. officials say that resolve and a new level of cooperation actually date back to May of last year when terrorists bombed Riyadh. The latest move on the terror financing front bears witness. JUAN ZARATE, DEPUTY ASST. TREASURY SECRETARY: Once again, the United States and Saudi Arabia have joined forces to identify and choke off additional channels of terrorist financing.

ARENA: Officials say Saudi Arabia's willingness to move against its biggest charities, such as Al Haramain, is significant. So, too, is the investigation into Al Haramain's former head Aqeel Al-Aqil. Experts say the outcome could be critical.

MATT LEVITT, FORMER FBI ANALYST: Perhaps the key, the most critical issue that has not yet happened in Saudi Arabia is that no single member of the Saudi elite has been held accountable for their actions to date, not a single individual.

ARENA: What the Saudis have done, according to the royal embassy, is arrest more than 600 individuals in the wake of September 11, dismantle a number of al Qaeda cells and seize large quantities of arms caches. While applauding those actions, some say what the Saudis really need to do is move away from what they call a culture of intolerance and hatred.

SEN. SUSAN COLLINS (R), MAINE: Until the Saudis commit to changing their schools, their curriculum, their culture, they are still going to be a breeding ground for terrorists like Osama bin Laden.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ARENA: Now, the Saudis say that they are working closely with educators and imams to make sure there is no place for incitement and intolerance and, instead, to bring a message of peace -- Aaron.

BROWN: Kelli, thank you, Kelli Arena tonight.

There's been a ring of been-there-done-that to all of this. Joining us tonight Fareed Zakaria the editor of "Newsweek International," a bit of Saudi politics, I guess a bit of Iraqi politics as well. It's good to see you.

Again, let's start with Iraq and we'll see if we can get through all that. An awful lot has happened since we last talked but, if I had to put one word on it or two it's that the Americans have become more pragmatic.

FAREED ZAKARIA, EDITOR "NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL": I think there's been a major shift. The president keeps saying we're staying the course, we're continuing the mission. Actually he has reversed himself on virtually every major aspect of Iraq policy.

We said we weren't going to send more troops in. We've sent 20,000 more troops in. We said we were never going to use the U.N. for political things, as opposed to humanitarian. Well, the U.N. is front and center politically.

The radical de-Baathification, that was meant to be a crucial part of the transformation of Iraq, well that's been junked. And, of course, most colorfully, Mr. Chalabi who was to be given the keys to the kingdom is now -- finds himself under investigation.

BROWN: Even in a place and I know some people on the far right or on the right have some trouble with the way Fallujah ended but, even if you look at how they ultimately tried to settle that mess, and it was, it was a very pragmatic, if imperfect, solution.

ZAKARIA: You know people often forget the British ruled India, 400 million people with only 900 civil servants and a few thousand military people. How did they do it, by pragmatically coming to accommodations within the country with local leaders.

You have to do that. To the extent that this is an empire, and let's think of it as a temporary empire, an empire cannot be based purely on coercion. You just don't have enough people, even if we had twice as many troops. It has to be based on consent, which means you've got to find local leaders who you ally with and then it becomes their problem not yours.

BROWN: On to the question of the government. You talked about the U.N. being involved in the politics of the last couple of months trying to find a government. Are you satisfied in your mind that it wasn't really Jerry Bremer and the CPA that pulled the strings on the big names?

ZAKARIA: I'm satisfied. I'll tell you what really happened as far as I can tell is that the governing council outmaneuvered both the United States and the U.N. We made this mistake of having created a governing council and then disempowered it. If you remember, the plan was meant to be that these guys go quietly into the night.

BROWN: Right.

ZAKARIA: Well, they discovered that they were the only Iraqis around and that they had a certain kind of bargaining power and so they called the bluff. They said, look, we're going to create facts on the ground.

We're going to name people and what are you going to do about this? So, both the U.S. and the U.N. were caught off guard. I don't think that either of them, Jerry Bremer or Brahimi, ended up with exactly the slate they wanted.

BROWN: In terms of how this ultimately all plays out is this a good thing, a bad thing or do we just not know thing?

ZAKARIA: No, it's a good thing. Oddly by losing we've won, by which I mean to say by losing this council, this new interim government has gotten a little bit more legitimacy than it would have gotten because the key to credibility right now is credibility vis-a- vis the 800-pound gorilla in the room.

BROWN: Got to be a little anti-American here?

ZAKARIA: Right because you're nationalist. You need to prove to the Iraqi people you're an Iraqi nationalist and the good news here is the people taking control of Iraq policy are going to be Powell and the State Department and I think they understand that. They understand that you've got to let these guys flex their muscles a little bit. Otherwise, they won't seem credible to their people.

BROWN: Good to see you. Thank you, as always.

ZAKARIA: Pleasure.

BROWN: Hopefully you'll be back soon. Thank you.

Coming up on NEWSNIGHT tonight, we'll take a look at what the Chinese call astronauts, those who left the country in search of freedom reentering for a shot at big money.

And we'll talk about Abraham Lincoln with Maria Cuomo, one darned good thinker talking about another. We'll do all that after a break.

This is NEWSNIGHT on CNN.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Let's start with sausage. You can like eating sausage without necessarily wanting to see it made. It isn't pretty and neither is some of what goes on into making financial markets work, even though most would agree it's a price worth paying.

In other words, what you're about to hear can be heard in good companies and bad. As it happens, this sample comes from tape recordings to be used in evidence against one of the worst, Enron, bleeped for your protection, the reporting tonight from CNN's Jen Rogers.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JEN ROGERS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Back in 2000 when Enron was the largest electricity trader on the West Coast, Enron traders fought back the laughs as California fought rolling blackouts.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh, the best thing that could happen is if (EXPLETIVE DELETED) an earthquake, let that thing float out to the Pacific and put 'em (EXPLETIVE DELETED) candles.

ROGERS: Joking about natural disasters didn't stop at quakes. Traders also cheered a wildfire that impacted supplies and boosted prices.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Burn baby burn.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's a beautiful saying.

ROGERS: The language and attitude of Enron traders isn't rare on trading floors where million dollar decisions are made by the minute often impacting the energy rates paid by consumers.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They're (EXPLETIVE DELETED) taking all the money back from you guys? All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California? UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yeah, Grandma Millie man. But she's the one who couldn't figure out how to (EXPLETIVE DELETED) vote on the butterfly ballot.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yeah, now she wants her (EXPLETIVE DELETED) money back for all the power you've charged right up jammed right up her (EXPLETIVE DELETED).

ROGERS: Grandma Millie isn't the only one who wants her money back. These tapes were made public by the Snohomish Public Utility in Washington State which, along with other utilities, is suing trying to recover some of Enron's profits from the California power crisis.

ERIC CHRISTENSEN, ASST. GENERAL COUNSEL SNOHOMISH PUBLIC UTILITY: The main significance of this is that we now have on tape in the words of Enron's own traders that they were engaged in criminal conspiracy to defraud electric rate payers all across the western United States.

ROGERS: Enron declined to comment on the tapes, other than to say it is cooperating with all investigations. Two former Enron energy traders have pled guilty to charges of manipulating the California energy market and another faces eleven counts of fraud.

Jen Rogers, CNN Financial News, Los Angeles.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: I thought newsrooms were a little raunchy.

