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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown

Some Pharmacists Morally Opposed to Filling Prescriptions for Contraceptives; Benedict XVI's First Months as Pope

Aired June 09, 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, HOST: Good evening again. Imagine handing a prescription from your doctor to a pharmacist and being told it can't be filled, can't because the pharmacist is morally opposed to the drug you need, won't even though an order from the governor requires the pharmacist to dispense the drug.
The governor is Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, and that's where this latest collision of faith and biology and the law is playing out. We begin tonight with CNN's Jonathan Freed.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JONATHAN FREED, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Luke Vander Bleek is a spiritual man...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Dad, you should (INAUDIBLE).

FREED: A family man. And he's challenging what he says is an assault on his conscience.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He has filed a lawsuit against the governor and against the state of Illinois.

FREED: Vander Bleek is a small-town pharmacist with big-time concerns about this little pill, known as Plan B, the so-called morning-after pill. It's an emergency contraceptive, and abortion opponents argue that instead of preventing a pregnancy, it's terminating it.

LUKE VANDER BLEEK, PHARMACIST: I'd like to just step aside from a relationship that would involve me, as a Christian man with a conscience, to be involved in products that may cause abortions.

FREED: The pill works by delaying ovulation, preventing fertilization, and may inhibit the implantation of a fertilized egg, avoiding a pregnancy.

VANDER BLEEK: One percent would mean I needed 4.54 grams.

FREED: Faced with resistance from some pharmacists, Illinois' governor recently put in place an emergency rule, requiring pharmacies to dispense the pill, just like they would any other medication.

GOV. ROD BLAGOJEVICH (D), ILLINOIS: Their responsibility is to fill the prescription, with no delays, no hassles, just fill the prescription.

FREED: Vander Bleek is the first pharmacy owner in Illinois to file suit in protest. He's backed by the group Americans United for Life.

(on camera): Do you feel that the state itself is trying to force on you what you feel should be your own moral choice?

VANDER BLEEK: Absolutely. I really believe this is a big overstep by governments into my rights.

FREED (voice-over): The governor argues it's a matter of guaranteeing access to health care.

BLAGOJEVICH: If a doctor fills a prescription for a woman to get birth control, it's not the place of a pharmacist to sit there and pass judgment.

FREED: But Vander Bleek's lawsuit alleges the state is trying to curb his conscience, which he argues is protected by statute. Illinois Health Care Right of Conscience Act.

(on camera): Some patients might think, shouldn't I be able to get the same medication at any pharmacy? If it's available at pharmacy A, why shouldn't I be able to get it at pharmacy B?

VANDER BLEEK: I really believe that the business owner ought to be able to make business decisions on whether they carry certain items or not. In fact, it's very common for patients to present to pharmacies and not find absolutely everything in stock.

FREED (voice-over): In fact, Vander Bleek does stock other types of contraceptives, and says he would be willing to carry Plan B if he could be convinced it would not abort a fertilized egg.

In a statement issued in response to CNN, the governor argues: "If a pharmacy decides to be in the business of selling contraceptives, then it must fill its customers' prescriptions for contraceptives in the same way. Women should have the same access to health care as men."

(on camera): You would rather get out of the business than carry it?

VANDER BLEEK: That's correct.

FREED: You feel that strongly about it?

VANDER BLEEK: I feel that strongly about it.

FREED (voice-over): If he loses his legal fight, Vander Bleek says he might even move to another state.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Holy Savior, thou art the living bread.

FREED: A state he would consider more tolerant of his moral convictions.

Jonathan Freed, CNN, Morrison, Illinois.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: In some respects, this fight goes back a long time. As recently as 1965, and for some of us that is not that long ago, states could actually ban residents from buying or using any kind of contraceptive. It took a Supreme Court ruling to change that. It may eventually take a different court in a much different time to decide the line between a pharmacist's conscience and the customer's right to a legal and available product.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): As a mother and first-grade teacher, Julee Lacey is always ready for the unexpected. But she didn't expect the unexpected when she went to the drug store for birth control pills.

JULEE LACEY, DENIED BIRTH CONTROL PRESCRIPTION: The pharmacist came to the window and she said, "I'm so sorry but I'm not going to be able to fill your prescription." And I said, "oh, really?" And I couldn't believe, you know, what she was saying, because I thought something was wrong with the prescription, or, you know, my doctor maybe had made a mistake or something.

BROWN: Not a medical issue. To the druggist, a moral one.

LACEY: She said, nothing's wrong with your prescription. I just personally do not believe in any kind of birth control, and therefore, I will not fill your prescription.

BROWN: The results were no better when her husband tried.

LACEY: He said, you know, we need our prescription, and she said, well, you know, I've already, you know, said I'm not going to fill it. I don't believe in birth control.

BROWN: Pharmacists denying to fill legitimate prescriptions is becoming more common all the time. Birth control pills sometimes, the morning-after pill sometimes, anything the druggist might oppose.

MARCIA GREENBERGER, NATIONAL WOMEN'S LAW CENTER: We have even seen, over the last several years, 28 bills being introduced all around the country to give pharmacists the right to refuse to fill any prescription if, in the pharmacist's view, it's in opposition to that pharmacist's moral beliefs.

BROWN: The policy of the American Pharmacist Association is that pharmacists can refuse to fill a prescription only if the pharmacist refers the customer to somewhere else and refrains from making moral lectures.

LLOYD DUPLANTIS, PHARMACISTS FOR LIFE: We ask you to help us to bless those that you sent to us, help us to be a blessing to them, and help them to be a blessing to us. BROWN: Lloyd Duplantis, a devout Catholic, starts the day at his pharmacy in Gray, Louisiana with a prayer.

DUPLANTIS: I don't have any contraceptives here. I specifically opened up the store so I could avoid that area of practice.

BROWN: Duplantis is a member of the Pharmacists for Life, an advocacy group supporting this issue. He says that based on his own research, he believes contraceptives are dangerous, and that he's obliged to protect his clientele.

DUPLANTIS: We are the bottom line. We have to make the final decision, because it's our name goes on that label.

BROWN: And the Julee Laceys of the world are caught in the middle of the never-ending right-to-life/abortion/birth control debate.

LACEY: I trust my care, as well as my family's care, to our physicians. And I think that's important to be able to -- for any American that has a prescription to be able to confidently walk into a pharmacist and know that their prescription will be filled.

BROWN: CVS eventually delivered Julie Lacey's birth control pills to her home the next day, and delivered an apology as well.

But Ms. Lacey continues to speak out on the issue, just as Lloyd Duplantis continues not to prescribe contraception. Distinct voices in a debate that shows no sign of ending.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: We asked CVS to comment on Julee Lacey's case. A spokesman telling CNN that what happened to her was an isolated incident, that it does not reflect CVS policy in Texas or around the country.

Now, this will get your attention. In a survey commissioned by the clothing maker Liz Claiborne, one in four teenagers say they've been involved in an abusive relationship. Thirteen percent of teenage girls say they've either been hit or otherwise physically injured by a boyfriend. Abuse, it turns out, is learned -- learned young and too often overlooked. Here's CNN's Kelli Arena.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KELLI ARENA, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Nicci Avey is two weeks shy of her 17th birthday.

