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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown

32-year-old Rape Case Broken By DNA; Debbie Rowe Not Coached In Jackson Rebuttal Video; New Drug Herpecin Gives Hope To Breast Cancer Sufferers

Aired April 27, 2005 - 22:00   ET

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

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


AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Larry, think about this, if your job is catching criminals, it's fair to say that stopping the bad guys before he commits a crime is about as good as it gets. Bat a close second may be cracking a cold case. Those are the cases that often only the victim and the cops remember.
32 years ago there was a rape here in New York. 15 years later a series of rapes in Maryland. There were plenty of victims, lots of cops, but no one caught. Tonight, a man is in jail proclaiming his innocence, but facing evidence that a jury may well find persuasive: His DNA left on a victim before many of you were born.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): If police are right, Fletcher Worrell made his last mistake in the fall when he tried to buy a gun in Atlanta. It was a decision that may have ended a reign of terror and three decades of fear and pain.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This person put a hand over my mouth, threatened my child's life if I screamed again. I was aware that he had a weapon. I saw the weapon.

BROWN: She was raped more than 15 years ago, in Maryland. And she was not the first or the last.

DOUGLAS GANSLER, STATE ATTY, MONTGOMERY COUNTY: Every night when they went to bed, they didn't know whether a stranger was going to come in their home in the evening. Montgomery County, Maryland, is an area with almost 1 million people and a very, very low crime rate. And the event of stranger on stranger rape, particularly of the serial variety, was very rare indeed.

BROWN: A background check on Worrell in Georgia found an outstanding warrant from New York. That, too, was a rape three decades ago. The evidence preserved and tested this week.

ROBERT MORGENTHAU, DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW YORK CITY: That underwear, now 32 years old, was submitted to the forensic biology laboratory of the office of the chief medical examiner in New York for DNA testing.

BROWN: The New York district attorney says the DNA in the underwear is a match for Worrell. And that's just the beginning. New Jersey has cases, Maryland has suspicions about 16 rapes at least. When all the testing is done, dozens of rapes may be solved and one rapist may finally face justice.

MORGENTHAU: And it will send a chill through a lot of defendants to know that after 32 years you can still test for DNA. And, of course, it was corroborated. We independently got a swab and that confirmed his DNA matched the DNA in the underwear.

BROWN: This has been a real life cold case pursued by real life cops who had never come close but who had never given up either.

LT. PHILLIP RAUM, MONTGOMERY COUNTY POLICE: The one thing we never lost track of was the fact that we had some real innocent victims out there that did not deserve what happened to them. And that was always a motivation for me.

BROWN: A lot changes in 30 years. People change. Maybe the suspect has changed, too. Maybe he's innocent. His lawyer says he is. What hasn't changed, though, is the memory and the fear, though maybe now it will.

GANSLER: And it gives us great solace as prosecutors in the law enforcement community, but particularly the victims. Victims who thought these cases would remain, unsolved forever, are now being solved each and every day throughout the country.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The anniversary of my rape is two days away. And this time of year, this memory always comes back to the surface. And I'm glad this year it's going to be a good memory. And from this spring forward, it will be a good memory.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: On now to another unsolved crime that has long stumped investigators, a crime that's still unfolding in front of their eyes somewhere in cyberspace. Hundreds of photographs of a young girl being sexually abused document the crime. But who she is and where she is remain a mystery.

Leads are scarce. Years have gone by. And now investigators are hoping the picture of another young girl can provide the break they need.

Reporting the story for us tonight, CNN's David Mattingly.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DAVID MATTINGLY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Her face remains hidden to the public, but she is well known to child porn investigators around the world who are desperately trying to find her in ways they've never dared before.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We are releasing the photograph of the material witness in hope that if a citizen can identify her, it will greatly increase the chances of successfully identifying the perpetrator and recovering the victim.

MATTINGLY: Orlando police now take the extraordinary step of going public with a child they believe is a material witness in the case. About 9-years-old in this picture when it was taken a couple of years ago, investigators have no evidence she is a victim or witnessed any acts of abuse, but they believe she is sitting on the same couch, in the same room where this highly sought after girl was photographed being sexually abused.

A tip line has been set up in Central Florida to take calls from anywhere. 1-866-635-HELP. Find the girl on the couch, investigators hope, and they will find their victim.

DET. SGT. PAUL GILLESPIE, TORONTO POLICE: I'm confident that the victim perhaps knows this person and this witness might be able to help us out with that.

MATTINGLY: On the trail of this case for years, Paul Gillespie of the Toronto Police Child Exploitation Unit has been hampered, he says, by secrecy. It has been the rule in law enforcement to never reveal the faces of child pornography victims out of fear that it could place the child in danger from the abuser. But according to Gillespie, it's a rule, he says, that needs to be changed.

GILLESPIE: I think we have to take into account that we have to start taking, perhaps, a little more aggressive measures to get in and break this cycle.

MATTINGLY: Using computers earlier this year, Toronto detectives removed the victim girl from her own pictures and re-created the rooms behind her. Pictures they could then show to the public.

And it paid off, someone recognized a bed spread from an Orlando resort. It was an unheard of break, but the hotel records with thousands of names didn't take them very far.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think those records are going to prove valuable from an historical standpoint, but at this point, we have no idea who we're looking for. So one name means nothing more than the next at this point.

MATTINGLY: Investigators believe this potential witness photograph is their last, best hope. Years spent scouring more than 200 photographs of the unknown victim have yielded few usable clues. If this girl's photograph doesn't help find their victim, more extreme measure, they say, may be taken.

(on camera): How close are you to releasing this girl's picture?

GILLESPIE: Oh, that's always going to be an option to be quite honest with you.

MATTINGLY: If that comes to pass, it would be a landmark step in the fight against child pornography. But for now, investigators in two countries wait, hoping the next phone call brings the break they've been looking for.

David Mattingly, CNN, Orlando, Florida.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Now a central figure not just in al Qaeda, but also in the fight against al Qaeda: Ahmed Rassam. He's been in federal custody since 1999, the end of the year, the so-called Millennium Bomber. For a good portion of that time, he has been talking to prosecutors and the FBI.

Because he may yet have more to say, and may need a little extra incentive for saying it, a federal judge in Seattle today put off sentencing at least until July.

Mr. Rassam was caught trying to enter the country from Western Washington with a car load of explosives and a plan to set them off at Los Angeles International Airport. In a moment, a bit of what he's been telling the feds. First, though, the fed who caught him. Here's CNN's Rusty Dornin.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Hello there. Where do you folks live?

RUSTY DORNIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Every day, every car met with the same question, the same sweet smile. On December 14, 1999 began just like that for customs agent Diana Dean -- just another car on another day.

The ferry had just arrived in Port Angeles, Washington. This car was the last off the boat. The driver picked Dean's line. She was the only woman on duty that day.

He said his name was Benni Norris from Montreal headed to Seattle on business. Dean vividly remembers her reaction.

(on camera): What made you so suspicious about him?

DIANA DEAN, U.S. CUSTOMS AGENT (RET): The answers he gave me -- or the answers he didn't give me to my questions. His itinerary didn't make any sense to me. And I'd only asked him a couple questions when he started getting very, very nervous.

DORNIN (voice-over): She asked him to fill out a customs declaration and told him he would have to do a secondary inspection. Other officers joined her and they opened the trunk.

(on camera): When you saw the stuff in his trunk, did you have any idea that you were looking at an act of terrorism?

DEAN: No. Absolutely no idea at all. All that we -- we thought it was probably drugs of some kind. It was bags of white powder.

And at that particular point really all we saw was the bags of white powder, because we had tunnel vision for a few minutes. And then we saw the timers and the nitroglycerin.

DORNIN (voice-over): 125 pounds of explosives, enough to kill or injure hundreds of innocent people. They later learned his target was busy, crowded Los Angeles airport.

The terrorist now known as Ahmed Rassam ran but was caught a short time later.

DEAN: I hate to teen think of what might have happened if we hadn't become suspicious. Because then he would have been on his way down the road.

DORNIN: Credited with preventing a potential tragedy, in January, she and another inspector were honored. An anti-terrorism award was named after them. They were heroes.

But Dean brushes off the hero moniker and said she just followed her instincts and her training.

DEAN: He looked like he wasn't telling the truth. We had no idea that we would find a bomb. And we just stopped a person that looked suspicious.

DORNIN: Now retired a grandmother and living in North Dakota, Dean came back for what she called the final chapter: the sentencing of Ahmed Rassam.

Now that the chapter has been continued, she says she'll be back again.