This may be another one of those sausage stories or a measure perhaps of the power a booming economy has to paper over the past. For China, that past includes a revolution in the '40s, a reign of terror in the '60s and a government crackdown in the late '80s, 15 years ago this week. The present covers a standoff with Taiwan and what many are calling the strangulation of democracy in Hong Kong. But it also includes prosperity. And prosperity makes a difference.

Here is CNN's Stan Grant.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

STAN GRANT, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): They call them astronauts, no, not like this one. He shot into space. These astronauts land in China's big cities, Beijing or Shanghai.

DAVID ZWEIG, SOCIOLOGIST: They're walking on two legs, as the Chinese used to say, one leg in China, one leg back in the West.

GRANT: The astronauts are among tens of thousands of Chinese living abroad now going home each year. Why astronauts? Because they leave their families behind to seek riches in China's stellar economy. Sociologist David Zweig has been charting the course. He's writing a book about China's returnees.

ZWEIG: People back in 1989, '90, '91 and talking about going back to China, they would have said, no way they would go back. But that's a long time ago.

GRANT: Dawn Zhao is going back. She left Beijing in 1989, just before the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Now in Hong Kong, she's planning a move to Shanghai. China is more energetic, she says, and it is changing. She believes she can make a difference.

DAWN ZHAO, RESIDENT OF HONG KONG: No matter, you know, where I go and where I have been and what passport I hold, at heart, I'm still Chinese.

GRANT (on camera): It is in markets like this that China is winning the P.R. battle. As the world's factory, it manufactures everything, from electronics to clothes. And whatever China makes, the rest of the world buys.

(voice-over): The money we all spend allows rich Chinese to splash out on flush cars, trendy clothes and new apartments. Some economists caution, China's phenomenal growth cannot continue indefinitely. Others, though, say that, within a generation, China's economy will top America's. Tiananmen square, human rights, who mentioned that?

ZWEIG: I think that people who care about human rights in China, who care a lot about it, don't go back, or they go back and get themselves arrested.

ZHAO: I'm not concerned about freedom. I think freedom is a relative term.

GRANT: For China's astronauts, it seems, as far as they're concerned, the sky is the limit.

Stan Grant, CNN, Hong Kong.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Before we go break, a couple of money stories. The price of oil dipped a bit today, as ministers from OPEC gathered in Beirut. At the meeting, members expressed support for a Saudi proposal to increase the cartel's production ceiling by about 10 percent. "I assure you," said the Saudi oil minister, "that the kingdom and OPEC don't want high prices" -- well, not too high, at least.

The news send blue chips into the green today. The S&P also finished ahead of the game. The Nasdaq ended up, down a smidge.

Ahead on NEWSNIGHT tonight, what would Abe Lincoln have done after 9/11? Perhaps only Mario Cuomo would have come up with that question and figured out an answer.

And why is it so funny that a panda eats, shoots and leaves? Stick around and we'll answer that, too.

From around the world, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) BROWN: Ordinarily, not even a wonk would stay up late for election results from South Dakota. But last night, the wonks, the nerds, the political junkies and the rest of us did. We all waited until late into the morning to learn that Stephanie Herseth, a Democrat, had narrowly defeated Larry Diedrich for a congressional seat left vacant by Republican Bill Janklow, who you might recall was just released from jail.

Whether this is a good omen for the Democrats in November or not is anybody's guess. And lots of people are guessing. It may also bode poorly for one Democrat in particular. It might, South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle. Here is the theory on this. Now that all three of South Dakota's representatives are Democrats, voters may turn against Senator Daschle in the name of diversity. That's the theory at least, and every program ought to have one.

Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York, was, is and always will be one of the sharpest minds in the Democratic Party. He also possesses a rare talent for making politics sound like poetry. Lately, he's turned his attention to another political poet, perhaps the best we ever had, in search of lessons for today. The politician is President Lincoln. The book is called "Why Lincoln Matters Today More Than Ever."

We spoke with Governor Cuomo yesterday afternoon.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Why Lincoln? Why write about Lincoln now?

MARIO CUOMO (D), FORMER NEW YORK GOVERNOR: I think he's desperately needed. I don't think either the Republicans or the Democrats have given us an overarching, inspirational philosophical view of the world that we could cling to. And I think we want that. We want to know your whole approach to life, to terrorism, to war, to opportunity.

And Lincoln is unique among all politicians. Nobody has been quoted as much as he. Nobody has been relied upon as much as he. And it is because of his wisdom, because of the breadth of what he had to say and the depth and the reach of it. He spoke to the whole world, although he had never traveled beyond the United States, except a few steps into Canada once. And he spoke to the ages.

On the memorial of 9/11, the first memorial, think about it. Governor Pataki, former Mayor Giuliani, Mayor Bloomberg, asked to speak about 9/11, interpret it for us, they didn't say a word. Instead, they read Lincoln. And when that happened, I said to myself, well, what you're saying is, he's more than a revered relic. He's relevant.

BROWN: In the last chapter of the book -- people can read all the rest. I'll have you talk about the last one -- you basically write a speech with his help, because you use a lot of his words.

CUOMO: Right. BROWN: You substitute some contemporary issues and you come up with Lincoln's view of where we are today.

CUOMO: Exactly, yes. And that's right.

And, well, there are two things. There's the war, regrettably. And there's the domestic situation. But on the war, right after 9/11, he would have done what we all wanted done. And that is, you have to go after Osama bin Laden, because he has announced that he's the guilty party, and his group, al Qaeda. So you have a group. You have a location, Afghanistan. You go get them, obviously. And you use force. He would never have gone to Iraq until he finished in Afghanistan.

He wouldn't have gone to Iraq because Iraq was a war of choice, a peremptory war. And what he said when asked that by Herndon, his partner, would you have a preemptive war? And he says, no, never. And he said, why? Because then it is too easy for a leader who is flawed to make a mistake or a leader who is cynical to create a false war. And that's exactly what happened.

BROWN: And the criticism I think you're going to get is that what you've actually done is taken Cuomo's view of the universe and channeled it through Lincoln, that you have manipulated Lincoln to make the arguments that you want to make.

CUOMO: That would be an egoism so tremendous that I'm not sure that even the worst politician would be capable of. No, I didn't do anything like that.

And a lot of people have used Lincoln. A lot of people have interpreted him. And if the Republicans can interpret him better than I do, and if the evidence in their book, if they choose to write one, is stronger than mine -- I have a discussion with Herndon, Lincoln and his partner. He says, preemptive war is wrong. Now, if you can show me evidence where he said, no, it is not wrong.

Here, here is an even better example. He invented the first income tax. And it was unconstitutional and it was progressive. But he said the following. Make the rich people pay more because they're rich. And make the working people do better than the people with the capital, because the workers are more important than the capital.

Now, you tell me, as a Republican or whatever you are, tell me how Lincoln could possibly have tolerated a situation where you're developing the biggest deficit in the world, which the young people who are fighting the war for you in Iraq are going to have to pay for and their children will pay for, and, at the same time, give $1 trillion, not $1 billion, $1 trillion, over 10 years to me and my clients.

The top two million taxpayers in America get $1 trillion. You have a huge deficit. The workers are in trouble. They have an average wage of $42,000. There are 15 million people either out of work, working part-time when they should be working full-time or out of the market all together. And you're going to take that? What do you think Lincoln would say to a Republican who did that?