NICCI AVEY, DATE ABUSE VICTIM: What party?

ARENA: She's an outgoing teenager who seems carefree on the surface. But Nicci is battling the emotional scars of abuse, abuse at the hands of a boyfriend.

NICCI AVEY: He has pushed me so hard that it pushed me and rolled me off the couch. So I was laying in the middle of the living room floor, and he came over there and he picked me up by my hair, dragged me to the stairs and started choking me.

ARENA: Nicci, who was 15 at the time, said that she was hit so hard, one of her tear ducts was permanently damaged.

NICCI AVEY: When he had hit me in kind of my jaw area, he busted my right tear duct. I'm not able to cry out of this eye anymore.

ARENA: In the beginning, crying was the last thing Nicci worried about. The relationship seemed like every young girl's dream.

NICCI AVEY: He, you know, made me laugh, which put a smile on my face, which every girl wants. And he was charming.

ARENA: But Nicci says her ex-boyfriend, who was 17 then, became very controlling and insulting, telling her to lose weight and how to dress. He also stopped her from spending time with her friends. Still, she stayed with him for five months.

NICCI AVEY: I just thought that's how a relationship was supposed to be, because I hadn't had many before him.

ARENA: Nicci's mother says she didn't know about the violence at first, but eventually helped her daughter get a court protective order.

NANCY AVEY, NICCI'S MOM: I felt somewhat betrayed by the boy and I felt helpless, totally helpless when she told us.

ARENA (on camera): Nicci's grades dropped dramatically during her ordeal. Previously an "A" student, she was failing miserably. So a counselor at her high school put her in touch with an organization called SafePlace. There, she learned her situation was not at all unique, that her ex-boyfriend's controlling behavior was a common and dangerous pattern.

Katherine Barnhill is Nicci's counselor.

KATHERINE BARNHILL, SAFEPLACE COUNSELOR: I think a lot of people say, oh, it won't happen to my kid because we're supportive. You know, my husband and I have been married for 30 years. I mean, I've seen teens where they have great, supportive parents and this still happens, because I think the behaviors become so accepted among their peers.

ARENA: SafePlace sends counselors into middle and high schools to teach kids that date abuse is not acceptable.

BARNHILL: People don't realize they have this problem on their campus. It's not that I think people see it and ignore it, necessarily. I think it's that people are in denial that this even happens to young teens.

ARENA: That's exactly what happened to Rae Spence, who says school administrators, students, and even the courts ignored her pleas for help.

RAE SPENCE, DATE ABUSE VICTIM: They didn't see it as a problem at all. Actually, one time, told my parents I was instigating it, that if I, you know, wanted this to stop, I should get away, like I could control what he did to me.

ARENA: When Rae, who was 15 at the time, transferred out of her high school to get away, her ex-boyfriend moved on to victimize a girl named Atrolla Mosely (ph) and ended up stabbing her to death. He later pled guilty.

SPENCE: It could have been me. It very well could have. I mean, I was with him for a year.

ARENA: Nino Flores says that he understands the rage young men sometimes feel and is convinced that if he didn't get help from the counselors at SafePlace, he would have become violent himself.

NINO FLORES, STUDENT: Just taking my anger out on everybody, you know what I'm saying? Not just my partner, just everybody, because if I didn't have anybody nobody to talk to and express my feelings, I would have so much rage inside of me just wanting to come out.

ARENA: Date violence is a national health problem, so much so that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention produced a video aimed at 11 to 14-year-olds.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: If your boyfriend starts telling you that it's not important to hang out with your family anymore and that it's more important to hang out with him, that's the biggest warning sign ever.

ARENA: The campaign might come too late for kids like Nicci, but she's determined to speak out.

NICCI AVEY: It's going to be hard, but there is help out there and you can do it. You just gotta be strong. You gotta know that there is light on the other side. It may not seem like it, but there is.

ARENA: The words of a girl forced to grow up much too quickly, who wants to be part of the solution.

Kelli Arena, CNN, Austin, Texas.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Still ahead tonight, what some major airlines are doing to keep from drowning in gred -- ah, red ink. That story in a couple of minutes, but first, as we approach a quarter past the hour, Erica Hill joins us from Atlanta with the night's headlines. Good evening, Miss Hill.

ERICA HILL, HEADLINE NEWS: Good evening, Mr. Brown.

We start off with President Bush who is pressuring Congress to make all 16 provisions of the Patriot Act permanent. Now, they're set to expire at the end of the year. The president urged Congress to renew the Patriot Act today while he was speaking to state troopers in Ohio. Mr. Bush credits the law with helping prosecutors convict more than 200 suspects on charges relating to terrorism, but critics say many parts of the Patriot Act -- or rather, most of those convictions were minor and counter that some provisions of the Patriot Act violate civil rights.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, attending a NATO meeting in Belgium today, spoke about Guantanamo Bay and the U.S. prison there. He says the Pentagon's goal is that the detainees would eventually be held in their own countries. Human rights groups claim prisoners have been abused at Gitmo.

In Santa Fe, New Mexico, police say they now think Tommy Hook wasn't beaten up to keep him from testifying about alleged financial irregularities at the Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons lab. Hook claims he was attacked by several men who told him to keep his mouth shut. Police, though, believe he was actually injured in a fight that happened after he backed into someone in the parking lot of a bar.

And in Los Angeles, 13 sheriffs deputies are facing disciplinary action now for firing more than 100 shots last month at an unarmed driver, all in the case of mistaken identity. The incident was caught on videotape. The vehicle matched the description of a car thought to be involved in a shooting. The driver was hit by four bullets. He did survive, though, and was later found to have not been involved in that incident.

And, that's the latest from Headline News, Aaron. Back to you.

BROWN: All things are caught on videotape these days. Thank you.

HILL: Yes, be careful.

BROWN: Talk to you in half an hour.

Straight ahead on the program, airlines bleeding red ink. Tourniquets are everywhere, in case you hadn't noticed.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You're cutting your labor force and you're cutting the jobs and you're cutting the wages and you're cutting the pension funds. If you don't do these things, they may not save you a tremendous amount of money. You're going to run into problems with your employees.

BROWN: And they are. Cutting back on pretzels and a whole lot more, but will it be enough?

MIKE LORINO, BAR PILOT: Highly volatile cargo travels this river 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

BROWN: A target for terrorism, more than 2,000 miles long, so who's guarding it?

ROMEO DALLAIRE, FORMER U.N. PEACEKEEPING FORCE COMMANDER, RWANDA: When I left Rwanda 11 years ago, I said that I'd keep the Rwandan genocide alive.

BROWN: And he has.

PETER RAYMONT, DIRECTOR: He stayed there. He saved lives. He witnessed and he's here to tell the story through his book and through this film.

BROWN: A remarkable film about one man's struggle to make a difference in the face of evil.