Rusty Dornin, CNN, Seattle, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: And there are chapters to be written, as well, on Mr. Rassam. That's the hope over the next three months at least. Josh Meyer has been reporting this end of the story for the "Los Angeles Times," where he writes about terrorism, and we spoke with him a short time ago.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Josh, do we know -- do we have clues, suspicions -- as to why this sentencing was postponed?

JOSH MEYER, LOS ANGELES TIMES STAFF WRITER: Well, I think the judge, after hearing arguments for three-and-a-half hours from one side and the other, decided that nothing can really be lost by delaying it by three months. He wants to give Rassam a chance to really think about what he's doing and consider participating more in the investigations and cooperating more, especially against -- in the prosecutions of two al Qaeda associates of his who are coming to the United States for trial.

BROWN: Nobody disputes that he has been talking. The question, I guess, came down to -- at some point he stopped talking, has been less cooperative. What do we know about why or what do we think about why?

MEYER: Well, it depends on who you ask. If you ask the FBI and the prosecutors, he's a disingenuous terrorist who decided to try to work the system and get a better deal for himself, and then once he got that, then he would stop talking.

The pro -- I'm sorry, the defense side of it has an entirely different story. They say that the FBI just really squeezed him too much, and forced him to talk too much -- kept him in solitary confinement -- and reneged on his deal to lower his sentence and that Rassam feels slighted by that and feels there's no hope in continuing that effort and he's just, basically, refused to play along with it. So, the judge is trying to see through that and see what the real story is.

BROWN: Maybe we should have started here, but, his importance in all this -- in our understanding of al Qaeda, in our understanding of what we now call the war on terror -- because he predates all of that in many respects.

MEYER: Right.

BROWN: His importance is, what?

MEYER: Well, you know, I just read many, many court documents in this -- after four years of them not saying anything about the case at all, they've now, you know, sort of released a flurry of documents. His importance is that he sort of shows that, even in the camps in Afghanistan, there's no such thing as al Qaeda central. It was basically an agglomeration, as it were, of smaller terrorism groups. His was a group of north African group of Algerians based in Europe, mostly, who united under the banner of al Qaeda. So, he sort of can show how it's smaller groups all put together into one larger umbrella of al Qaeda.

BROWN: And, in specific cases, he was helpful, at least, in some, including the Richard Reid (ph) case. Is that right?

BROWN: Absolutely right. He's sort of helpful in what they call trade-crafted terrorism. He went through the camps for nine months, in three separate camps they're now saying. We had thought it was two. So, he's told the authorities, on many occasions, how they construct their explosives, how they engage in guerrilla warfare, conduct assassinations, do chemical bombs.

In the Reid case, he showed authorities how they can make paper explosives and detonators that you can sneak aboard an aircraft like Reid did and then detonate them, and apparently he saved the lives, or could have, of several FBI agents who were tinkering with Reid's sneakers which contained those explosives and they didn't know it.

BROWN: He's -- would you describe him as low-level, midlevel? He's certainly not Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (ph)?

MEYER: No, he's a soldier, actually. Well, he rose in prominence in the Canadian -- in the Montreal cell of this Algerian group. But in the beginning he was what the FBI calls a mope. He was just a low level functionary who, like many, other people, went to Afghanistan. They saw some talent there, so they promoted him from one of the general camps to a bigger camp, a more senior camp, and then from then on he met with Abu Zubaydah (ph) who is one of the senior al Qaeda people, and Zubaydah basically gave him orders to go back to Canada, set up a cell and attack the United States.

BROWN: Let me ask you one, last -- one of those horrible questions. If you actually did get a chance to sit down and talk to him -- you've written a lot about him, you've spent a lot of time thinking about him -- what do you want to know from him?

MEYER: Oh, that is a good question. I'd ask him why he -- I mean, I think he's articulated why he did it. He thought that he -- he hated America, wanted to get back at them, and I wonder if he really is serious about turning around and rehabilitating himself. I mean, there's some very interesting arguments by the defense as to why he did that. He's very proud and he's now trying to regain his sense of pride and sense of self by cooperating. I would ask him, you know, why are you all of a sudden deciding to cooperate -- or excuse me, why did you decide to cooperate when you did four years ago.

BROWN: All right, Josh, you've done nice work on this. We appreciate your time tonight. We know you've been under deadline. Thank you.

MEYER: Thanks, Aaron.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Josh Meyer writes about terrorism for the "Los Angeles Times."

Coming up, a potential breakthrough in treating breast cancer. First, at a quarter past the hour, "On the Money" tonight, Erica. Erica Hill joins us from Atlanta.

ERICA HILL, HEADLINES NEWS: Hi, Aaron. Good to see you, and good evening, everyone.

A setback tonight for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, his colleagues voting overwhelmingly to rescind a controversial ethics rule. That rule made it tougher to investigate alleged wrong-doings. Many Democrats and a number of Republicans had complained the rule was put in place specifically to protect Congressman DeLay.

Michael Jackson's ex-wife Debbie Rowe testified today in the singer's molestation trial. Rowe was married to Jackson from '96 to '99. She's the mother of two of his children. Today Rowe said she never shared a home with the singer, and also said Jackson asked her to make a video to rebut a damaging TV expose of his life.

The president briefly took shelter today in a bunker beneath the White House. Radar had shown some kind of aircraft inside the White House no-fly zone. It turned out to be a false alarm and the president quickly returned to the Oval Office.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld urged Congress to approve more money quickly so the army could keep operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rumsfeld says the army has already stretched every dollar to keep operations going through May when the money will run out.

In Tel Aviv, Israel, history in the making: tonight Russian President Vladimir Putin became the first Kremlin leader to visit the Jewish state. During the Cold War, Israel was a bitter enemy of Moscow, but the relationship has improved since the fall of the Soviet Union.

And the world's biggest airliner struts its stuff in a maiden flight. The Airbus A-380 made a four-hour flight today in southwestern France. The double decker is designed to hold 555 passengers in its basic configuration, but can actually accommodate up to 800. This is Europe's answer to the U.S.-built Boeing 787. Now, Aaron, they just need a few more airports to agree to build the runways to accommodate it.

BROWN: A lot of middle seats, if you think about it.

HILL: Yes, a few too many for my liking.

BROWN: Yep, pretty much so. Thank you Erica, we'll see you in half an hour.

More to come in the hour ahead, starting with a rare commodity for people with cancer: honest to goodness hope.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I had only been married for about a year and a half, and I felt like my world was falling down around me.

BROWN: After facing the kind of cancer that comes back and kills, she's cancer free today and she's not the only one, thanks to what could be a true breakthrough.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Targeted therapies, which we've talked a lot about for the last couple of years, are really coming to fruition.

BROWN: Also tonight, making buildings safe from terrorist attack, without turning them into armed fortresses.

And, going back to the future by retracing a pioneering run up north a ways.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I like cold. I like to be cold. Don't get me confused there. But I love the cold. I love the arctic. I love the light.

BROWN: Down south, there's gold in them thar dogs. Planet Dog is on the rise, and so are we, because this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: In the war against cancer, the goal of late is to find stealth drugs that zero in on specific targets. The breast cancer drug Herceptin is one such drug. It's already used to treat women with an especially aggressive type of breast cancer whose cancer has spread. Now two trials shows it works in the early stages of that same aggressive cancer form. The evidence was so strong, the trials ended early.

Here's medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): She found the lump herself one morning.

ELIZABETH RUSSO, HERCEPTIN PATIENT: I was petrified.

COHEN: Then her doctor confirmed the worst.

RUSSO: I had only been married for about a year and a half. And I felt like my world was falling down around me. You know, the first question that goes through your head is, am I going to die? And that's really what I was thinking at the time. It was extremely frightening.

COHEN: At age 29, Elizabeth Russo had breast cancer, and there was more. Doctors told her she had a particular kind that grew quickly and was more likely to come back. This happens to one out of every four patients. But there was a twist. Because she had this particular type of tumor, she was a candidate for a study on a drug called Herceptin. Doctors knew it worked when the cancer had spread to other parts of the body, but they weren't sure if it could help women like Elizabeth who were at the early stages. At first, she wasn't sure what to do because the drug, in a small number of women, had caused heart failure.

RUSSO: There was a little bit of fear there, but obviously, in my situation, the chances absolutely outweighed the frighteningness of the whole situation. I mean, I had to take the risk because there was still the chance that I could die.