BROWN: It is -- it is a great and interesting way that you have put a book together. And people will learn a lot about Lincoln and a lot about the times in which we live. It is always nice to see you.

CUOMO: Good to see you. Thank you for having me.

BROWN: Thank you, sir.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Mario Cuomo, we talked to him yesterday.

Still to come on NEWSNIGHT, Beth Nissen reports on a best-selling book on punctuation, really. And we'll bring you tomorrow's news from tomorrow morning's paper, the bulldog edition -- exclamation point -- right here on NEWSNIGHT, period.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: So there is this old joke. A guy gets lost in Harvard Square, so he asks a student, excuse me, where is the library at? Sir, this is Harvard, the student replies, looking down his nose. And at Harvard, we don't end a sentence with a preposition. OK, the man says, where is the library at, knucklehead? Might have been that word, might not have.

Anyway, nobody likes a stickler, or so you would imagine. So how then to account for the No. 1 best-selling nonfiction book in the country, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation"? How, indeed.

Here is NEWSNIGHT's Beth Nissen.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BETH NISSEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): This one little book's dash to the top of the best-seller list in two countries has been a surprise, period.

LYNNE TRUSS, AUTHOR, "EATS, SHOOTS & LEAVES": When every day, your publisher says we're printing another 60,000 copies today, I just kept thinking, well, it is about punctuation. How can this possibly be the case?

NISSEN: Lynne Truss is a journalist, novelist and self-described stickler whose book is a field guide to what she calls an endangered species, properly placed punctuation marks, colons, semicolons, quotation marks, apostrophes. She says apostrophes, those airborne commas, are especially endangered.

TRUSS: What is happening with the apostrophe is that it is just dying out, because people don't know how to it and they think probably best to leave it out.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "TWO WEEKS NOTICE") HUGH GRANT, ACTOR: Well, that's just silly.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

NISSEN: That's the mistake producers of the Hugh Grant-Sandra Bullock fill "Two Weeks Notice" made on the film's title.

TRUSS: The film "Two Weeks Notice" should have had an apostrophe after the weeks.

NISSEN: Just as galling to sticklers, sign makers, most of them vendors of fresh produce and groceries, who make the opposite mistake, wrongly putting in an apostrophe to make a word plural.

TRUSS: We actually call it the green grocer's apostrophe, which is where a plural has an apostrophe in it that shouldn't be there.

NISSEN: Another thing that gets sticklers' nickers in a twist -- that's sticklers', apostrophe after the S, because sticklers is plural. Anyway, another thing that maddens them are signs bearing quotation marks that shouldn't be there.

TRUSS: What you now find, really oddly, is pizzas or something will have an apostrophe. And it will also come with inverted commas. It will also comes as quotation marks -- "Pizzas," as if to say, they might be pizzas, but we're not sure, you know, we're not promising.

NISSEN: Punctuation can utterly change the meaning of one's writing. Read this sentence with no internal punctuation: "A woman without her man is nothing." Read the same sentence punctuated with a colon and a comma: "A woman: Without her, man is nothing."

TRUSS: I wrote this book because I really thought how interesting it was that these marks make such a difference in the way we read and write.

NISSEN: Truss blames much of modern-day punctuation ignorance and indifference on poor habits developed online.

TRUSS: Because of e-mailing and text messaging and all that, people are writing a great deal and making up their own punctuation as they go along, because they don't know that there are rules, let alone what the rules are.

NISSEN: So "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" is a rule book for all those who, Truss says, don't know their apostrophe from their elbow.

There is guidance here on how to use an exclamation point, sparingly, says Truss. It is the punctuation equivalent of canned laughter. There's a whole chapter on where to place a comma. There shouldn't be one in the title which refers to a joke about a gun- toting panda and a badly punctuated wildlife manual. The goal: clear expression.

As Truss writes -- quote -- "All our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places" -- period -- close quote.

Beth Nissen, comma, CNN, comma, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Never a punctuation mistake in morning papers, as you'll see in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(ROOSTER CROWING)

BROWN: OK. Time to check -- uh-oh, that's a bad sign, isn't it -- morning papers from around the country and around the world.

Lots good stuff today, really good stuff.

"The Christian Science Monitor" leads with why -- with oil prices, why oil prices are stubbornly high. But this is a story that is fascinating. "New Story Emerges on an Infamous Massacre. Eyewitnesses to Tiananmen, 15 Years Later, A Second Look." It turns out a lot of what we thought was true was not. But you'll have to buy "The Christian Science Monitor," which costs a buck, to find out, or ask me tomorrow. We'll have read it by then.

"The Daily Telegraph," this is an Australian newspaper. With all the things going on in the world, here is their lead. "You Beauty. Our Jennifer is Miss Universe," an Australian. Now, here is what I noticed. You're going to take this wrong. Remember when these beauty pageants, they used to wear like your grandmother's swimsuit in the competition? They don't anymore.

Back to the serious stuff now, "The Chattanooga Times Free Press." "U.N. Envoy Calls Bremer a Dictator. Brahimi says his authority was limited by U.S. officials." It's actually not quite as harsh as it sounds, though it is hard to be referred to a dictator in a nice way.

"The Atlanta Journal-Constitution" leads local. "Scores Better For Third-Graders," test scores. Also, this is a very good story that is in a number of front pages. "Women Cut Risk Of Lung Cancer." Guess why? They're not smoking as much. There you go.

"Cincinnati Enquirer," the third installment in the ongoing soap opera of the television series "Cops" there. "Take Three: Cops Invited Back to the City. Streicher" -- that's Tommy Streicher, the police chief -- "Tells Show, Let Suburbs Have Spotlight First." That's a good story for them. I like this story, too, by the way, "Catholics Try to Reconcile Faith and Political Choices." It's just something we need to think about how we're going to do. But I'm out of time here.

Really quick, Philadelphia Inquirer" is going to have a Smarty Jones story every day in the newspaper. It's a Philadelphia horse, or at least it's raced there. And it does again, including the pole positions. Do they call it pole positions? Yes, well, we don't have time to know.

The weather in Chicago tomorrow is "soft air." Hey, I don't write them. They do. The punctuation is correct, though.

We'll wrap it up in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: If you don't have a plan for tomorrow morning, this may help. Here is Bill Hemmer with a look at "AMERICAN MORNING."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: Aaron, thanks.

Tomorrow on "AMERICAN MORNING," the theme parks pushing the boundaries of adrenaline, more wild, more exciting rides. Has safety taken a back seat on the roller coaster? So far, three people have died this year. How bad are the risks? What you need to know to protect your family this summer tomorrow morning 7:00 a.m. Eastern time here on "AMERICAN MORNING." Hope to see you then -- Aaron.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: Thank you, Bill.

And that's it for tonight. Tomorrow, we've got a lot of cool things in play, but we'll also take a look -- well, not we'll also take a look, like this isn't cool -- but a Smarty Jones story of our own, how the horse and the city have come together. It's a nice little tale. Oh, that's so cute, too.

We'll see you tomorrow. Until then, good night for all of us.

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


Aired June 2, 2004 - 22:00   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening again everyone.
The president yesterday said that he had no role in picking the new Iraqi government and we suspect that is a technical truth as opposed to an absolute truth.