From New York, and around the world, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DAN QUAYLE: CNN, happy 25th anniversary.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: There was a time when you got all dressed up to fly. The first flight I ever took, Minneapolis to Winnipeg in about 1955, you had a choice, steak or lobster. That was coach. Today, you also have a choice, diet or regular soda. That's still free, though, it may not be for long.

Back when they were cooking steak and lobster, the airlines were regulated and flying was expensive. Today, flying is cheap, if you shop, and largely unregulated, which is great for consumers and horrible, really horrible, for airlines, at least the old airlines, the ones still in business if only barely.

Here's CNN's Allan Chernoff.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ALLAN CHERNOFF, CORRESPONDENT: Pretzels, a dollar. A couple of magazines, eight bucks. Just dealing with the new reality of flying coach on Northwest. By making us, the passengers, buy our own pretzels and magazines, the airline is going to save $2.5 million a year. That's peanuts for a major airline. Analysts say these cutbacks are symbolic. Northwest is asking employees for another $800 million a year in cost savings after they agreed to a $300 million cut just last year.

JOHN PINCAVAGE, AIRLINE ANALYST: They have to do this because when you're cutting your labor force, and you're cutting your -- the jobs, and you're cutting the -- cutting the wages, and you're cutting the pension funds, the problem you have is, is that if you don't do these things, you're going to run into problems with your employees. CHERNOFF: Passengers, however don't seem to care about pretzels. They just want low fares.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't travel for the food, or the pillow, or the blanket. You know, not crazy about it, but it doesn't bother me.

CHERNOFF: And low fares are something discounters like jetBlue are prepared to deliver. They've got younger, more fuel-efficient fleets. Their employees work for less and put in longer hours. While Northwest spends $15.40 to fly a passenger 100 miles, jetBlue's cost is only $6.50.

That really helps the bottom line when the cost of fuel is sky high, and helps explain why the discounters are sending older airlines into a financial tailspin. Northwest is drenched in red ink. United and U.S. Airways are operating under bankruptcy protection.

Running an airline has always been tough. Since 1938, the industry as a whole has actually lost $14 billion. But these days, it's especially hard.

PINCAVAGE: Either you are low fare, low cost or you aren't, and if you aren't, you've got to try to become that.

CHERNOFF: Those that are not are searching everywhere for places to cut costs.

Airlines are saving money in ways that we can't even see. While taxing on the runway, they're using only one engine and some routes have become shorter as well. Have a look. From New York to Hong Kong, planes used to fly over Alaska, across the Bering Strait, past Japan and finally to Hong Kong. But now, U.S. airlines can fly over Russian and Chinese air space, meaning from New York, they can up head toward the pole, make a horseshoe all the way down to Hong Kong, a route that saves 2,000 miles.

They're outsourcing maintenance work, often overseas, and flying airplanes longer. That has the Transportation Department worried about safety, according to a new government report. But even with all these cutbacks, some airlines may simply not make it.

BOB CRANDALL, FORMER CEO, AMERICAN AIRLINES: This whole notion of airlines lingering in bankruptcy, they should be liquidated and some of the capacity will go away.

CHERNOFF: Indeed, analysts say, some of today's best-known airlines may be headed for the same fate as legendary airlines of the past. Like Eastern, TWA, and Pan Am.

Allan Chernoff, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: There's an old saying that when some investment you own ends up on the cover of "Time" magazine, it's time to sell. This week, the magazine put real estate on the cover, so look out. The fed chairman, Alan Greenspan, indicated today that while soaring real estate isn't exactly the internet bubble with a backyard, there are markets in the country where the frenzy of rising prices is a froth, which, if you don't speak economics, is not good.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ALAN GREENSPAN, FEDERAL RESERVE CHAIRMAN: Although a bubble in home prices for the nation as a whole does not appear likely, there do appear to be at a minimum, signs of froth in some local markets where home prices seem to have risen to unsustainable levels.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: As for what happens when that froth loses its froth, the fed chairman said the larger economy will be able to handle it, and maybe you will too.

Just ahead, the Army's latest answer on the death of Pat Tillman and why it took the Army so long to get out the truth.

And later, the new pope. To borrow a phrase from an old mayor, how's he doing? We'll hear from one of the sharpest Vatican watchers in the business, but we take a break first. Around the world, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: The Army today had another answer for the family of Corporal Pat Tillman, a fresh denial that it tried to cover up the circumstances of his death in Afghanistan. Corporal Tillman, you'll recall, was killed by friendly fire, but the Pentagon waited for weeks before telling the true account. This, while the Tillman family believed that his death came at the hands of the enemy, the initial reporting.

"It is true," the Army said in a statement today, "that neither the family nor the public were notified immediately of the suspicion of friendly fire, and the follow-on investigation. This was due to the fact," the statement goes on to say, "that the operationally deployed unit did not immediately notify the department out of a desire to complete the investigation and garner all available facts."

What all those words seem to mean is the Army says it never deliberately tried to deceive either the family or you.

At the Vatican today, Pope Benedict XVI met with an international group of Jewish leaders. The pope says he's committed to carrying on the work of his predecessor, John Paul II, in fighting anti-semitism and improving relations between Catholics and Jews, one rabbi describing the meeting as warm.

When John Paul died in April and Benedict was elected his successor, CNN called on the expertise of Vatican reporters and analysts, one of them John Allen of the "National Catholic Reporter." Talk about quick work -- since the new pope's election, Mr. Allen has written a new book, "The Rise of Pope Benedict XVI." And, we talked to John the other day.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: When last I saw you, we were in the midst of this outpouring for John Paul II. How did the international reaction to John Paul's death affect, if at all, the selection of Cardinal Ratzinger to become hope?

JOHN ALLEN, AUTHOR "THE RISE OF POPE BENEDICT XVI": Oh, I think it was hugely important, because, you know, Aaron, the thing is, we're already for getting now, the election of Joseph Ratzinger seems the most obvious thing in the world, you know, the man who was the pope's right hand for 24 years, a man of great intelligence, theological preparation.

But, actually, that election violated every bit of conventional wisdom that exists about who should get elected pope. I mean, the guy was too old. He was a northern European. He came out of the papal bureaucracy. He didn't have much pastoral experience. He was too controversial. All of those reasons should have meant that his election was virtually unthinkable but it happened in just four ballots.

So, something obviously changed to create a new context, and I think what changed is what I've come to call the funeral effect. I mean, precisely those moments that you're talking about, that vast out-pouring, not just of humanity...

BROWN: Why, though? What was it about that that said, yeah, Cardinal Ratzinger's the guy?

ALLEN: Because the cardinals, those 115 men who elected the pope, came to understand, in a way they hadn't before, that they had to elect a person of substance, who would not be crushed by the weight of comparison to the man he was following. In other words, it wasn't just enough to find a smiling, pastoral, holy figure. They had to find someone of deep intelligence, someone of political vision, someone of personal substance.

BROWN: He has, in a short time, the new pope, I think, confirmed in many respects what we knew about him. The editor of a progressive American Catholic magazine, fired.