COHEN: She took Herceptin along with chemotherapy and radiation, and a year after finding that lump, she's cancer free. In the studies at the National Cancer Institute, when women did not take Herceptin, 30 percent of them had the cancer come back. When they did take Herceptin, only 15 percent had the cancer come back. It cut the recurrence rate in half. An extraordinary impact, experts say, meaning this drug is one of the most promising in a new generation of cancer treatments. Unlike chemotherapy or radiation which attack healthy and unhealthy tissue, medicines like Herceptin are designed to attack only the specific protein that causes problems.

DR. DAVID JOHNSON, VANDERBILT CANCER INSTITUTION: Targeted therapies which we've talked a lot about for the last couple of years, are really coming to fruition.

COHEN: Now Elizabeth Russo once afraid she would die, is alive for the big moments like her godson's christening last month. The cancer could come back, but now it seems that's less likely. Elizabeth Cohen, CNN reporting.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Doctors can seldom explain why one woman gets breast cancer and another does not. No one knows exactly what causes the disease in the first place. A recent study out in California however, gives women and their loved ones who smoke some reason for concern.

Here's CNN's Thelma Gutierrez.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Hey, fish.

THELMA GUTIERREZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Pat Grannis never smoked a cigarette in her life, but all the smoke she breathed might have come back to haunt her.

PAT GRANNIS, BREAST CANCER SURVIVOR: Whenever you hear the word cancer, it likea death sentence, so it's really horribly frightening.

GUTIERREZ: Frightening because Pat was diagnosed with breast cancer.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's the size of the tumor.

GUTIERREZ: That discovery threw pat's life into a tailspin.

PAT GRANNIES: When you're alone someplace or at night, you wake up in the middle of the night, you think about, you know, your body has really turned against you. What could be happening? If this happened to me, what else could be happening. What else could go wrong?

GUTIERREZ: According to a recent report by a California state environmental advisory group, secondhand smoke may be linked to breast cancer. For Pat, perhaps the most painful realization is that her exposure to secondhand smoke came from the people she loved the most.

PAT GRANNIS: My dad was really the only one who smoked. And you know, he smoked all his life that I remember, anyway. And he died of emphysema. He was about 77. I grew up with a smoking father and went to a smoking husband. So there was smoke in my life for all those years.

GUTIERREZ: All those years, more than 30 that Pat breathed in smoke. First from her father...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They do a beautiful job on the garden.

GUTIERREZ: ... then her husband Fred.

FRED GRANNIS, HUSBAND: I feel very bad that I didn't have better judgment at that time to not smoke.

GUTIERREZ: Pat's husband is a surgeon, a lung cancer specialist who began to smoke at the age of 10.

FRED GRANNIS: Both of my parents smoked. There were always packs of Camels open around the house.

GUTIERREZ: For years he was smoking a pack a day around his wife and four children, two of whom have asthma.

FRED GRANNIS: I would obviously like to think that the study wasn't accurate, and that would let me off the hook. But I think that after reading the study carefully, the evidence that's presented in this study is very compelling.

PAT GRANNIS: He has quite bad asthma.

GUTIERREZ: Grannis stopped smoking years ago but says he'll always regret it.

FRED GRANNIS: I have worries about it, both whether I contributed to my wife's breast cancer and more that I have four children that I also exposed to tobacco smoke when I was younger and stupider and addicted to nicotine.

PAT GRANNIS: There's no reason for any feeling of guilt or anything. I mean, we didn't know about it. So I mean, we were just doing in those days what you did in the '50s and '60s.

GUTIERREZ: Pat's doctor says it's too early to make the connection between breast cancer and secondhand smoke.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I feel badly if we're now even blaming somebody else or yourself for remaining in this situation or blaming somebody else for having placed you in that situation.

GUTIERREZ: Pat went through radiation treatment and is cancer free for now.

PAT GRANNIS: If there's any risk, any risk at all that secondhand smoke is causing breast cancer, it's a cigarette? What's the point? It's only a cigarette.

GUTIERREZ: As a doctor husband and father, Fred believes he learned the hard way. And hopes that others will stop smoking in front of families.

Thelma Gutierrez, Los Angeles.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: In a moment, can a building keep you safe from terrorism and also be beautiful, even memorable? It's a question being asked and answered all across the country.

And later tonight, they were miles away from the finish and moments away from danger. They were also about to make history. From the South Pole to North and around the world, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: It hasn't been easy building a new skyscraper on the site of the World Trade Center, not even on paper. Another round of design changes for the Freedom Tower got under way this week to address concerns about security, which immediately raised another concern: reconciling place and space and beauty and cost with something else. It is a conversation that began, not here in New York City, but elsewhere, and not after 9/11, before.

Reporting tonight from Oklahoma City, here's CNN's Candy Crowley.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CANDY CROWLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: From the chairs that memorialized those who died here, you can see what was built for the living.

CAROL ROSS BARNEY, ARCHITECT: From the very beginning, this was a commitment building. It meant that things weren't -- they'll change, but they'll change for the better, that they were going to be back in Oklahoma City...

CROWLEY: When Carol Ross-Barney started out as an architect, security was door locks. When she won the contract to design the new federal building in Oklahoma City, she faced the raw emotions of a deeply wounded city and new challenges to build buildings against the threat of the unknowable: secure, but open, a friendly fortress.

ED FEINER, CHIEF ARCHITECT: The goal was, that we are a brave society, that we stand by our principles of freedom and access. This is democracy and these buildings must be open to their owners, who are the American people.

CROWLEY: The Oklahoma City bombing left a legacy of new regulations for all federal buildings coast to coast: setbacks at least 20, preferably 100 feet from the street; barriers to keep vehicles from ramming the building; shatter proof windows; a building that could withstand a major hit. An estimated 80 percent of those killed in Oklahoma City survived the blast. They died when the building collapsed.

ROSS BARNEY: They wanted to be able to design buildings where you would be able to remove one major structural member without causing the building to fail. So, that's pretty hard to do. The way to think about it is trying to design a three-legged table.

CROWLEY: She wanted to build for and into the future. She wanted a structure about the totality of Oklahoma, not a single moment.

ROSS BARNEY: I thought that if I concentrated only on the bombing or only on a piece of it, that it wouldn't be as lasting. It wouldn't be as complete.

CROWLEY: She wanted -- Oklahoma City wanted -- a living, breathing, working office building that incorporated the lessons of tragedy without being about tragedy.

When you were designing this building, did you say to yourself, you know what I'd love to do, but I can't do that because that would...

ROSS BARNEY: No, actually, we did the opposite. We'd say, you know what we'd love to do? How can we do that and still meet the security requirements?

CROWLEY: On three sides of the building, the reinforced walls are unforgiving concrete made with Oklahoma rocks.

ROSS BARNEY: The stone is integral in the wall. It is part of the wall. It is not applied to the wall.

CROWLEY: So, it doesn't come shooting out, essentially.

ROSS BARNEY: Right. Yes. So, it is not fastened to the wall, it is part of the wall.

CROWLEY: Part of the court yard is a babbling stream filled with boulders from a nearby buffalo ranch.

ROSS BARNEY: You can see our eating area out there. That's inside security. So, in a way, this is a modern moat, but it's beautiful.

CROWLEY: And since aluminum sun screens can turn into shrapnel, these are made of awning-like fabric which would shred, and everywhere, there is light, windows, glass.

ROSS BARNEY: You'd think that you couldn't do a building with this much glass, but you can. It's very special glass. All the injuries happened from flying glass, from the blast impact, so this window is designed so that it will break like your car window, rather than traditional glass, into little pieces.

CROWLEY: From the southeast corner of the new federal building, you can see the monument grounds where the Murrah building once stood. The offices belonged to Housing and Urban Development, the department that lost the most that day in April of 1995.

ROSS BARNEY: The second floor space here is HUD, and they were just -- oh, my God, they had a committee of survivors that were just terrified about coming back here. That's their training room, and they put it there. And so we said, well, aren't you worried about having training and having to look at the memorial? They said, oh yes, we need blinds. They never close the blinds either. So, I think that's good. If a building can heal -- help heal people, that's good.

CROWLEY: Candy Crowley, CNN, Oklahoma city.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: There's often no better way of getting someone to do something than telling them it can't be done. There are, of course, exceptions, having mostly to do with cleaning rooms and mowing lawns. And there are variations. In this case, redoing the impossible because someone said it could not possibly have been done the first time around.

Here's CNN's Matthew Chance.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MATTHEW CHANCE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Thirty-seven grueling days across the Arctic pack ice, pulled by dogs and determination, to reach the North Pole. On a shaky satellite link, explorer Matty McNair told me the team feels very much on top of the world.