The absolute truth would acknowledge that the United States, the Coalition Provisional Authority in particular, had a large hand in choosing the names at the top of the government, which may turn out to be a blessing or may turn out to be a curse.

U.N. Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi is the consummate diplomat and someone asked if the U.S. had essentially handpicked the new Iraqi prime minister. He said you better ask the Americans.

To be successful this new government must not be seen as an American puppet government. It must be seen as independent. A little anti-Americanism might help on the Iraqi streets even as it might enrage many here.

Iraq again plays a large role in the program and the whip, but the road to Iraq runs first through the White House and another story breaking late tonight, CNN's Suzanne Malveaux with the watch tonight, Suzanne a headline.

SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Well, Aaron, President Bush has consulted an attorney and may retain him, this for the criminal investigation into who leaked the identity of a covert CIA operative.

Now officials say this does not mean that the president has become the focus of this investigation. What it does mean, however, is that he may be anticipating that he'll be questioned.

BROWN: Suzanne, we'll get to you at the top tonight.

Next to a spy story and a former darling of many in Washington and Tehran as well as it happens, CNN's David Ensor with that for us, David a headline.

DAVID ENSOR, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, knowledgeable sources say Ahmed Chalabi gave Iran a key piece of intelligence, the fact that the U.S. had cracked the codes used by Iranian intelligence to communicate. Now, the FBI is looking for who told Chalabi -- Aaron.

BROWN: David, thank you.

In Baghdad, down to business for the interim government and business as usual for the insurgents, Harris Whitbeck again with the duty tonight, so Harris the headline from there.

HARRIS WHITBECK, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, the new interim government here gets right to work holding its first cabinet meeting and getting more expressions of support from the U.N. diplomat who helped form it.

BROWN: Thank you.

And finally to the question of Saudi charities and support for international terror, another promise today to break the connection between the two, CNN's Kelli Arena covering, Kelli a headline.

KELLI ARENA, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Saudi Arabia is tightening its control on charitable donations sent overseas but some say to really fight the war on terror the Saudis need nothing less than a cultural revolution -- Aaron.

BROWN: Kelli, thank you. We'll get back to you and the rest in a moment or two.

Also on the program tonight, 15 years after the Chinese protesting for democracy were driven from Tiananmen Square by tanks, many who left the country are returning to take part in China's exploding economy.

And NEWSNIGHT's Beth Nissen examines a best-selling book on punctuation. No, we're not kidding.

And, of course, we'll have the morning papers!

All that and more in the hour ahead, two information leaks though top the broadcast tonight. We begin with the case of Valerie Plame, the CIA officer whose name was leaked to reporter Bob Novak last year after her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, had written critically of the administration's case against Iraq.

A federal grand jury is investigating who revealed her identity, a potential federal crime. Today the White House confirmed the president has consulted private counsel in the matter.

From the White House tonight, CNN's Suzanne Malveaux.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MALVEAUX (voice-over): The White House confirms President Bush has consulted a private attorney to possibly represent him in the criminal investigation into who leaked the name of a covert CIA operative last year.

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said: "The president has had discussions with a private attorney recently in the event he is sought by the grand jury but there is no indication that President Bush is the target of the leak investigation." McClellan noted that while Mr. Bush has recently spoken to Washington attorney Jim Sharp he has not yet retained him.

The leak first appeared in print last July that anonymous senior administration officials had exposed the identity of CIA Operative Valerie Plame. Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson had publicly accused the president of using bogus intelligence to make the case for invading Iraq and Wilson suspected the White House was seeking revenge.

Wilson had been hired by the CIA to investigate reports that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa. Mr. Bush used that information in his 2003 State of the Union speech as part of his case to go to war.

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

MALVEAUX: Since January, a federal grand jury has been hearing testimony from administration and government officials to try to find who leaked Plame's identity, a federal crime. It has combed through thousands of pages of documents turned over by the White House and called witnesses but returned no indictments.

McClellan said: "The president has always encouraged everyone in the White House to cooperate with the investigation and that would mean him too."

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MALVEAUX: Now, clearly the investigation has become a political football during this election season. This evening the Democratic National Committee putting out a statement saying that they are urging President Bush to come forward with all of the information that he knows and to come clean with the American people -- Aaron.

BROWN: I guess two questions, maybe one and a half. Does this tell us anything about where -- how far along the investigation is and, question two while we're at it, does this mean the president will willingly go before the grand jury even if he's not subpoenaed, do we know?

MALVEAUX: Two things here. First of all, what it indicates is that they have moved farther along that they are much farther along than before or anticipated, also that the president, because I did ask White House officials, that the president would be willing to cooperate as he has said before with the grand jury.

There is not an anticipation that he would be subpoenaed to go before the grand jury. There are many different ways they could get information from the president. The White House likes to call it kind of visiting or sitting down.

They can submit questions. There are all kinds of ways they could do it. What this does indicate, Aaron, is that there is an anticipation that perhaps the president will be asked some questions involving this leak investigation.

BROWN: Suzanne, thank you, Suzanne Malveaux at the White House tonight.

On now to leak number two. Ahmed Chalabi was a White House darling until he wasn't. Tonight, the former Iraqi exile is at the center of a spy scandal that has all the elements of an espionage thriller, a secret code cracked, that secret told and a vigorous denial by the man who stands accused of doing the leaking and just to make things a bit more interesting, Iran, of the evil empire is at the center of it all.

Here again, CNN's David Ensor.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ENSOR (voice-over): Knowledgeable sources say Ahmed Chalabi gave Iran a key piece of intelligence, the fact that the U.S. had cracked the codes used by Iranian intelligence. The revelation could close down a critical national security asset, a window into what Iranian intelligence is up to.

REP. JANE HARMAN (D), INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE: The fact that we broke the Iranian code was communicated by him to the Iranians. That's as bad as it gets. That is absolute, you know, class A treachery.

ENSOR: Sources say an Iranian official in Baghdad sent a cable to Tehran about a conversation he'd had with Chalabi, who has been open about his efforts to build ties in Iran.

The cable quoted Chalabi warning that the Americans knew Iran's secret code. According to "The New York Times" it even quoted Chalabi saying the American official who told him this was "drunk."

KENNETH POLLACK, CNN ANALYST, SABAN CENTER AT BROOKINGS INSTITUTION: If these charges are borne out what seems to have happened is that someone got a little bit too chummy with Chalabi and forgot that he was someone who really wasn't an American or working for the United States. He was someone who was working for himself and who would use whatever information we passed to him for whatever purpose would serve his interests, not necessarily ours.

ENSOR: An urgent FBI investigation into who could have leaked the information to Chalabi will focus on officials he has been in contact with, including top Pentagon officials like Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz but officials say it will also cover many more like staff in Baghdad who worked for the National Security Agency, the nation's code breakers and eavesdroppers.

In Iraq, Chalabi called the charge "stupid and false" but legal experts say the Iraqi could be prosecuted under U.S. law and he could be vulnerable to arrest if he ever enters U.S. territory again. (END VIDEOTAPE)

ENSOR: U.S. officials say the CIA will conduct a damage assessment but first the FBI must try to figure out who told Chalabi that the U.S. was monitoring Iranian intelligence communications -- Aaron.