ALLEN: Right.

BROWN: Birth control opposition, artificial birth control, opposition to divorce, opposition to living together, opposition to gay marriage, of course. And they're doing battle in Italy on this referendum about -- it's complicated, but at its core is in vitro fertilization. So he's doing as we expected him to do, fair?

ALLEN: Well, on those issues, sure. I mean, I don't think it was any mystery that Joseph Ratzinger on these sort of hot-button culture war issues was going to take a tenaciously conservative line.

BROWN: Is he doing things differently than we thought he would do, on anything?

ALLEN: Yeah, I think so.

BROWN: What?

ALLEN: Well, I think first of all, I think his ecumenical outreach, that is these efforts to kind of reunite the divided Christian family are a lot more prominent than we thought they would be. The one thing that the Catholic right has been expecting from day one is the great purge. And other than the Reese case, which actually dates before Benedict's election as pope, there hasn't been a single disciplinary move in his pontificate. Moreover, if you read everything he's said so far, which is about 50,000 words of stuff, the overwhelming thrust of it has been positive.

And finally, I think he's been surprisingly collegial, collegial in the Catholic sense, meaning somebody who doesn't need to put the press of his personality in absolutely everything that happens in the Vatican. I mean, if you take his trip to Bari last week, his first trip outside of Rome, you know, he got on a chopper, he went down, he spent three hours on the ground to celebrate mass, and he went home. He was not the star of the show, in the way that John Paul II certainly would have been.

BROWN: I said to you once, my sense is that you get selected pope, but you become pope over a period of time and a period, in fact, of years. Do you think you know yet what kind of pope he will be?

ALLEN: This is not a pope who needs a lot of on-the-job training. I mean, this is a man who has been at the center of power in the Catholic Church for a quarter century, with a front row seat for watching the pontificate of John Paul II, and he has a very clear vision already developed about where he wants his papacy to go.

So in that sense, I think these first 50 days, he's hit the ground running in a way that few popes ever do.

BROWN: It's nice to see you. I don't know what took you so long to get the book out, but, you know, it's taken me 56 years to come up with an idea; you crank one out in about 10 days. Nice to have you with us.

ALLEN: Aaron, always a pleasure. You're a class act.

BROWN: Thank you very much.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: John Allen.

Next on the program, bearing witness to the unbearable. How a man who lived through the genocide in Rwanda lives with what he saw.

And later, they are the first and in many cases the only line of defense against terrorism on the waterfront. From Maine to the Big Muddy and beyond. This is NEWSNIGHT. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Eleven years ago, the United Nations sent a Canadian, Romeo Dallaire, to Rwanda to command a small number of troops whose job it was to stop the killing that much of the world did not yet know about. It was an impossible mission.

What General Dallaire experienced in Rwanda has haunted him. He spent years reliving the horrors and making peace with the inner demons. His story is the focus of a new film, "Shake Hands With the Devil." Our "Newsdoc" feature tonight.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

PETER RAYMONT, DIRECTOR, "SHAKE HANDS WITH THE DEVIL": The Rwandan genocide is not very well known. Eight hundred thousand people died in 100 days. And General Dallaire was at the center of it. And I thought that the most useful way to draw people into this very important story was to do it through the eyes and experiences of the general who commanded the U.N. troops at the time.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Heavy fighting has broken out around the capital of Rwanda, hours after the president died in a plane crash.

GEN. ROMEO DALLAIRE (RET.), COMMANDER, U.N. PEACEKEEPING FORCE, RWANDA: It became evident within about the third day that this was expanding. And the Belgians and everybody else decided to pack it in and to simply pull out their expatriates. From that day on, we knew what what we would be able to do at best is bear witness, attempt to stop the fighting, so cease-fires, attempt to save as many as we could, because we ended up with about 30,000 in our small little enclaves.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Do you think the worst of it's over now as far as civilian deaths?

DALLAIRE: I'd be at a loss to tell you if it is, because every day we hear about another horror story here or another mortar bomb dropped, wipe out a whole bunch.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So he actually approached reporters, and Mark Doyle of BBC was the most classic example of a guy who accepted; he said, if you stay on the ground, we'll water you, we'll feed you, we'll protect you. I really don't care what you report, but I want you to file a story a day, and I'll ensure that it gets out.

DALLAIRE: I shifted then from trying to convince the U.N. and the structures of government directly to the media.

A journalist once asked me, what in the hell are you doing here? I mean, why are you staying? And I blurted out, I said, if I can save one Rwandan, then it's worth it. And the journalist said, yeah, but there are tens of thousands being slaughtered every day. And I said, then maybe if I can be a witness.

RAYMONT: He stayed there. He saved lives. He witnessed. And he's here to tell the story through his book and through this film. I think that people can identify with someone like the general, can get to know and understand this very complex, horrific situation through this one man's experience.

DALLAIRE: There were two occasions where I met with the interahamwe leaders, and when I shook their hands, their hands were cold. But they weren't cold as a temperature; they were cold as if another body -- although they had a human form, their eyes were not human. Their eyes were reflecting the most evil that I could ever imagine.

When I left Rwanda 11 years ago, I said that I'd keep the Rwandan genocide alive. The 10th anniversary was last year, in 2004. And I had an opportunity to return.

The whole place has changed.

Over the 10 days, it was both a mixture of formal meetings, formal venues, to which I was invited as one of the VIPs, and a lot of the other was simply returning 10 years later and taking a look at the people, at the infrastructure, the sites.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Remember this place?

DALLAIRE: Yes, sir, very much.

One place I absolutely wanted to go was to the University of Butare, which is the national university. When you speak, university campuses are excellent venues. The original plan was to just meet with a class. The morning we arrived, there were so many people interested that we did it in a stadium. And there was over 7,000 people.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): Standing here, I say to you that Romeo Dallaire, as force commander...

RAYMONT: We all have a responsibility as citizens of the world, if we really do believe in this notion of a global village, of a global community, of mutual security, we should reach out to the Rwandans today.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: The film, again, is "Shake Hands With the Devil."

Ahead on the program, some of the other news of the day, and then a river of opportunity, more than 2,000 miles long. A liquid highway for hazardous cargo. So who's keeping watch? We are. This is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: In a moment, guarding against terrorism on the Mississippi. But first, at a quarter to the hour, almost exactly, time for other headlines of the day. Erica Hill in Atlanta with that. Good evening, again. HILL: Good evening to you. And like you said, very on time tonight.

BROWN: Thank you.

HILL: No, thank you.

We start off with a warning tonight, to war crimes fugitive General Radko Mladic: Your days are numbered. That coming from a State Department official, who said the Bosnian Serb military commander may soon be captured. Now, the State Department official also announced the U.S. is lifting its freeze on a $10 million aid package to Serbia Montenegro. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns saying he hopes Mladic will surrender and be on trial by July 11th. That is the 10-year anniversary of the slaughter at Srebrenica; 8,000 men and boys were killed in Europe's worst massacre since World War II. Burns told leaders in Belgrave, extraditing Mladic would also help the country's chances of joining the European Union and NATO.