MATTY MCNAIR, EXPLORER: We're very excited. We still are very disbelieving that we're actually here. We don't actually have to get up and go for another 24 hours, nonstop. It's just -- it's like, we're here. We made it! It's hard to believe.

CHANCE: It was American explorer, Robert E. Peary (ph) who first reached the North Pole in 1909. His claim, to have done it in just 37 days, was debated for years. Matty McNair's expedition took the same route and used similar antiquated equipment to prove the U.S. naval officer could have done what he said he had.

MCNAIR: My read on the man was, he didn't have a lot of charisma. He wasn't somebody that people wanted to believe in, and therefore, it was easy to be critical of him. And I think they've been very unfair to him, and I think people that have been against him have no experience with dogs or the Arctic. And so yes, it's been great to follow his route, and say, yes, it is possible.

CHANCE: The team flew to Cape Columbia, where Peary's 1909 expedition started out, traveling 420 nautical miles to the pole. Along the way, she says, they rediscovered an old camp used by the Peary team.

MCNAIR: We found parts of old sled runners and lots of wire and parts of sleds and boards, and metal pans, probably a fuel tent. So that was really exciting, to find that stuff. We did that by taking a photograph and walking until the hills lined up with the photograph and said, oh, this must be where he had his camp, right here.

CHANCE: And, for McNair, herself a 53-year-old grandmother, it was another adventure in the kind of hostile climate she says she loves the most.

MCNAIR: I like cold. I don't like to be cold. Don't get me confused there. But I love the cold. I love the arctic. I love the light. It's like being on a different planet. There's a very softness to the light.

CHANCE: A softness in an extreme place visited by none but a determined few.

Matthew Chance, CNN, London.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Still to come tonight, that moment when it seemed there was nothing sacred anymore, a moment in Berlin. How things have changed since then.

And, before the rooster, tonight, comes the dog: a business built on chew toys, and it is on the rise. From the statehouse to the -- well, doghouse, and all around the world, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: In business, a dog of an idea is rarely a good idea -- rarely but not never. Not when you consider the billions we spend on our pets every year. Which brings us to Planet Dog, a company on the rise.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Come on.

ALEX FISHER, CO-FOUNDER, PLANET DOG: This year, we expect that the pet industry will be close to $34 billion large.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Get that. Good dog.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Seer was one of two dogs that inspired us to start Planet Dog seven years ago.

FISHER: We wanted to sort of encapsulate what we thought was special about Ben & Jerry's and Patagonia, pick it up and drop it right in the pet industry.

Here we are at the Planet Dog warehouse, we call it the doghouse. Come on in.

Our most popular product is a version of the orby ball. This ball happens to glow in the dark. They also come in a whole bunch of different colors and sizes. Now with the same material, we're making bones, all types of sizes. We even have them for the real little guys.

This is the compound year using to make our famous orby balls. The great thing about this material is that it can be recycled very easily. So, with any leftovers that we use, we make this product, we regrind it, we shoot it and make another ball from it.

What makes these so special is the durability factor. These things are designed with dog's teeth in mind. Not only are they really durable, they float, they bounce, they're peppermint scented and they can glow in the dark. And dogs just love them.

Now, go get them guys!

STEW MALONEY, CO-FOUNDER, PLANET DOG: It's great to have a dog on hand. When you get a prototype, give it to your dog or a series of dogs and say, let's see what you can do with that. FISHER: This is product testing at its best. Good dog, good dog.

MALONEY: Here we are at our first planet dog company store what did you see when you were there

How old? I think you want a bigger one.

Our company store is in Portland, Maine. It's intended to be a place were we can speak directly to the consumer, get a great idea of how they perceive our product.

This is what makes a happy dog.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Coming up, putting new dollars in your pocket. Sounds like a plan to me. We'll take a break first. This is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Coming up, pictures from a moment that changed our world. First, though, the news of the moment. At about a quarter to the hour, time for other headlines of the day. Erica Hill again in Atlanta -- Erica.

HILL: Hi again, Aaron.

We start off with some news just coming in to us a few hours ago. The president will hold a primetime news conference tomorrow night, we'll learning. And CNN will, of course, cover it as it happens. It starts at 8:30 p.m. Eastern time.

Mr. Bush is expected to talk Social Security and energy policy. Today he called for more research into hydrogen fuels, building refineries on abandoned military bases and a return to nuclear power. Our dependence on foreign energy, he said, is like a foreign tax on the American people.

A setback tonight for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, his colleagues voted overwhelmingly to rescind a controversial ethics rule. Now that rule made it tougher to investigate alleged wrongdoing. Many Democrats, and a number of Republicans, have complained the rule was put in place to specifically protect Congressman DeLay.

On the security watch, all international cargo coming into the Port of Oakland, California, will now be scanned for radioactive material. The goal here, to prevent a bomb from getting into the U.S. by next year. Customs officials hope more than 300 seaports in the U.S. will be using the scanners.

And finally, we're in for a dollar -- another dollar of the round variety. The government may soon give dollar coins the old try again. The House today approving a plan for presidential dollars here. The idea -- issue one coin for each president. A popular idea, because dollar coins only cost a nickel to produce. So the government makes a mint on every one. Pun intended -- Aaron.

BROWN: The lowest form of humor, Erica.

HILL: Indeed, it is.

BROWN: Thank you very much.

The Berlin Wall was a symbol of all that stood between the East and the West during the height of the Cold War. As part of CNN's anniversary series "Then & Now," tonight we look back at an East German who helped bring down the wall and see where he is today.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: His video of Communist East Germany crumbling, hopelessly polluted, restless, helped topple the Berlin Wall. Amateur video journalist Eric Radomski spirited his tapes to western TV which beamed them back into Eastern Germany.

When the wall opens November 9, 1989, 27-year-old Radomski was among the first to walk to the west. He photographed checkpoint Charlie, a sullen, heavily fortified flash point at the end of the Cold War suddenly overrun with euphoria.

Our pictures on TV were a reason people took to the streets, he says. And they changed this land.

15 years later, unemployment hovers around 20 percent in the east. Capitalism isn't so easy, he says. I try to look at it realistically, that you have to help yourself to find your place.

Radomski found his, designing wall paper for homes, bars, film sets. After helping to tear down one wall, he's covering others. His life now as free as his spirit.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Throughout the year, we mark 25 years of broadcasting at CNN. We'll continue to look back at yesterday's newsmakers and where they are today. That was a pretty cool one, too wasn't it?

Morning papers when we come back. And a reminder tomorrow at 8:30 Eastern time, the president's prime time news conference coverage here on CNN.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Okey-doke. Time to check morning papers from around the country and around the world.

The "International Herald Tribune" published by "The New York Times" in Paris. "First Flight is Perfect for Largest Passenger Jet," and then a picture of the Airbus A380. This is a plane that can hold up to 800 people. Think about what a pleasurable experience that's going to be. OK, 800 people. "Stars and Stripes" -- listen, it doesn't mean you shouldn't go out and buy one of those planes. If you like the idea, go buy one, OK.

"Militants Gun Down Iraqi Lawmaker at Home. Woman is first in parliament -- is first parliament member targeted since the election. Also, I don't know how well you can make this picture out. Headline is "Enter Sandstorm, a dust storm moves across the western desert of Iraq on Tuesday." The storm spawned near the Syrian border leaving a heavy sheet of dust in its wake. Well, yes, I guess it would, wouldn't it?

That's "Stars and Stripes," so is this. How many editions do they put out? Anyway I like the story. "Dragging Down a Career, Heavy smoking military recruits are much more likely to wash out." While recruiting --"Will recruiting practices change?" Everybody it seems like when I was in the service smoked. It may have had to do with the fact that they'd charged you 10 cents a pack for cigarettes.

"The Washington Times," two that we'll mention. "House GOP" -- we'll probably a lot of good stories but two that were mentioned. "House GOP Backs off Ethics Rules," folded like a cheap suitcase on that one. "Hastert/DeLay support move to end impasse."

And then down here, this is a good story, "Life Worse for Iraqi Women, intimidation more common." I guarantee you, if this story had appeared in "The New York Times," the right wing blogs would go nuts on the "Times." But it's in the "Washington Times," so they'll probably leave it alone. The -- and it's a good story and an important story. I'll move on now.

"The Rocky Mountain News," man, this is an ugly little moment. "They are Antichrist. Senator says he regrets using term to describe founder Dobson," that's James Dobson "and his efforts." Yes, that was intemperate.