BROWN: David, thank you, David Ensor tonight.

Some of the details of the leak were first described yesterday by Jane Mayer, a correspondent for "The New Yorker" magazine whose article on the allegations appears in the magazine's current issue. Jane joins us from Washington. It's good to have you with us tonight. Why would he do this?

JANE MAYER, "NEW YORKER" MAGAZINE STAFF REPORTER: Well, he's been -- first of all, I'm not sure that he did do this so we shouldn't jump to conclusions. These are just allegations.

BROWN: If he did this why would he do it?

MAYER: But why he would do it, Chalabi has been close with Iran for years. His family has many, many generations of ties to Iran and he is a Shiite. He's a secular Shiite but he has very close relations with a lot of the so-called reformers in Iran.

And he also at this point is kind of maneuvering once again politically and he's trying to be separating himself from the U.S. and prove that he's got sort of independent credentials to the Shiite community that he needs to get backing from in Iraq.

BROWN: Let me try it just a little bit differently. Assuming for a second all of this is true, assuming that, how does it help him in Iraq if he is seen as a good friend of the Iranians?

MAYER: That's a good question because after all the two countries have been at war bitterly, you know, in the recent past.

BROWN: Yes.

MAYER: But there are a number of the Shiite -- members of the Shiite community that are -- that have close ties to Iran and, of course, and those would be the base of any kind of political ambitions that Chalabi might have in his own country. So, there's that possibility that he is trying to prove himself to the Shiite community there.

BROWN: Mr. Chalabi used to deny that he had any political ambitions at all in his native country. He doesn't deny that anymore, does he?

MAYER: Well, I asked him not very long ago, about three weeks ago and he had said he wasn't a candidate and I said never and he said "well never is a very long time." So, he's also told other people sort of privately over the years, including Scott Ritter, who I interviewed for this piece, that he imagined the day that he might be running Iraq himself and, if so, he would be in charge of the oil concessions and he would take care of all his friends, he told Ritter.

BROWN: The United States has taken good care of him over the years. A lot of money has been funneled to him to his organization, over the last month or so things have turned a bit. Does he have any friends in Washington left?

MAYER: He does. He's got a very good friend in Richard Perle, who used to be the head of the Defense Policy Board here who's not a member of the administration and there is a kind of a clique of people in the Defense Department that still are big backers of Chalabi's and who say that this is just -- it's impossible for them to imagine that he would have double dealt the U.S. on this -- in this particular way.

You know and also you've got Chalabi saying it's stupid and it is a little bit on the kind of bizarre side that if this was a compromise channel of communications that they then would have gone ahead and sent a message of that kind of importance on a channel that they knew was being eavesdropped on by the U.S.

So, there are a lot of questions to be answered here and, you know, it's very hard when you're covering intelligence matters like this to get to the bottom of anything. We, as reporters, just have to rely on whatever our best sources tell us.

BROWN: Does he have -- are the long knives out for him in Washington right now?

MAYER: I think they've gone right, you know, they're not just after him but they've gone right through him.

BROWN: Yes.

MAYER: He -- the president just yesterday was sidestepping completely any kind of friendship or relationship with Chalabi saying, you know, he barely knew him and met him in a rope line.

And, in fact, he's had a tremendous influence in this administration I think and he set out to do that. He had a very specific and deliberate plan to woo this administration and to try to talk the U.S. into going into this war.

And, he's a brilliant strategist. He's, you know, got a Ph.D. in math from -- he went to both MIT and the University of Chicago and he studied American politics and he made a list of 150 people he needed to know in the U.S. and got to know them. And, he's been -- he's a very seductive personality. I enjoyed interviewing him. He's very, very quick, a lot of fun to talk to.

BROWN: Yes. That part of the piece where he talks about sort of all the work he did leading up to the war in Iraq is a fascinating part of the piece in "The New Yorker" magazine, nice piece of work and nice to have you with us tonight. Thank you.

MAYER: Thanks so much.

BROWN: Thank you.

Not so long ago, it wasn't a stretch to imagine Mr. Chalabi would be in a much different place today with say, oh, a seat in the new Iraqi government, if you want. That's not how the chips fell, of course. Iraq's new leaders did get down to business today without Mr. Chalabi. On their first day in office everything was different yet nothing had changed.

Here's CNN's Harris Whitbeck.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WHITBECK (voice-over): Iraq's new interim cabinet meets as a quasi governing body for the first time. The focus remained security and stability. Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said his government would rely on a multinational force in Iraq under the control of the United Nations but the force may be headed by a U.S. commander.

Another bomb exploded in a residential neighborhood of Baghdad Wednesday. At least five people died and 37 wounded.

And, in Kufa, near the holy city of Najaf, more skirmishes between U.S. forces and militia loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Mortars were fired at U.S. troops in the city and at their base nearby.

U.N. Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, in a news conference carried on Iraqi TV, said that if security doesn't improve in the next six months there will be a problem. Then, he asked the Iraqi people to support the new government.

LAKHDAR BRAHIMI, U.N. SPECIAL ENVOY: I would appeal to the Iraqi people, as I said yesterday, to give this government a chance. There is a lot of talent in the cabinet.

WHITBECK: Iraqis have said they will support their new government if they feel it is truly in control.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WHITBECK: But many Iraqis question how sovereign the new government really will be. The United States has said it will grant full sovereignty on June 30th. But with tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq and not under direct Iraqi control, the meaning of full sovereignty remains an open question -- Aaron.

BROWN: And feelings towards the new government have they settled in the media, have they settled on the street, or is it a kind of well let's see what happens on the first of July?

WHITBECK: Well, it's kind of a let's see what happens on the first of July but it's also a lot -- expressions of a lot more optimism that I've detected in other times that I've been here, Aaron. People are certainly willing to give the new government the benefit of the doubt. They are happy that they are Iraqis who will be in the seats of power. Although they're not entirely sure that they are fully in those seats of power, they are glad that things have taken the turn that they have.

BROWN: Harris, thank you, Harris Whitbeck in Baghdad tonight.

Ahead on NEWSNIGHT, Saudi Arabia cracks down on terrorism support at home. Is it too little too late?

And a book on semicolons and quotations marks hits the best seller list. Has the entire world gone mad?

From New York, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Some more news from the Middle East tonight. In the Saudi capital of Riyadh, two U.S. Army officers came under fire today. One suffered minor injuries a group that claims to have links to al Qaeda taking responsibility for that attack this as Saudi officials announce that their security forces have killed two suspected militants tied to the weekend attacks in Khobar. It's not clear if they were among the attackers who escaped on Sunday.

It's fair to say that Saudi Arabia is one of the more complicated corners of the new normal. Most of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudis, a number of Saudi charities are believed to have funded al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

Today, Saudi officials said again they are taking steps to crack down on the flow of money to the killers. They've asked the U.N. Security Council to block assets of one Saudi charity believed to have channeled such funds.

They also said they will consolidate all domestic charities into one new entity, better control over where the donations go, a familiar promise, so is anything different this time?

Here's CNN's Kelli Arena.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ARENA (voice-over): The weekend attacks in Khobar are a painful reminder Saudi Arabia has a very real stake in the war on terror.

ADEL AL-JUBEIR, SAUDI FOREIGN POLICY ADVISER: The actions of al Qaeda that we see in the kingdom have grown more desperate. They have gone from targeting hard targets and high value targets to targeting the innocent but as they grow more desperate our resolve grows stronger.