Near Conroe, Texas today, a twin engine plane crashes into and ignites this home. The pilot was killed. The house destroyed in the fire. It was unoccupied at the time. No word yet on the cause of the crash. We do know that it happened shortly after takeoff, and there was no radio contact with the pilot.

And the Consumer Products Safety Commission may tighten restrictions on all-terrain vehicles. It's looking at them following a rise in injuries and deaths among kids riding them. ATVs, we should point out, are not designed for children, but it turns out riders under 16 account for a third of all deaths and injuries. And the number of ATVs being used is also up, doubling to an estimated 6,000 between 1998 and 2003.

There's been a lot of pressure, Aaron, to -- for them to look at those guidelines, those safety guidelines much more closely.

BROWN: (INAUDIBLE) would say that too. They also shouldn't talk on cell phones when they're doing that.

HILL: Probably not the best idea. Yeah.

BROWN: Thank you, see you tomorrow.

Human nature being what it is, sexy gets attention, even when sober ought to prevail. Sexy is Ebola; the flu is not. Sexy is a tiny Cessna buzzing the White House. Sober and sobering is the fact that 2,300-mile stretch of the American heartland, lined with people and vital to the economy goes largely unprotected from terrorism. Largely, but not entirely. From the Mississippi River Delta and on the "Security Watch" tonight, CNN's Jeanne Meserve.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JEANNE MESERVE, CNN HOMELAND SECURITY CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Long before sun-up, the Southwest House pilots station is cooking.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's a Monday morning. You automatically have red beans, because that's a tradition.

MESERVE: The men who work here live here for two weeks at a stretch.

The pilots station is a small village on stilts, situated at the remote southernmost stretch of the Mississippi. The pilots' job is to meet every ship entering or exiting the river at the Gulf of Mexico.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, Captain, this is the pilot boat. We're on our way out to you now. What's your distance and speed from the buoy, please?

MESERVE: There is a bit of the daredevil in the river pilots. They scale the sides of massive moving ships on rope ladders to help navigate the vessels through the shifting shoals and the narrow channel at the entrance to the Mississippi.

The pilots are in most cases the first Americans to board incoming ships. They're not government employees, but they provide by default a first thin line of defense for the river.

There is a lot to protect.

(on camera): In the first 250 miles of this river, there are five ports, including three that rank among the largest in the country.

(voice-over): In centuries past, Mississippi steamboats carried cotton, not tourists. But the once mighty plantations are relics now, and the river is lined instead with chemical plants and petroleum refineries. Ships and barges haul millions of tons of products to and from those facilities, including highly toxic chemicals, like ammonia, chlorine and benzene, and flammable materials like propane and liquefied natural gas.

The roster at the pilots house show what ships coming into the river are carrying.

CAPT. MIKE LORINO, BAR PILOT: There's a lot of dangerous products -- crude oil, chemical tankers, and whatever is in the containers.

MESERVE: The ships are arriving from all over the world with foreign crews.

(on camera): The Coast Guard looking at any of these, as far as you can tell?

LORINO: The Coast Guard is not looking at any of these, as far as I can tell.

MESERVE (voice-over): The Coast Guard does scrutinize crew lists and cargo manifests, and boards ships offshore that it classifies as high interest. But Mike Lorino, a pilot for 30 years, says the Coast Guard is overwhelmed.

LORINO: They do a great job with what they have.

MESERVE (on camera): Which isn't enough?

LORINO: Which isn't enough. They need more. They need more.

MESERVE (voice-over): A terrorist attack on a ship carrying dangerous cargo could cause environmental havoc at the southwest pass.

But 100 miles upriver, where the Mississippi flows through the city of New Orleans, there is a potential for massive loss of life.

LORINO: Highly, highly volatile cargo travels this river 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

MESERVE: As Mike Lorino watches 170-foot-wide ships squeeze past one another in the 600-foot-wide passage, he voices another fear, that a terrorist could simply turn a wheel and cause a collision, potentially shutting down the entire river.

LORINO: It would be an economic catastrophe to the United States.

MESERVE: Lorino loves the Mississippi for its lore and the livelihood it gives him. He says security has improved significantly. Though more could be done, ultimately, he admits, the volume of river traffic and the Mississippi's sheer size make it impossible to protect it absolutely.

LORINO: The only way to secure it would be not let any ships come in the Mississippi River, and that's not going to happen.

MESERVE: So Lorino keeps his eyes and ears open when he boards, looking for threats. But hoping the water never brings them this way.

Jeanne Meserve, CNN, on the southwest passage.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: An Alfred Hitchcock film comes to life. That's one of the "Morning Paper" headlines after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: OK. Time to check morning papers from around the country and around the world. I was distracted during the break by some disquieting news, but I'll get it together here.

"Christian Science Monitor." Over here, please, Ed. "Close encounters of the fluttering kind: A rise in bird attacks." This is not an attack on a bird; this is birds attacking humans, like in "The Birds," the Alfred Hitchcock movie, which has terrified me for 35, 40 years. I won't go into a phone booth if there's a crow around. Anyway, it's actually happening. Apologize to the birds. Whatever we did, we're sorry.

"Can't mask fanaticism," "San Antonio Express News." San Antonio Spurs and the Detroit Pistons playing ball in the NBA finals finally. And the game is tied unless you're watching the replay, in which case the game is over.

"The Washington Times," down at the bottom, this is too weird. "Aide orchestrates new power plan for pontiff, draws notice for being beautiful." The pope's number two is described as a handsome, tall, blond, sporty, like the pope's secretary, a Bavarian himself. The best news out of the Vatican of late.

"The Daily News" is into more substance, thankfully. "Gumfella: Toothless jailed Mafia boss wants furlough to get dentures." This is why there are tabloids, OK? Dominick "Quiet Dom" -- well, sure he's quiet, he's got no teeth, can't talk -- Cirillo wants out of jail so he can get a bridge.

"UAW OK's talks to help GM." That's "The Detroit News." We like that story.

And the weather in Chicago tomorrow, if you're in that area -- I don't like that you guys, OK? "Helter swelter" is the weather.

We'll wrap it up in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BRUCE MORTON, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): This week in history, allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy in 1944 in the D-Day invasion of World War II.

Secretariat wins the Triple Crown of horse racing in 1973.

And in 1987, President Ronald Reagan delivers a memorable speech at Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin.

RONALD REAGAN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Tear down this wall!

MORTON: And that is "This Week in History."

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Pretty good week. Pretty good week here too. We'll see you tomorrow. Good night for all of us.

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


Aired June 9, 2005 - 22:00   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
AARON BROWN, HOST: Good evening again. Imagine handing a prescription from your doctor to a pharmacist and being told it can't be filled, can't because the pharmacist is morally opposed to the drug you need, won't even though an order from the governor requires the pharmacist to dispense the drug.
The governor is Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, and that's where this latest collision of faith and biology and the law is playing out. We begin tonight with CNN's Jonathan Freed.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JONATHAN FREED, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Luke Vander Bleek is a spiritual man...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Dad, you should (INAUDIBLE).