How are we doing on time? We out of time? Weather tomorrow in Chicago, anemic. We'll wrap it up quickly in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: The president holds a prime time news conference. Our coverage begins at 8:00, the president starts at 8:30. And we'll talk about what he talked about afterwards for a while too. Good to have you with us tonight. 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 April 27, 2005 - 22:00   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Larry, think about this, if your job is catching criminals, it's fair to say that stopping the bad guys before he commits a crime is about as good as it gets. Bat a close second may be cracking a cold case. Those are the cases that often only the victim and the cops remember.
32 years ago there was a rape here in New York. 15 years later a series of rapes in Maryland. There were plenty of victims, lots of cops, but no one caught. Tonight, a man is in jail proclaiming his innocence, but facing evidence that a jury may well find persuasive: His DNA left on a victim before many of you were born.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): If police are right, Fletcher Worrell made his last mistake in the fall when he tried to buy a gun in Atlanta. It was a decision that may have ended a reign of terror and three decades of fear and pain.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This person put a hand over my mouth, threatened my child's life if I screamed again. I was aware that he had a weapon. I saw the weapon.

BROWN: She was raped more than 15 years ago, in Maryland. And she was not the first or the last.

DOUGLAS GANSLER, STATE ATTY, MONTGOMERY COUNTY: Every night when they went to bed, they didn't know whether a stranger was going to come in their home in the evening. Montgomery County, Maryland, is an area with almost 1 million people and a very, very low crime rate. And the event of stranger on stranger rape, particularly of the serial variety, was very rare indeed.

BROWN: A background check on Worrell in Georgia found an outstanding warrant from New York. That, too, was a rape three decades ago. The evidence preserved and tested this week.

ROBERT MORGENTHAU, DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW YORK CITY: That underwear, now 32 years old, was submitted to the forensic biology laboratory of the office of the chief medical examiner in New York for DNA testing.

BROWN: The New York district attorney says the DNA in the underwear is a match for Worrell. And that's just the beginning. New Jersey has cases, Maryland has suspicions about 16 rapes at least. When all the testing is done, dozens of rapes may be solved and one rapist may finally face justice.

MORGENTHAU: And it will send a chill through a lot of defendants to know that after 32 years you can still test for DNA. And, of course, it was corroborated. We independently got a swab and that confirmed his DNA matched the DNA in the underwear.

BROWN: This has been a real life cold case pursued by real life cops who had never come close but who had never given up either.

LT. PHILLIP RAUM, MONTGOMERY COUNTY POLICE: The one thing we never lost track of was the fact that we had some real innocent victims out there that did not deserve what happened to them. And that was always a motivation for me.

BROWN: A lot changes in 30 years. People change. Maybe the suspect has changed, too. Maybe he's innocent. His lawyer says he is. What hasn't changed, though, is the memory and the fear, though maybe now it will.

GANSLER: And it gives us great solace as prosecutors in the law enforcement community, but particularly the victims. Victims who thought these cases would remain, unsolved forever, are now being solved each and every day throughout the country.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The anniversary of my rape is two days away. And this time of year, this memory always comes back to the surface. And I'm glad this year it's going to be a good memory. And from this spring forward, it will be a good memory.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: On now to another unsolved crime that has long stumped investigators, a crime that's still unfolding in front of their eyes somewhere in cyberspace. Hundreds of photographs of a young girl being sexually abused document the crime. But who she is and where she is remain a mystery.

Leads are scarce. Years have gone by. And now investigators are hoping the picture of another young girl can provide the break they need.

Reporting the story for us tonight, CNN's David Mattingly.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DAVID MATTINGLY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Her face remains hidden to the public, but she is well known to child porn investigators around the world who are desperately trying to find her in ways they've never dared before.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We are releasing the photograph of the material witness in hope that if a citizen can identify her, it will greatly increase the chances of successfully identifying the perpetrator and recovering the victim.

MATTINGLY: Orlando police now take the extraordinary step of going public with a child they believe is a material witness in the case. About 9-years-old in this picture when it was taken a couple of years ago, investigators have no evidence she is a victim or witnessed any acts of abuse, but they believe she is sitting on the same couch, in the same room where this highly sought after girl was photographed being sexually abused.

A tip line has been set up in Central Florida to take calls from anywhere. 1-866-635-HELP. Find the girl on the couch, investigators hope, and they will find their victim.

DET. SGT. PAUL GILLESPIE, TORONTO POLICE: I'm confident that the victim perhaps knows this person and this witness might be able to help us out with that.

MATTINGLY: On the trail of this case for years, Paul Gillespie of the Toronto Police Child Exploitation Unit has been hampered, he says, by secrecy. It has been the rule in law enforcement to never reveal the faces of child pornography victims out of fear that it could place the child in danger from the abuser. But according to Gillespie, it's a rule, he says, that needs to be changed.

GILLESPIE: I think we have to take into account that we have to start taking, perhaps, a little more aggressive measures to get in and break this cycle.

MATTINGLY: Using computers earlier this year, Toronto detectives removed the victim girl from her own pictures and re-created the rooms behind her. Pictures they could then show to the public.

And it paid off, someone recognized a bed spread from an Orlando resort. It was an unheard of break, but the hotel records with thousands of names didn't take them very far.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think those records are going to prove valuable from an historical standpoint, but at this point, we have no idea who we're looking for. So one name means nothing more than the next at this point.

MATTINGLY: Investigators believe this potential witness photograph is their last, best hope. Years spent scouring more than 200 photographs of the unknown victim have yielded few usable clues. If this girl's photograph doesn't help find their victim, more extreme measure, they say, may be taken.

(on camera): How close are you to releasing this girl's picture?

GILLESPIE: Oh, that's always going to be an option to be quite honest with you.

MATTINGLY: If that comes to pass, it would be a landmark step in the fight against child pornography. But for now, investigators in two countries wait, hoping the next phone call brings the break they've been looking for.

David Mattingly, CNN, Orlando, Florida.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Now a central figure not just in al Qaeda, but also in the fight against al Qaeda: Ahmed Rassam. He's been in federal custody since 1999, the end of the year, the so-called Millennium Bomber. For a good portion of that time, he has been talking to prosecutors and the FBI.

Because he may yet have more to say, and may need a little extra incentive for saying it, a federal judge in Seattle today put off sentencing at least until July.

Mr. Rassam was caught trying to enter the country from Western Washington with a car load of explosives and a plan to set them off at Los Angeles International Airport. In a moment, a bit of what he's been telling the feds. First, though, the fed who caught him. Here's CNN's Rusty Dornin.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Hello there. Where do you folks live?

RUSTY DORNIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Every day, every car met with the same question, the same sweet smile. On December 14, 1999 began just like that for customs agent Diana Dean -- just another car on another day.

The ferry had just arrived in Port Angeles, Washington. This car was the last off the boat. The driver picked Dean's line. She was the only woman on duty that day.

He said his name was Benni Norris from Montreal headed to Seattle on business. Dean vividly remembers her reaction.

(on camera): What made you so suspicious about him?

DIANA DEAN, U.S. CUSTOMS AGENT (RET): The answers he gave me -- or the answers he didn't give me to my questions. His itinerary didn't make any sense to me. And I'd only asked him a couple questions when he started getting very, very nervous.

DORNIN (voice-over): She asked him to fill out a customs declaration and told him he would have to do a secondary inspection. Other officers joined her and they opened the trunk.

(on camera): When you saw the stuff in his trunk, did you have any idea that you were looking at an act of terrorism?

DEAN: No. Absolutely no idea at all. All that we -- we thought it was probably drugs of some kind. It was bags of white powder.

And at that particular point really all we saw was the bags of white powder, because we had tunnel vision for a few minutes. And then we saw the timers and the nitroglycerin.

DORNIN (voice-over): 125 pounds of explosives, enough to kill or injure hundreds of innocent people. They later learned his target was busy, crowded Los Angeles airport.

The terrorist now known as Ahmed Rassam ran but was caught a short time later.

DEAN: I hate to teen think of what might have happened if we hadn't become suspicious. Because then he would have been on his way down the road.

DORNIN: Credited with preventing a potential tragedy, in January, she and another inspector were honored. An anti-terrorism award was named after them. They were heroes.

But Dean brushes off the hero moniker and said she just followed her instincts and her training.

DEAN: He looked like he wasn't telling the truth. We had no idea that we would find a bomb. And we just stopped a person that looked suspicious.

DORNIN: Now retired a grandmother and living in North Dakota, Dean came back for what she called the final chapter: the sentencing of Ahmed Rassam.

Now that the chapter has been continued, she says she'll be back again.