ARENA: U.S. officials say that resolve and a new level of cooperation actually date back to May of last year when terrorists bombed Riyadh. The latest move on the terror financing front bears witness. JUAN ZARATE, DEPUTY ASST. TREASURY SECRETARY: Once again, the United States and Saudi Arabia have joined forces to identify and choke off additional channels of terrorist financing.

ARENA: Officials say Saudi Arabia's willingness to move against its biggest charities, such as Al Haramain, is significant. So, too, is the investigation into Al Haramain's former head Aqeel Al-Aqil. Experts say the outcome could be critical.

MATT LEVITT, FORMER FBI ANALYST: Perhaps the key, the most critical issue that has not yet happened in Saudi Arabia is that no single member of the Saudi elite has been held accountable for their actions to date, not a single individual.

ARENA: What the Saudis have done, according to the royal embassy, is arrest more than 600 individuals in the wake of September 11, dismantle a number of al Qaeda cells and seize large quantities of arms caches. While applauding those actions, some say what the Saudis really need to do is move away from what they call a culture of intolerance and hatred.

SEN. SUSAN COLLINS (R), MAINE: Until the Saudis commit to changing their schools, their curriculum, their culture, they are still going to be a breeding ground for terrorists like Osama bin Laden.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ARENA: Now, the Saudis say that they are working closely with educators and imams to make sure there is no place for incitement and intolerance and, instead, to bring a message of peace -- Aaron.

BROWN: Kelli, thank you, Kelli Arena tonight.

There's been a ring of been-there-done-that to all of this. Joining us tonight Fareed Zakaria the editor of "Newsweek International," a bit of Saudi politics, I guess a bit of Iraqi politics as well. It's good to see you.

Again, let's start with Iraq and we'll see if we can get through all that. An awful lot has happened since we last talked but, if I had to put one word on it or two it's that the Americans have become more pragmatic.

FAREED ZAKARIA, EDITOR "NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL": I think there's been a major shift. The president keeps saying we're staying the course, we're continuing the mission. Actually he has reversed himself on virtually every major aspect of Iraq policy.

We said we weren't going to send more troops in. We've sent 20,000 more troops in. We said we were never going to use the U.N. for political things, as opposed to humanitarian. Well, the U.N. is front and center politically.

The radical de-Baathification, that was meant to be a crucial part of the transformation of Iraq, well that's been junked. And, of course, most colorfully, Mr. Chalabi who was to be given the keys to the kingdom is now -- finds himself under investigation.

BROWN: Even in a place and I know some people on the far right or on the right have some trouble with the way Fallujah ended but, even if you look at how they ultimately tried to settle that mess, and it was, it was a very pragmatic, if imperfect, solution.

ZAKARIA: You know people often forget the British ruled India, 400 million people with only 900 civil servants and a few thousand military people. How did they do it, by pragmatically coming to accommodations within the country with local leaders.

You have to do that. To the extent that this is an empire, and let's think of it as a temporary empire, an empire cannot be based purely on coercion. You just don't have enough people, even if we had twice as many troops. It has to be based on consent, which means you've got to find local leaders who you ally with and then it becomes their problem not yours.

BROWN: On to the question of the government. You talked about the U.N. being involved in the politics of the last couple of months trying to find a government. Are you satisfied in your mind that it wasn't really Jerry Bremer and the CPA that pulled the strings on the big names?

ZAKARIA: I'm satisfied. I'll tell you what really happened as far as I can tell is that the governing council outmaneuvered both the United States and the U.N. We made this mistake of having created a governing council and then disempowered it. If you remember, the plan was meant to be that these guys go quietly into the night.

BROWN: Right.

ZAKARIA: Well, they discovered that they were the only Iraqis around and that they had a certain kind of bargaining power and so they called the bluff. They said, look, we're going to create facts on the ground.

We're going to name people and what are you going to do about this? So, both the U.S. and the U.N. were caught off guard. I don't think that either of them, Jerry Bremer or Brahimi, ended up with exactly the slate they wanted.

BROWN: In terms of how this ultimately all plays out is this a good thing, a bad thing or do we just not know thing?

ZAKARIA: No, it's a good thing. Oddly by losing we've won, by which I mean to say by losing this council, this new interim government has gotten a little bit more legitimacy than it would have gotten because the key to credibility right now is credibility vis-a- vis the 800-pound gorilla in the room.

BROWN: Got to be a little anti-American here?

ZAKARIA: Right because you're nationalist. You need to prove to the Iraqi people you're an Iraqi nationalist and the good news here is the people taking control of Iraq policy are going to be Powell and the State Department and I think they understand that. They understand that you've got to let these guys flex their muscles a little bit. Otherwise, they won't seem credible to their people.

BROWN: Good to see you. Thank you, as always.

ZAKARIA: Pleasure.

BROWN: Hopefully you'll be back soon. Thank you.

Coming up on NEWSNIGHT tonight, we'll take a look at what the Chinese call astronauts, those who left the country in search of freedom reentering for a shot at big money.

And we'll talk about Abraham Lincoln with Maria Cuomo, one darned good thinker talking about another. We'll do all that after a break.

This is NEWSNIGHT on CNN.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Let's start with sausage. You can like eating sausage without necessarily wanting to see it made. It isn't pretty and neither is some of what goes on into making financial markets work, even though most would agree it's a price worth paying.

In other words, what you're about to hear can be heard in good companies and bad. As it happens, this sample comes from tape recordings to be used in evidence against one of the worst, Enron, bleeped for your protection, the reporting tonight from CNN's Jen Rogers.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JEN ROGERS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Back in 2000 when Enron was the largest electricity trader on the West Coast, Enron traders fought back the laughs as California fought rolling blackouts.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh, the best thing that could happen is if (EXPLETIVE DELETED) an earthquake, let that thing float out to the Pacific and put 'em (EXPLETIVE DELETED) candles.

ROGERS: Joking about natural disasters didn't stop at quakes. Traders also cheered a wildfire that impacted supplies and boosted prices.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Burn baby burn.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's a beautiful saying.

ROGERS: The language and attitude of Enron traders isn't rare on trading floors where million dollar decisions are made by the minute often impacting the energy rates paid by consumers.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They're (EXPLETIVE DELETED) taking all the money back from you guys? All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California? UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yeah, Grandma Millie man. But she's the one who couldn't figure out how to (EXPLETIVE DELETED) vote on the butterfly ballot.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yeah, now she wants her (EXPLETIVE DELETED) money back for all the power you've charged right up jammed right up her (EXPLETIVE DELETED).

ROGERS: Grandma Millie isn't the only one who wants her money back. These tapes were made public by the Snohomish Public Utility in Washington State which, along with other utilities, is suing trying to recover some of Enron's profits from the California power crisis.

ERIC CHRISTENSEN, ASST. GENERAL COUNSEL SNOHOMISH PUBLIC UTILITY: The main significance of this is that we now have on tape in the words of Enron's own traders that they were engaged in criminal conspiracy to defraud electric rate payers all across the western United States.

ROGERS: Enron declined to comment on the tapes, other than to say it is cooperating with all investigations. Two former Enron energy traders have pled guilty to charges of manipulating the California energy market and another faces eleven counts of fraud.