FREED: A family man. And he's challenging what he says is an assault on his conscience.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He has filed a lawsuit against the governor and against the state of Illinois.

FREED: Vander Bleek is a small-town pharmacist with big-time concerns about this little pill, known as Plan B, the so-called morning-after pill. It's an emergency contraceptive, and abortion opponents argue that instead of preventing a pregnancy, it's terminating it.

LUKE VANDER BLEEK, PHARMACIST: I'd like to just step aside from a relationship that would involve me, as a Christian man with a conscience, to be involved in products that may cause abortions.

FREED: The pill works by delaying ovulation, preventing fertilization, and may inhibit the implantation of a fertilized egg, avoiding a pregnancy.

VANDER BLEEK: One percent would mean I needed 4.54 grams.

FREED: Faced with resistance from some pharmacists, Illinois' governor recently put in place an emergency rule, requiring pharmacies to dispense the pill, just like they would any other medication.

GOV. ROD BLAGOJEVICH (D), ILLINOIS: Their responsibility is to fill the prescription, with no delays, no hassles, just fill the prescription.

FREED: Vander Bleek is the first pharmacy owner in Illinois to file suit in protest. He's backed by the group Americans United for Life.

(on camera): Do you feel that the state itself is trying to force on you what you feel should be your own moral choice?

VANDER BLEEK: Absolutely. I really believe this is a big overstep by governments into my rights.

FREED (voice-over): The governor argues it's a matter of guaranteeing access to health care.

BLAGOJEVICH: If a doctor fills a prescription for a woman to get birth control, it's not the place of a pharmacist to sit there and pass judgment.

FREED: But Vander Bleek's lawsuit alleges the state is trying to curb his conscience, which he argues is protected by statute. Illinois Health Care Right of Conscience Act.

(on camera): Some patients might think, shouldn't I be able to get the same medication at any pharmacy? If it's available at pharmacy A, why shouldn't I be able to get it at pharmacy B?

VANDER BLEEK: I really believe that the business owner ought to be able to make business decisions on whether they carry certain items or not. In fact, it's very common for patients to present to pharmacies and not find absolutely everything in stock.

FREED (voice-over): In fact, Vander Bleek does stock other types of contraceptives, and says he would be willing to carry Plan B if he could be convinced it would not abort a fertilized egg.

In a statement issued in response to CNN, the governor argues: "If a pharmacy decides to be in the business of selling contraceptives, then it must fill its customers' prescriptions for contraceptives in the same way. Women should have the same access to health care as men."

(on camera): You would rather get out of the business than carry it?

VANDER BLEEK: That's correct.

FREED: You feel that strongly about it?

VANDER BLEEK: I feel that strongly about it.

FREED (voice-over): If he loses his legal fight, Vander Bleek says he might even move to another state.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Holy Savior, thou art the living bread.

FREED: A state he would consider more tolerant of his moral convictions.

Jonathan Freed, CNN, Morrison, Illinois.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: In some respects, this fight goes back a long time. As recently as 1965, and for some of us that is not that long ago, states could actually ban residents from buying or using any kind of contraceptive. It took a Supreme Court ruling to change that. It may eventually take a different court in a much different time to decide the line between a pharmacist's conscience and the customer's right to a legal and available product.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): As a mother and first-grade teacher, Julee Lacey is always ready for the unexpected. But she didn't expect the unexpected when she went to the drug store for birth control pills.

JULEE LACEY, DENIED BIRTH CONTROL PRESCRIPTION: The pharmacist came to the window and she said, "I'm so sorry but I'm not going to be able to fill your prescription." And I said, "oh, really?" And I couldn't believe, you know, what she was saying, because I thought something was wrong with the prescription, or, you know, my doctor maybe had made a mistake or something.

BROWN: Not a medical issue. To the druggist, a moral one.

LACEY: She said, nothing's wrong with your prescription. I just personally do not believe in any kind of birth control, and therefore, I will not fill your prescription.

BROWN: The results were no better when her husband tried.

LACEY: He said, you know, we need our prescription, and she said, well, you know, I've already, you know, said I'm not going to fill it. I don't believe in birth control.

BROWN: Pharmacists denying to fill legitimate prescriptions is becoming more common all the time. Birth control pills sometimes, the morning-after pill sometimes, anything the druggist might oppose.

MARCIA GREENBERGER, NATIONAL WOMEN'S LAW CENTER: We have even seen, over the last several years, 28 bills being introduced all around the country to give pharmacists the right to refuse to fill any prescription if, in the pharmacist's view, it's in opposition to that pharmacist's moral beliefs.

BROWN: The policy of the American Pharmacist Association is that pharmacists can refuse to fill a prescription only if the pharmacist refers the customer to somewhere else and refrains from making moral lectures.

LLOYD DUPLANTIS, PHARMACISTS FOR LIFE: We ask you to help us to bless those that you sent to us, help us to be a blessing to them, and help them to be a blessing to us. BROWN: Lloyd Duplantis, a devout Catholic, starts the day at his pharmacy in Gray, Louisiana with a prayer.

DUPLANTIS: I don't have any contraceptives here. I specifically opened up the store so I could avoid that area of practice.

BROWN: Duplantis is a member of the Pharmacists for Life, an advocacy group supporting this issue. He says that based on his own research, he believes contraceptives are dangerous, and that he's obliged to protect his clientele.

DUPLANTIS: We are the bottom line. We have to make the final decision, because it's our name goes on that label.

BROWN: And the Julee Laceys of the world are caught in the middle of the never-ending right-to-life/abortion/birth control debate.

LACEY: I trust my care, as well as my family's care, to our physicians. And I think that's important to be able to -- for any American that has a prescription to be able to confidently walk into a pharmacist and know that their prescription will be filled.

BROWN: CVS eventually delivered Julie Lacey's birth control pills to her home the next day, and delivered an apology as well.

But Ms. Lacey continues to speak out on the issue, just as Lloyd Duplantis continues not to prescribe contraception. Distinct voices in a debate that shows no sign of ending.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: We asked CVS to comment on Julee Lacey's case. A spokesman telling CNN that what happened to her was an isolated incident, that it does not reflect CVS policy in Texas or around the country.

Now, this will get your attention. In a survey commissioned by the clothing maker Liz Claiborne, one in four teenagers say they've been involved in an abusive relationship. Thirteen percent of teenage girls say they've either been hit or otherwise physically injured by a boyfriend. Abuse, it turns out, is learned -- learned young and too often overlooked. Here's CNN's Kelli Arena.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KELLI ARENA, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Nicci Avey is two weeks shy of her 17th birthday.

NICCI AVEY, DATE ABUSE VICTIM: What party?

ARENA: She's an outgoing teenager who seems carefree on the surface. But Nicci is battling the emotional scars of abuse, abuse at the hands of a boyfriend.

NICCI AVEY: He has pushed me so hard that it pushed me and rolled me off the couch. So I was laying in the middle of the living room floor, and he came over there and he picked me up by my hair, dragged me to the stairs and started choking me.