Rusty Dornin, CNN, Seattle, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: And there are chapters to be written, as well, on Mr. Rassam. That's the hope over the next three months at least. Josh Meyer has been reporting this end of the story for the "Los Angeles Times," where he writes about terrorism, and we spoke with him a short time ago.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Josh, do we know -- do we have clues, suspicions -- as to why this sentencing was postponed?

JOSH MEYER, LOS ANGELES TIMES STAFF WRITER: Well, I think the judge, after hearing arguments for three-and-a-half hours from one side and the other, decided that nothing can really be lost by delaying it by three months. He wants to give Rassam a chance to really think about what he's doing and consider participating more in the investigations and cooperating more, especially against -- in the prosecutions of two al Qaeda associates of his who are coming to the United States for trial.

BROWN: Nobody disputes that he has been talking. The question, I guess, came down to -- at some point he stopped talking, has been less cooperative. What do we know about why or what do we think about why?

MEYER: Well, it depends on who you ask. If you ask the FBI and the prosecutors, he's a disingenuous terrorist who decided to try to work the system and get a better deal for himself, and then once he got that, then he would stop talking.

The pro -- I'm sorry, the defense side of it has an entirely different story. They say that the FBI just really squeezed him too much, and forced him to talk too much -- kept him in solitary confinement -- and reneged on his deal to lower his sentence and that Rassam feels slighted by that and feels there's no hope in continuing that effort and he's just, basically, refused to play along with it. So, the judge is trying to see through that and see what the real story is.

BROWN: Maybe we should have started here, but, his importance in all this -- in our understanding of al Qaeda, in our understanding of what we now call the war on terror -- because he predates all of that in many respects.

MEYER: Right.

BROWN: His importance is, what?

MEYER: Well, you know, I just read many, many court documents in this -- after four years of them not saying anything about the case at all, they've now, you know, sort of released a flurry of documents. His importance is that he sort of shows that, even in the camps in Afghanistan, there's no such thing as al Qaeda central. It was basically an agglomeration, as it were, of smaller terrorism groups. His was a group of north African group of Algerians based in Europe, mostly, who united under the banner of al Qaeda. So, he sort of can show how it's smaller groups all put together into one larger umbrella of al Qaeda.

BROWN: And, in specific cases, he was helpful, at least, in some, including the Richard Reid (ph) case. Is that right?

BROWN: Absolutely right. He's sort of helpful in what they call trade-crafted terrorism. He went through the camps for nine months, in three separate camps they're now saying. We had thought it was two. So, he's told the authorities, on many occasions, how they construct their explosives, how they engage in guerrilla warfare, conduct assassinations, do chemical bombs.

In the Reid case, he showed authorities how they can make paper explosives and detonators that you can sneak aboard an aircraft like Reid did and then detonate them, and apparently he saved the lives, or could have, of several FBI agents who were tinkering with Reid's sneakers which contained those explosives and they didn't know it.

BROWN: He's -- would you describe him as low-level, midlevel? He's certainly not Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (ph)?

MEYER: No, he's a soldier, actually. Well, he rose in prominence in the Canadian -- in the Montreal cell of this Algerian group. But in the beginning he was what the FBI calls a mope. He was just a low level functionary who, like many, other people, went to Afghanistan. They saw some talent there, so they promoted him from one of the general camps to a bigger camp, a more senior camp, and then from then on he met with Abu Zubaydah (ph) who is one of the senior al Qaeda people, and Zubaydah basically gave him orders to go back to Canada, set up a cell and attack the United States.

BROWN: Let me ask you one, last -- one of those horrible questions. If you actually did get a chance to sit down and talk to him -- you've written a lot about him, you've spent a lot of time thinking about him -- what do you want to know from him?

MEYER: Oh, that is a good question. I'd ask him why he -- I mean, I think he's articulated why he did it. He thought that he -- he hated America, wanted to get back at them, and I wonder if he really is serious about turning around and rehabilitating himself. I mean, there's some very interesting arguments by the defense as to why he did that. He's very proud and he's now trying to regain his sense of pride and sense of self by cooperating. I would ask him, you know, why are you all of a sudden deciding to cooperate -- or excuse me, why did you decide to cooperate when you did four years ago.

BROWN: All right, Josh, you've done nice work on this. We appreciate your time tonight. We know you've been under deadline. Thank you.

MEYER: Thanks, Aaron.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Josh Meyer writes about terrorism for the "Los Angeles Times."

Coming up, a potential breakthrough in treating breast cancer. First, at a quarter past the hour, "On the Money" tonight, Erica. Erica Hill joins us from Atlanta.

ERICA HILL, HEADLINES NEWS: Hi, Aaron. Good to see you, and good evening, everyone.

A setback tonight for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, his colleagues voting overwhelmingly to rescind a controversial ethics rule. That rule made it tougher to investigate alleged wrong-doings. Many Democrats and a number of Republicans had complained the rule was put in place specifically to protect Congressman DeLay.

Michael Jackson's ex-wife Debbie Rowe testified today in the singer's molestation trial. Rowe was married to Jackson from '96 to '99. She's the mother of two of his children. Today Rowe said she never shared a home with the singer, and also said Jackson asked her to make a video to rebut a damaging TV expose of his life.

The president briefly took shelter today in a bunker beneath the White House. Radar had shown some kind of aircraft inside the White House no-fly zone. It turned out to be a false alarm and the president quickly returned to the Oval Office.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld urged Congress to approve more money quickly so the army could keep operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rumsfeld says the army has already stretched every dollar to keep operations going through May when the money will run out.

In Tel Aviv, Israel, history in the making: tonight Russian President Vladimir Putin became the first Kremlin leader to visit the Jewish state. During the Cold War, Israel was a bitter enemy of Moscow, but the relationship has improved since the fall of the Soviet Union.

And the world's biggest airliner struts its stuff in a maiden flight. The Airbus A-380 made a four-hour flight today in southwestern France. The double decker is designed to hold 555 passengers in its basic configuration, but can actually accommodate up to 800. This is Europe's answer to the U.S.-built Boeing 787. Now, Aaron, they just need a few more airports to agree to build the runways to accommodate it.

BROWN: A lot of middle seats, if you think about it.

HILL: Yes, a few too many for my liking.

BROWN: Yep, pretty much so. Thank you Erica, we'll see you in half an hour.

More to come in the hour ahead, starting with a rare commodity for people with cancer: honest to goodness hope.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I had only been married for about a year and a half, and I felt like my world was falling down around me.

BROWN: After facing the kind of cancer that comes back and kills, she's cancer free today and she's not the only one, thanks to what could be a true breakthrough.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Targeted therapies, which we've talked a lot about for the last couple of years, are really coming to fruition.

BROWN: Also tonight, making buildings safe from terrorist attack, without turning them into armed fortresses.

And, going back to the future by retracing a pioneering run up north a ways.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I like cold. I like to be cold. Don't get me confused there. But I love the cold. I love the arctic. I love the light.

BROWN: Down south, there's gold in them thar dogs. Planet Dog is on the rise, and so are we, because this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: In the war against cancer, the goal of late is to find stealth drugs that zero in on specific targets. The breast cancer drug Herceptin is one such drug. It's already used to treat women with an especially aggressive type of breast cancer whose cancer has spread. Now two trials shows it works in the early stages of that same aggressive cancer form. The evidence was so strong, the trials ended early.

Here's medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): She found the lump herself one morning.

ELIZABETH RUSSO, HERCEPTIN PATIENT: I was petrified.

COHEN: Then her doctor confirmed the worst.

RUSSO: I had only been married for about a year and a half. And I felt like my world was falling down around me. You know, the first question that goes through your head is, am I going to die? And that's really what I was thinking at the time. It was extremely frightening.

COHEN: At age 29, Elizabeth Russo had breast cancer, and there was more. Doctors told her she had a particular kind that grew quickly and was more likely to come back. This happens to one out of every four patients. But there was a twist. Because she had this particular type of tumor, she was a candidate for a study on a drug called Herceptin. Doctors knew it worked when the cancer had spread to other parts of the body, but they weren't sure if it could help women like Elizabeth who were at the early stages. At first, she wasn't sure what to do because the drug, in a small number of women, had caused heart failure.

RUSSO: There was a little bit of fear there, but obviously, in my situation, the chances absolutely outweighed the frighteningness of the whole situation. I mean, I had to take the risk because there was still the chance that I could die.

COHEN: She took Herceptin along with chemotherapy and radiation, and a year after finding that lump, she's cancer free. In the studies at the National Cancer Institute, when women did not take Herceptin, 30 percent of them had the cancer come back. When they did take Herceptin, only 15 percent had the cancer come back. It cut the recurrence rate in half. An extraordinary impact, experts say, meaning this drug is one of the most promising in a new generation of cancer treatments. Unlike chemotherapy or radiation which attack healthy and unhealthy tissue, medicines like Herceptin are designed to attack only the specific protein that causes problems.