Jen Rogers, CNN Financial News, Los Angeles.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: I thought newsrooms were a little raunchy.

This may be another one of those sausage stories or a measure perhaps of the power a booming economy has to paper over the past. For China, that past includes a revolution in the '40s, a reign of terror in the '60s and a government crackdown in the late '80s, 15 years ago this week. The present covers a standoff with Taiwan and what many are calling the strangulation of democracy in Hong Kong. But it also includes prosperity. And prosperity makes a difference.

Here is CNN's Stan Grant.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

STAN GRANT, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): They call them astronauts, no, not like this one. He shot into space. These astronauts land in China's big cities, Beijing or Shanghai.

DAVID ZWEIG, SOCIOLOGIST: They're walking on two legs, as the Chinese used to say, one leg in China, one leg back in the West.

GRANT: The astronauts are among tens of thousands of Chinese living abroad now going home each year. Why astronauts? Because they leave their families behind to seek riches in China's stellar economy. Sociologist David Zweig has been charting the course. He's writing a book about China's returnees.

ZWEIG: People back in 1989, '90, '91 and talking about going back to China, they would have said, no way they would go back. But that's a long time ago.

GRANT: Dawn Zhao is going back. She left Beijing in 1989, just before the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Now in Hong Kong, she's planning a move to Shanghai. China is more energetic, she says, and it is changing. She believes she can make a difference.

DAWN ZHAO, RESIDENT OF HONG KONG: No matter, you know, where I go and where I have been and what passport I hold, at heart, I'm still Chinese.

GRANT (on camera): It is in markets like this that China is winning the P.R. battle. As the world's factory, it manufactures everything, from electronics to clothes. And whatever China makes, the rest of the world buys.

(voice-over): The money we all spend allows rich Chinese to splash out on flush cars, trendy clothes and new apartments. Some economists caution, China's phenomenal growth cannot continue indefinitely. Others, though, say that, within a generation, China's economy will top America's. Tiananmen square, human rights, who mentioned that?

ZWEIG: I think that people who care about human rights in China, who care a lot about it, don't go back, or they go back and get themselves arrested.

ZHAO: I'm not concerned about freedom. I think freedom is a relative term.

GRANT: For China's astronauts, it seems, as far as they're concerned, the sky is the limit.

Stan Grant, CNN, Hong Kong.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Before we go break, a couple of money stories. The price of oil dipped a bit today, as ministers from OPEC gathered in Beirut. At the meeting, members expressed support for a Saudi proposal to increase the cartel's production ceiling by about 10 percent. "I assure you," said the Saudi oil minister, "that the kingdom and OPEC don't want high prices" -- well, not too high, at least.

The news send blue chips into the green today. The S&P also finished ahead of the game. The Nasdaq ended up, down a smidge.

Ahead on NEWSNIGHT tonight, what would Abe Lincoln have done after 9/11? Perhaps only Mario Cuomo would have come up with that question and figured out an answer.

And why is it so funny that a panda eats, shoots and leaves? Stick around and we'll answer that, too.

From around the world, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) BROWN: Ordinarily, not even a wonk would stay up late for election results from South Dakota. But last night, the wonks, the nerds, the political junkies and the rest of us did. We all waited until late into the morning to learn that Stephanie Herseth, a Democrat, had narrowly defeated Larry Diedrich for a congressional seat left vacant by Republican Bill Janklow, who you might recall was just released from jail.

Whether this is a good omen for the Democrats in November or not is anybody's guess. And lots of people are guessing. It may also bode poorly for one Democrat in particular. It might, South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle. Here is the theory on this. Now that all three of South Dakota's representatives are Democrats, voters may turn against Senator Daschle in the name of diversity. That's the theory at least, and every program ought to have one.

Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York, was, is and always will be one of the sharpest minds in the Democratic Party. He also possesses a rare talent for making politics sound like poetry. Lately, he's turned his attention to another political poet, perhaps the best we ever had, in search of lessons for today. The politician is President Lincoln. The book is called "Why Lincoln Matters Today More Than Ever."

We spoke with Governor Cuomo yesterday afternoon.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Why Lincoln? Why write about Lincoln now?

MARIO CUOMO (D), FORMER NEW YORK GOVERNOR: I think he's desperately needed. I don't think either the Republicans or the Democrats have given us an overarching, inspirational philosophical view of the world that we could cling to. And I think we want that. We want to know your whole approach to life, to terrorism, to war, to opportunity.

And Lincoln is unique among all politicians. Nobody has been quoted as much as he. Nobody has been relied upon as much as he. And it is because of his wisdom, because of the breadth of what he had to say and the depth and the reach of it. He spoke to the whole world, although he had never traveled beyond the United States, except a few steps into Canada once. And he spoke to the ages.

On the memorial of 9/11, the first memorial, think about it. Governor Pataki, former Mayor Giuliani, Mayor Bloomberg, asked to speak about 9/11, interpret it for us, they didn't say a word. Instead, they read Lincoln. And when that happened, I said to myself, well, what you're saying is, he's more than a revered relic. He's relevant.

BROWN: In the last chapter of the book -- people can read all the rest. I'll have you talk about the last one -- you basically write a speech with his help, because you use a lot of his words.

CUOMO: Right. BROWN: You substitute some contemporary issues and you come up with Lincoln's view of where we are today.

CUOMO: Exactly, yes. And that's right.

And, well, there are two things. There's the war, regrettably. And there's the domestic situation. But on the war, right after 9/11, he would have done what we all wanted done. And that is, you have to go after Osama bin Laden, because he has announced that he's the guilty party, and his group, al Qaeda. So you have a group. You have a location, Afghanistan. You go get them, obviously. And you use force. He would never have gone to Iraq until he finished in Afghanistan.

He wouldn't have gone to Iraq because Iraq was a war of choice, a peremptory war. And what he said when asked that by Herndon, his partner, would you have a preemptive war? And he says, no, never. And he said, why? Because then it is too easy for a leader who is flawed to make a mistake or a leader who is cynical to create a false war. And that's exactly what happened.

BROWN: And the criticism I think you're going to get is that what you've actually done is taken Cuomo's view of the universe and channeled it through Lincoln, that you have manipulated Lincoln to make the arguments that you want to make.

CUOMO: That would be an egoism so tremendous that I'm not sure that even the worst politician would be capable of. No, I didn't do anything like that.

And a lot of people have used Lincoln. A lot of people have interpreted him. And if the Republicans can interpret him better than I do, and if the evidence in their book, if they choose to write one, is stronger than mine -- I have a discussion with Herndon, Lincoln and his partner. He says, preemptive war is wrong. Now, if you can show me evidence where he said, no, it is not wrong.

Here, here is an even better example. He invented the first income tax. And it was unconstitutional and it was progressive. But he said the following. Make the rich people pay more because they're rich. And make the working people do better than the people with the capital, because the workers are more important than the capital.

Now, you tell me, as a Republican or whatever you are, tell me how Lincoln could possibly have tolerated a situation where you're developing the biggest deficit in the world, which the young people who are fighting the war for you in Iraq are going to have to pay for and their children will pay for, and, at the same time, give $1 trillion, not $1 billion, $1 trillion, over 10 years to me and my clients.