ARENA: Nicci, who was 15 at the time, said that she was hit so hard, one of her tear ducts was permanently damaged.

NICCI AVEY: When he had hit me in kind of my jaw area, he busted my right tear duct. I'm not able to cry out of this eye anymore.

ARENA: In the beginning, crying was the last thing Nicci worried about. The relationship seemed like every young girl's dream.

NICCI AVEY: He, you know, made me laugh, which put a smile on my face, which every girl wants. And he was charming.

ARENA: But Nicci says her ex-boyfriend, who was 17 then, became very controlling and insulting, telling her to lose weight and how to dress. He also stopped her from spending time with her friends. Still, she stayed with him for five months.

NICCI AVEY: I just thought that's how a relationship was supposed to be, because I hadn't had many before him.

ARENA: Nicci's mother says she didn't know about the violence at first, but eventually helped her daughter get a court protective order.

NANCY AVEY, NICCI'S MOM: I felt somewhat betrayed by the boy and I felt helpless, totally helpless when she told us.

ARENA (on camera): Nicci's grades dropped dramatically during her ordeal. Previously an "A" student, she was failing miserably. So a counselor at her high school put her in touch with an organization called SafePlace. There, she learned her situation was not at all unique, that her ex-boyfriend's controlling behavior was a common and dangerous pattern.

Katherine Barnhill is Nicci's counselor.

KATHERINE BARNHILL, SAFEPLACE COUNSELOR: I think a lot of people say, oh, it won't happen to my kid because we're supportive. You know, my husband and I have been married for 30 years. I mean, I've seen teens where they have great, supportive parents and this still happens, because I think the behaviors become so accepted among their peers.

ARENA: SafePlace sends counselors into middle and high schools to teach kids that date abuse is not acceptable.

BARNHILL: People don't realize they have this problem on their campus. It's not that I think people see it and ignore it, necessarily. I think it's that people are in denial that this even happens to young teens.

ARENA: That's exactly what happened to Rae Spence, who says school administrators, students, and even the courts ignored her pleas for help.

RAE SPENCE, DATE ABUSE VICTIM: They didn't see it as a problem at all. Actually, one time, told my parents I was instigating it, that if I, you know, wanted this to stop, I should get away, like I could control what he did to me.

ARENA: When Rae, who was 15 at the time, transferred out of her high school to get away, her ex-boyfriend moved on to victimize a girl named Atrolla Mosely (ph) and ended up stabbing her to death. He later pled guilty.

SPENCE: It could have been me. It very well could have. I mean, I was with him for a year.

ARENA: Nino Flores says that he understands the rage young men sometimes feel and is convinced that if he didn't get help from the counselors at SafePlace, he would have become violent himself.

NINO FLORES, STUDENT: Just taking my anger out on everybody, you know what I'm saying? Not just my partner, just everybody, because if I didn't have anybody nobody to talk to and express my feelings, I would have so much rage inside of me just wanting to come out.

ARENA: Date violence is a national health problem, so much so that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention produced a video aimed at 11 to 14-year-olds.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: If your boyfriend starts telling you that it's not important to hang out with your family anymore and that it's more important to hang out with him, that's the biggest warning sign ever.

ARENA: The campaign might come too late for kids like Nicci, but she's determined to speak out.

NICCI AVEY: It's going to be hard, but there is help out there and you can do it. You just gotta be strong. You gotta know that there is light on the other side. It may not seem like it, but there is.

ARENA: The words of a girl forced to grow up much too quickly, who wants to be part of the solution.

Kelli Arena, CNN, Austin, Texas.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Still ahead tonight, what some major airlines are doing to keep from drowning in gred -- ah, red ink. That story in a couple of minutes, but first, as we approach a quarter past the hour, Erica Hill joins us from Atlanta with the night's headlines. Good evening, Miss Hill.

ERICA HILL, HEADLINE NEWS: Good evening, Mr. Brown.

We start off with President Bush who is pressuring Congress to make all 16 provisions of the Patriot Act permanent. Now, they're set to expire at the end of the year. The president urged Congress to renew the Patriot Act today while he was speaking to state troopers in Ohio. Mr. Bush credits the law with helping prosecutors convict more than 200 suspects on charges relating to terrorism, but critics say many parts of the Patriot Act -- or rather, most of those convictions were minor and counter that some provisions of the Patriot Act violate civil rights.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, attending a NATO meeting in Belgium today, spoke about Guantanamo Bay and the U.S. prison there. He says the Pentagon's goal is that the detainees would eventually be held in their own countries. Human rights groups claim prisoners have been abused at Gitmo.

In Santa Fe, New Mexico, police say they now think Tommy Hook wasn't beaten up to keep him from testifying about alleged financial irregularities at the Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons lab. Hook claims he was attacked by several men who told him to keep his mouth shut. Police, though, believe he was actually injured in a fight that happened after he backed into someone in the parking lot of a bar.

And in Los Angeles, 13 sheriffs deputies are facing disciplinary action now for firing more than 100 shots last month at an unarmed driver, all in the case of mistaken identity. The incident was caught on videotape. The vehicle matched the description of a car thought to be involved in a shooting. The driver was hit by four bullets. He did survive, though, and was later found to have not been involved in that incident.

And, that's the latest from Headline News, Aaron. Back to you.

BROWN: All things are caught on videotape these days. Thank you.

HILL: Yes, be careful.

BROWN: Talk to you in half an hour.

Straight ahead on the program, airlines bleeding red ink. Tourniquets are everywhere, in case you hadn't noticed.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You're cutting your labor force and you're cutting the jobs and you're cutting the wages and you're cutting the pension funds. If you don't do these things, they may not save you a tremendous amount of money. You're going to run into problems with your employees.

BROWN: And they are. Cutting back on pretzels and a whole lot more, but will it be enough?

MIKE LORINO, BAR PILOT: Highly volatile cargo travels this river 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

BROWN: A target for terrorism, more than 2,000 miles long, so who's guarding it?

ROMEO DALLAIRE, FORMER U.N. PEACEKEEPING FORCE COMMANDER, RWANDA: When I left Rwanda 11 years ago, I said that I'd keep the Rwandan genocide alive.

BROWN: And he has.

PETER RAYMONT, DIRECTOR: He stayed there. He saved lives. He witnessed and he's here to tell the story through his book and through this film.

BROWN: A remarkable film about one man's struggle to make a difference in the face of evil.

From New York, and around the world, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DAN QUAYLE: CNN, happy 25th anniversary.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: There was a time when you got all dressed up to fly. The first flight I ever took, Minneapolis to Winnipeg in about 1955, you had a choice, steak or lobster. That was coach. Today, you also have a choice, diet or regular soda. That's still free, though, it may not be for long.

Back when they were cooking steak and lobster, the airlines were regulated and flying was expensive. Today, flying is cheap, if you shop, and largely unregulated, which is great for consumers and horrible, really horrible, for airlines, at least the old airlines, the ones still in business if only barely.