DR. DAVID JOHNSON, VANDERBILT CANCER INSTITUTION: Targeted therapies which we've talked a lot about for the last couple of years, are really coming to fruition.

COHEN: Now Elizabeth Russo once afraid she would die, is alive for the big moments like her godson's christening last month. The cancer could come back, but now it seems that's less likely. Elizabeth Cohen, CNN reporting.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Doctors can seldom explain why one woman gets breast cancer and another does not. No one knows exactly what causes the disease in the first place. A recent study out in California however, gives women and their loved ones who smoke some reason for concern.

Here's CNN's Thelma Gutierrez.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Hey, fish.

THELMA GUTIERREZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Pat Grannis never smoked a cigarette in her life, but all the smoke she breathed might have come back to haunt her.

PAT GRANNIS, BREAST CANCER SURVIVOR: Whenever you hear the word cancer, it likea death sentence, so it's really horribly frightening.

GUTIERREZ: Frightening because Pat was diagnosed with breast cancer.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's the size of the tumor.

GUTIERREZ: That discovery threw pat's life into a tailspin.

PAT GRANNIES: When you're alone someplace or at night, you wake up in the middle of the night, you think about, you know, your body has really turned against you. What could be happening? If this happened to me, what else could be happening. What else could go wrong?

GUTIERREZ: According to a recent report by a California state environmental advisory group, secondhand smoke may be linked to breast cancer. For Pat, perhaps the most painful realization is that her exposure to secondhand smoke came from the people she loved the most.

PAT GRANNIS: My dad was really the only one who smoked. And you know, he smoked all his life that I remember, anyway. And he died of emphysema. He was about 77. I grew up with a smoking father and went to a smoking husband. So there was smoke in my life for all those years.

GUTIERREZ: All those years, more than 30 that Pat breathed in smoke. First from her father...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They do a beautiful job on the garden.

GUTIERREZ: ... then her husband Fred.

FRED GRANNIS, HUSBAND: I feel very bad that I didn't have better judgment at that time to not smoke.

GUTIERREZ: Pat's husband is a surgeon, a lung cancer specialist who began to smoke at the age of 10.

FRED GRANNIS: Both of my parents smoked. There were always packs of Camels open around the house.

GUTIERREZ: For years he was smoking a pack a day around his wife and four children, two of whom have asthma.

FRED GRANNIS: I would obviously like to think that the study wasn't accurate, and that would let me off the hook. But I think that after reading the study carefully, the evidence that's presented in this study is very compelling.

PAT GRANNIS: He has quite bad asthma.

GUTIERREZ: Grannis stopped smoking years ago but says he'll always regret it.

FRED GRANNIS: I have worries about it, both whether I contributed to my wife's breast cancer and more that I have four children that I also exposed to tobacco smoke when I was younger and stupider and addicted to nicotine.

PAT GRANNIS: There's no reason for any feeling of guilt or anything. I mean, we didn't know about it. So I mean, we were just doing in those days what you did in the '50s and '60s.

GUTIERREZ: Pat's doctor says it's too early to make the connection between breast cancer and secondhand smoke.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I feel badly if we're now even blaming somebody else or yourself for remaining in this situation or blaming somebody else for having placed you in that situation.

GUTIERREZ: Pat went through radiation treatment and is cancer free for now.

PAT GRANNIS: If there's any risk, any risk at all that secondhand smoke is causing breast cancer, it's a cigarette? What's the point? It's only a cigarette.

GUTIERREZ: As a doctor husband and father, Fred believes he learned the hard way. And hopes that others will stop smoking in front of families.

Thelma Gutierrez, Los Angeles.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: In a moment, can a building keep you safe from terrorism and also be beautiful, even memorable? It's a question being asked and answered all across the country.

And later tonight, they were miles away from the finish and moments away from danger. They were also about to make history. From the South Pole to North and around the world, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: It hasn't been easy building a new skyscraper on the site of the World Trade Center, not even on paper. Another round of design changes for the Freedom Tower got under way this week to address concerns about security, which immediately raised another concern: reconciling place and space and beauty and cost with something else. It is a conversation that began, not here in New York City, but elsewhere, and not after 9/11, before.

Reporting tonight from Oklahoma City, here's CNN's Candy Crowley.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CANDY CROWLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: From the chairs that memorialized those who died here, you can see what was built for the living.

CAROL ROSS BARNEY, ARCHITECT: From the very beginning, this was a commitment building. It meant that things weren't -- they'll change, but they'll change for the better, that they were going to be back in Oklahoma City...

CROWLEY: When Carol Ross-Barney started out as an architect, security was door locks. When she won the contract to design the new federal building in Oklahoma City, she faced the raw emotions of a deeply wounded city and new challenges to build buildings against the threat of the unknowable: secure, but open, a friendly fortress.

ED FEINER, CHIEF ARCHITECT: The goal was, that we are a brave society, that we stand by our principles of freedom and access. This is democracy and these buildings must be open to their owners, who are the American people.

CROWLEY: The Oklahoma City bombing left a legacy of new regulations for all federal buildings coast to coast: setbacks at least 20, preferably 100 feet from the street; barriers to keep vehicles from ramming the building; shatter proof windows; a building that could withstand a major hit. An estimated 80 percent of those killed in Oklahoma City survived the blast. They died when the building collapsed.

ROSS BARNEY: They wanted to be able to design buildings where you would be able to remove one major structural member without causing the building to fail. So, that's pretty hard to do. The way to think about it is trying to design a three-legged table.

CROWLEY: She wanted to build for and into the future. She wanted a structure about the totality of Oklahoma, not a single moment.

ROSS BARNEY: I thought that if I concentrated only on the bombing or only on a piece of it, that it wouldn't be as lasting. It wouldn't be as complete.

CROWLEY: She wanted -- Oklahoma City wanted -- a living, breathing, working office building that incorporated the lessons of tragedy without being about tragedy.

When you were designing this building, did you say to yourself, you know what I'd love to do, but I can't do that because that would...

ROSS BARNEY: No, actually, we did the opposite. We'd say, you know what we'd love to do? How can we do that and still meet the security requirements?

CROWLEY: On three sides of the building, the reinforced walls are unforgiving concrete made with Oklahoma rocks.

ROSS BARNEY: The stone is integral in the wall. It is part of the wall. It is not applied to the wall.

CROWLEY: So, it doesn't come shooting out, essentially.

ROSS BARNEY: Right. Yes. So, it is not fastened to the wall, it is part of the wall.

CROWLEY: Part of the court yard is a babbling stream filled with boulders from a nearby buffalo ranch.

ROSS BARNEY: You can see our eating area out there. That's inside security. So, in a way, this is a modern moat, but it's beautiful.

CROWLEY: And since aluminum sun screens can turn into shrapnel, these are made of awning-like fabric which would shred, and everywhere, there is light, windows, glass.

ROSS BARNEY: You'd think that you couldn't do a building with this much glass, but you can. It's very special glass. All the injuries happened from flying glass, from the blast impact, so this window is designed so that it will break like your car window, rather than traditional glass, into little pieces.

CROWLEY: From the southeast corner of the new federal building, you can see the monument grounds where the Murrah building once stood. The offices belonged to Housing and Urban Development, the department that lost the most that day in April of 1995.

ROSS BARNEY: The second floor space here is HUD, and they were just -- oh, my God, they had a committee of survivors that were just terrified about coming back here. That's their training room, and they put it there. And so we said, well, aren't you worried about having training and having to look at the memorial? They said, oh yes, we need blinds. They never close the blinds either. So, I think that's good. If a building can heal -- help heal people, that's good.

CROWLEY: Candy Crowley, CNN, Oklahoma city.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: There's often no better way of getting someone to do something than telling them it can't be done. There are, of course, exceptions, having mostly to do with cleaning rooms and mowing lawns. And there are variations. In this case, redoing the impossible because someone said it could not possibly have been done the first time around.

Here's CNN's Matthew Chance.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MATTHEW CHANCE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Thirty-seven grueling days across the Arctic pack ice, pulled by dogs and determination, to reach the North Pole. On a shaky satellite link, explorer Matty McNair told me the team feels very much on top of the world.

MATTY MCNAIR, EXPLORER: We're very excited. We still are very disbelieving that we're actually here. We don't actually have to get up and go for another 24 hours, nonstop. It's just -- it's like, we're here. We made it! It's hard to believe.