The top two million taxpayers in America get $1 trillion. You have a huge deficit. The workers are in trouble. They have an average wage of $42,000. There are 15 million people either out of work, working part-time when they should be working full-time or out of the market all together. And you're going to take that? What do you think Lincoln would say to a Republican who did that?

BROWN: It is -- it is a great and interesting way that you have put a book together. And people will learn a lot about Lincoln and a lot about the times in which we live. It is always nice to see you.

CUOMO: Good to see you. Thank you for having me.

BROWN: Thank you, sir.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Mario Cuomo, we talked to him yesterday.

Still to come on NEWSNIGHT, Beth Nissen reports on a best-selling book on punctuation, really. And we'll bring you tomorrow's news from tomorrow morning's paper, the bulldog edition -- exclamation point -- right here on NEWSNIGHT, period.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: So there is this old joke. A guy gets lost in Harvard Square, so he asks a student, excuse me, where is the library at? Sir, this is Harvard, the student replies, looking down his nose. And at Harvard, we don't end a sentence with a preposition. OK, the man says, where is the library at, knucklehead? Might have been that word, might not have.

Anyway, nobody likes a stickler, or so you would imagine. So how then to account for the No. 1 best-selling nonfiction book in the country, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation"? How, indeed.

Here is NEWSNIGHT's Beth Nissen.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BETH NISSEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): This one little book's dash to the top of the best-seller list in two countries has been a surprise, period.

LYNNE TRUSS, AUTHOR, "EATS, SHOOTS & LEAVES": When every day, your publisher says we're printing another 60,000 copies today, I just kept thinking, well, it is about punctuation. How can this possibly be the case?

NISSEN: Lynne Truss is a journalist, novelist and self-described stickler whose book is a field guide to what she calls an endangered species, properly placed punctuation marks, colons, semicolons, quotation marks, apostrophes. She says apostrophes, those airborne commas, are especially endangered.

TRUSS: What is happening with the apostrophe is that it is just dying out, because people don't know how to it and they think probably best to leave it out.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "TWO WEEKS NOTICE") HUGH GRANT, ACTOR: Well, that's just silly.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

NISSEN: That's the mistake producers of the Hugh Grant-Sandra Bullock fill "Two Weeks Notice" made on the film's title.

TRUSS: The film "Two Weeks Notice" should have had an apostrophe after the weeks.

NISSEN: Just as galling to sticklers, sign makers, most of them vendors of fresh produce and groceries, who make the opposite mistake, wrongly putting in an apostrophe to make a word plural.

TRUSS: We actually call it the green grocer's apostrophe, which is where a plural has an apostrophe in it that shouldn't be there.

NISSEN: Another thing that gets sticklers' nickers in a twist -- that's sticklers', apostrophe after the S, because sticklers is plural. Anyway, another thing that maddens them are signs bearing quotation marks that shouldn't be there.

TRUSS: What you now find, really oddly, is pizzas or something will have an apostrophe. And it will also come with inverted commas. It will also comes as quotation marks -- "Pizzas," as if to say, they might be pizzas, but we're not sure, you know, we're not promising.

NISSEN: Punctuation can utterly change the meaning of one's writing. Read this sentence with no internal punctuation: "A woman without her man is nothing." Read the same sentence punctuated with a colon and a comma: "A woman: Without her, man is nothing."

TRUSS: I wrote this book because I really thought how interesting it was that these marks make such a difference in the way we read and write.

NISSEN: Truss blames much of modern-day punctuation ignorance and indifference on poor habits developed online.

TRUSS: Because of e-mailing and text messaging and all that, people are writing a great deal and making up their own punctuation as they go along, because they don't know that there are rules, let alone what the rules are.

NISSEN: So "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" is a rule book for all those who, Truss says, don't know their apostrophe from their elbow.

There is guidance here on how to use an exclamation point, sparingly, says Truss. It is the punctuation equivalent of canned laughter. There's a whole chapter on where to place a comma. There shouldn't be one in the title which refers to a joke about a gun- toting panda and a badly punctuated wildlife manual. The goal: clear expression.

As Truss writes -- quote -- "All our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places" -- period -- close quote.

Beth Nissen, comma, CNN, comma, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Never a punctuation mistake in morning papers, as you'll see in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(ROOSTER CROWING)

BROWN: OK. Time to check -- uh-oh, that's a bad sign, isn't it -- morning papers from around the country and around the world.

Lots good stuff today, really good stuff.

"The Christian Science Monitor" leads with why -- with oil prices, why oil prices are stubbornly high. But this is a story that is fascinating. "New Story Emerges on an Infamous Massacre. Eyewitnesses to Tiananmen, 15 Years Later, A Second Look." It turns out a lot of what we thought was true was not. But you'll have to buy "The Christian Science Monitor," which costs a buck, to find out, or ask me tomorrow. We'll have read it by then.

"The Daily Telegraph," this is an Australian newspaper. With all the things going on in the world, here is their lead. "You Beauty. Our Jennifer is Miss Universe," an Australian. Now, here is what I noticed. You're going to take this wrong. Remember when these beauty pageants, they used to wear like your grandmother's swimsuit in the competition? They don't anymore.

Back to the serious stuff now, "The Chattanooga Times Free Press." "U.N. Envoy Calls Bremer a Dictator. Brahimi says his authority was limited by U.S. officials." It's actually not quite as harsh as it sounds, though it is hard to be referred to a dictator in a nice way.

"The Atlanta Journal-Constitution" leads local. "Scores Better For Third-Graders," test scores. Also, this is a very good story that is in a number of front pages. "Women Cut Risk Of Lung Cancer." Guess why? They're not smoking as much. There you go.

"Cincinnati Enquirer," the third installment in the ongoing soap opera of the television series "Cops" there. "Take Three: Cops Invited Back to the City. Streicher" -- that's Tommy Streicher, the police chief -- "Tells Show, Let Suburbs Have Spotlight First." That's a good story for them. I like this story, too, by the way, "Catholics Try to Reconcile Faith and Political Choices." It's just something we need to think about how we're going to do. But I'm out of time here.

Really quick, Philadelphia Inquirer" is going to have a Smarty Jones story every day in the newspaper. It's a Philadelphia horse, or at least it's raced there. And it does again, including the pole positions. Do they call it pole positions? Yes, well, we don't have time to know.

The weather in Chicago tomorrow is "soft air." Hey, I don't write them. They do. The punctuation is correct, though.

We'll wrap it up in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: If you don't have a plan for tomorrow morning, this may help. Here is Bill Hemmer with a look at "AMERICAN MORNING."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: Aaron, thanks.

Tomorrow on "AMERICAN MORNING," the theme parks pushing the boundaries of adrenaline, more wild, more exciting rides. Has safety taken a back seat on the roller coaster? So far, three people have died this year. How bad are the risks? What you need to know to protect your family this summer tomorrow morning 7:00 a.m. Eastern time here on "AMERICAN MORNING." Hope to see you then -- Aaron.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: Thank you, Bill.

And that's it for tonight. Tomorrow, we've got a lot of cool things in play, but we'll also take a look -- well, not we'll also take a look, like this isn't cool -- but a Smarty Jones story of our own, how the horse and the city have come together. It's a nice little tale. Oh, that's so cute, too.

We'll see you tomorrow. Until then, good night for all of us.

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