CHANCE: It was American explorer, Robert E. Peary (ph) who first reached the North Pole in 1909. His claim, to have done it in just 37 days, was debated for years. Matty McNair's expedition took the same route and used similar antiquated equipment to prove the U.S. naval officer could have done what he said he had.

MCNAIR: My read on the man was, he didn't have a lot of charisma. He wasn't somebody that people wanted to believe in, and therefore, it was easy to be critical of him. And I think they've been very unfair to him, and I think people that have been against him have no experience with dogs or the Arctic. And so yes, it's been great to follow his route, and say, yes, it is possible.

CHANCE: The team flew to Cape Columbia, where Peary's 1909 expedition started out, traveling 420 nautical miles to the pole. Along the way, she says, they rediscovered an old camp used by the Peary team.

MCNAIR: We found parts of old sled runners and lots of wire and parts of sleds and boards, and metal pans, probably a fuel tent. So that was really exciting, to find that stuff. We did that by taking a photograph and walking until the hills lined up with the photograph and said, oh, this must be where he had his camp, right here.

CHANCE: And, for McNair, herself a 53-year-old grandmother, it was another adventure in the kind of hostile climate she says she loves the most.

MCNAIR: I like cold. I don't like to be cold. Don't get me confused there. But I love the cold. I love the arctic. I love the light. It's like being on a different planet. There's a very softness to the light.

CHANCE: A softness in an extreme place visited by none but a determined few.

Matthew Chance, CNN, London.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Still to come tonight, that moment when it seemed there was nothing sacred anymore, a moment in Berlin. How things have changed since then.

And, before the rooster, tonight, comes the dog: a business built on chew toys, and it is on the rise. From the statehouse to the -- well, doghouse, and all around the world, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: In business, a dog of an idea is rarely a good idea -- rarely but not never. Not when you consider the billions we spend on our pets every year. Which brings us to Planet Dog, a company on the rise.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Come on.

ALEX FISHER, CO-FOUNDER, PLANET DOG: This year, we expect that the pet industry will be close to $34 billion large.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Get that. Good dog.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Seer was one of two dogs that inspired us to start Planet Dog seven years ago.

FISHER: We wanted to sort of encapsulate what we thought was special about Ben & Jerry's and Patagonia, pick it up and drop it right in the pet industry.

Here we are at the Planet Dog warehouse, we call it the doghouse. Come on in.

Our most popular product is a version of the orby ball. This ball happens to glow in the dark. They also come in a whole bunch of different colors and sizes. Now with the same material, we're making bones, all types of sizes. We even have them for the real little guys.

This is the compound year using to make our famous orby balls. The great thing about this material is that it can be recycled very easily. So, with any leftovers that we use, we make this product, we regrind it, we shoot it and make another ball from it.

What makes these so special is the durability factor. These things are designed with dog's teeth in mind. Not only are they really durable, they float, they bounce, they're peppermint scented and they can glow in the dark. And dogs just love them.

Now, go get them guys!

STEW MALONEY, CO-FOUNDER, PLANET DOG: It's great to have a dog on hand. When you get a prototype, give it to your dog or a series of dogs and say, let's see what you can do with that. FISHER: This is product testing at its best. Good dog, good dog.

MALONEY: Here we are at our first planet dog company store what did you see when you were there

How old? I think you want a bigger one.

Our company store is in Portland, Maine. It's intended to be a place were we can speak directly to the consumer, get a great idea of how they perceive our product.

This is what makes a happy dog.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Coming up, putting new dollars in your pocket. Sounds like a plan to me. We'll take a break first. This is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Coming up, pictures from a moment that changed our world. First, though, the news of the moment. At about a quarter to the hour, time for other headlines of the day. Erica Hill again in Atlanta -- Erica.

HILL: Hi again, Aaron.

We start off with some news just coming in to us a few hours ago. The president will hold a primetime news conference tomorrow night, we'll learning. And CNN will, of course, cover it as it happens. It starts at 8:30 p.m. Eastern time.

Mr. Bush is expected to talk Social Security and energy policy. Today he called for more research into hydrogen fuels, building refineries on abandoned military bases and a return to nuclear power. Our dependence on foreign energy, he said, is like a foreign tax on the American people.

A setback tonight for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, his colleagues voted overwhelmingly to rescind a controversial ethics rule. Now that rule made it tougher to investigate alleged wrongdoing. Many Democrats, and a number of Republicans, have complained the rule was put in place to specifically protect Congressman DeLay.

On the security watch, all international cargo coming into the Port of Oakland, California, will now be scanned for radioactive material. The goal here, to prevent a bomb from getting into the U.S. by next year. Customs officials hope more than 300 seaports in the U.S. will be using the scanners.

And finally, we're in for a dollar -- another dollar of the round variety. The government may soon give dollar coins the old try again. The House today approving a plan for presidential dollars here. The idea -- issue one coin for each president. A popular idea, because dollar coins only cost a nickel to produce. So the government makes a mint on every one. Pun intended -- Aaron.

BROWN: The lowest form of humor, Erica.

HILL: Indeed, it is.

BROWN: Thank you very much.

The Berlin Wall was a symbol of all that stood between the East and the West during the height of the Cold War. As part of CNN's anniversary series "Then & Now," tonight we look back at an East German who helped bring down the wall and see where he is today.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: His video of Communist East Germany crumbling, hopelessly polluted, restless, helped topple the Berlin Wall. Amateur video journalist Eric Radomski spirited his tapes to western TV which beamed them back into Eastern Germany.

When the wall opens November 9, 1989, 27-year-old Radomski was among the first to walk to the west. He photographed checkpoint Charlie, a sullen, heavily fortified flash point at the end of the Cold War suddenly overrun with euphoria.

Our pictures on TV were a reason people took to the streets, he says. And they changed this land.

15 years later, unemployment hovers around 20 percent in the east. Capitalism isn't so easy, he says. I try to look at it realistically, that you have to help yourself to find your place.

Radomski found his, designing wall paper for homes, bars, film sets. After helping to tear down one wall, he's covering others. His life now as free as his spirit.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Throughout the year, we mark 25 years of broadcasting at CNN. We'll continue to look back at yesterday's newsmakers and where they are today. That was a pretty cool one, too wasn't it?

Morning papers when we come back. And a reminder tomorrow at 8:30 Eastern time, the president's prime time news conference coverage here on CNN.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Okey-doke. Time to check morning papers from around the country and around the world.

The "International Herald Tribune" published by "The New York Times" in Paris. "First Flight is Perfect for Largest Passenger Jet," and then a picture of the Airbus A380. This is a plane that can hold up to 800 people. Think about what a pleasurable experience that's going to be. OK, 800 people. "Stars and Stripes" -- listen, it doesn't mean you shouldn't go out and buy one of those planes. If you like the idea, go buy one, OK.

"Militants Gun Down Iraqi Lawmaker at Home. Woman is first in parliament -- is first parliament member targeted since the election. Also, I don't know how well you can make this picture out. Headline is "Enter Sandstorm, a dust storm moves across the western desert of Iraq on Tuesday." The storm spawned near the Syrian border leaving a heavy sheet of dust in its wake. Well, yes, I guess it would, wouldn't it?

That's "Stars and Stripes," so is this. How many editions do they put out? Anyway I like the story. "Dragging Down a Career, Heavy smoking military recruits are much more likely to wash out." While recruiting --"Will recruiting practices change?" Everybody it seems like when I was in the service smoked. It may have had to do with the fact that they'd charged you 10 cents a pack for cigarettes.

"The Washington Times," two that we'll mention. "House GOP" -- we'll probably a lot of good stories but two that were mentioned. "House GOP Backs off Ethics Rules," folded like a cheap suitcase on that one. "Hastert/DeLay support move to end impasse."

And then down here, this is a good story, "Life Worse for Iraqi Women, intimidation more common." I guarantee you, if this story had appeared in "The New York Times," the right wing blogs would go nuts on the "Times." But it's in the "Washington Times," so they'll probably leave it alone. The -- and it's a good story and an important story. I'll move on now.

"The Rocky Mountain News," man, this is an ugly little moment. "They are Antichrist. Senator says he regrets using term to describe founder Dobson," that's James Dobson "and his efforts." Yes, that was intemperate.

How are we doing on time? We out of time? Weather tomorrow in Chicago, anemic. We'll wrap it up quickly in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: The president holds a prime time news conference. Our coverage begins at 8:00, the president starts at 8:30. And we'll talk about what he talked about afterwards for a while too. Good to have you with us tonight. We'll see you tomorrow. Until then, good night for all of us.

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