Here's CNN's Allan Chernoff.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ALLAN CHERNOFF, CORRESPONDENT: Pretzels, a dollar. A couple of magazines, eight bucks. Just dealing with the new reality of flying coach on Northwest. By making us, the passengers, buy our own pretzels and magazines, the airline is going to save $2.5 million a year. That's peanuts for a major airline. Analysts say these cutbacks are symbolic. Northwest is asking employees for another $800 million a year in cost savings after they agreed to a $300 million cut just last year.

JOHN PINCAVAGE, AIRLINE ANALYST: They have to do this because when you're cutting your labor force, and you're cutting your -- the jobs, and you're cutting the -- cutting the wages, and you're cutting the pension funds, the problem you have is, is that if you don't do these things, you're going to run into problems with your employees. CHERNOFF: Passengers, however don't seem to care about pretzels. They just want low fares.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't travel for the food, or the pillow, or the blanket. You know, not crazy about it, but it doesn't bother me.

CHERNOFF: And low fares are something discounters like jetBlue are prepared to deliver. They've got younger, more fuel-efficient fleets. Their employees work for less and put in longer hours. While Northwest spends $15.40 to fly a passenger 100 miles, jetBlue's cost is only $6.50.

That really helps the bottom line when the cost of fuel is sky high, and helps explain why the discounters are sending older airlines into a financial tailspin. Northwest is drenched in red ink. United and U.S. Airways are operating under bankruptcy protection.

Running an airline has always been tough. Since 1938, the industry as a whole has actually lost $14 billion. But these days, it's especially hard.

PINCAVAGE: Either you are low fare, low cost or you aren't, and if you aren't, you've got to try to become that.

CHERNOFF: Those that are not are searching everywhere for places to cut costs.

Airlines are saving money in ways that we can't even see. While taxing on the runway, they're using only one engine and some routes have become shorter as well. Have a look. From New York to Hong Kong, planes used to fly over Alaska, across the Bering Strait, past Japan and finally to Hong Kong. But now, U.S. airlines can fly over Russian and Chinese air space, meaning from New York, they can up head toward the pole, make a horseshoe all the way down to Hong Kong, a route that saves 2,000 miles.

They're outsourcing maintenance work, often overseas, and flying airplanes longer. That has the Transportation Department worried about safety, according to a new government report. But even with all these cutbacks, some airlines may simply not make it.

BOB CRANDALL, FORMER CEO, AMERICAN AIRLINES: This whole notion of airlines lingering in bankruptcy, they should be liquidated and some of the capacity will go away.

CHERNOFF: Indeed, analysts say, some of today's best-known airlines may be headed for the same fate as legendary airlines of the past. Like Eastern, TWA, and Pan Am.

Allan Chernoff, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: There's an old saying that when some investment you own ends up on the cover of "Time" magazine, it's time to sell. This week, the magazine put real estate on the cover, so look out. The fed chairman, Alan Greenspan, indicated today that while soaring real estate isn't exactly the internet bubble with a backyard, there are markets in the country where the frenzy of rising prices is a froth, which, if you don't speak economics, is not good.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ALAN GREENSPAN, FEDERAL RESERVE CHAIRMAN: Although a bubble in home prices for the nation as a whole does not appear likely, there do appear to be at a minimum, signs of froth in some local markets where home prices seem to have risen to unsustainable levels.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: As for what happens when that froth loses its froth, the fed chairman said the larger economy will be able to handle it, and maybe you will too.

Just ahead, the Army's latest answer on the death of Pat Tillman and why it took the Army so long to get out the truth.

And later, the new pope. To borrow a phrase from an old mayor, how's he doing? We'll hear from one of the sharpest Vatican watchers in the business, but we take a break first. Around the world, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: The Army today had another answer for the family of Corporal Pat Tillman, a fresh denial that it tried to cover up the circumstances of his death in Afghanistan. Corporal Tillman, you'll recall, was killed by friendly fire, but the Pentagon waited for weeks before telling the true account. This, while the Tillman family believed that his death came at the hands of the enemy, the initial reporting.

"It is true," the Army said in a statement today, "that neither the family nor the public were notified immediately of the suspicion of friendly fire, and the follow-on investigation. This was due to the fact," the statement goes on to say, "that the operationally deployed unit did not immediately notify the department out of a desire to complete the investigation and garner all available facts."

What all those words seem to mean is the Army says it never deliberately tried to deceive either the family or you.

At the Vatican today, Pope Benedict XVI met with an international group of Jewish leaders. The pope says he's committed to carrying on the work of his predecessor, John Paul II, in fighting anti-semitism and improving relations between Catholics and Jews, one rabbi describing the meeting as warm.

When John Paul died in April and Benedict was elected his successor, CNN called on the expertise of Vatican reporters and analysts, one of them John Allen of the "National Catholic Reporter." Talk about quick work -- since the new pope's election, Mr. Allen has written a new book, "The Rise of Pope Benedict XVI." And, we talked to John the other day.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: When last I saw you, we were in the midst of this outpouring for John Paul II. How did the international reaction to John Paul's death affect, if at all, the selection of Cardinal Ratzinger to become hope?

JOHN ALLEN, AUTHOR "THE RISE OF POPE BENEDICT XVI": Oh, I think it was hugely important, because, you know, Aaron, the thing is, we're already for getting now, the election of Joseph Ratzinger seems the most obvious thing in the world, you know, the man who was the pope's right hand for 24 years, a man of great intelligence, theological preparation.

But, actually, that election violated every bit of conventional wisdom that exists about who should get elected pope. I mean, the guy was too old. He was a northern European. He came out of the papal bureaucracy. He didn't have much pastoral experience. He was too controversial. All of those reasons should have meant that his election was virtually unthinkable but it happened in just four ballots.

So, something obviously changed to create a new context, and I think what changed is what I've come to call the funeral effect. I mean, precisely those moments that you're talking about, that vast out-pouring, not just of humanity...

BROWN: Why, though? What was it about that that said, yeah, Cardinal Ratzinger's the guy?

ALLEN: Because the cardinals, those 115 men who elected the pope, came to understand, in a way they hadn't before, that they had to elect a person of substance, who would not be crushed by the weight of comparison to the man he was following. In other words, it wasn't just enough to find a smiling, pastoral, holy figure. They had to find someone of deep intelligence, someone of political vision, someone of personal substance.

BROWN: He has, in a short time, the new pope, I think, confirmed in many respects what we knew about him. The editor of a progressive American Catholic magazine, fired.

ALLEN: Right.

BROWN: Birth control opposition, artificial birth control, opposition to divorce, opposition to living together, opposition to gay marriage, of course. And they're doing battle in Italy on this referendum about -- it's complicated, but at its core is in vitro fertilization. So he's doing as we expected him to do, fair?

ALLEN: Well, on those issues, sure. I mean, I don't think it was any mystery that Joseph Ratzinger on these sort of hot-button culture war issues was going to take a tenaciously conservative line.

BROWN: Is he doing things differently than we thought he would do, on anything?

ALLEN: Yeah, I think so.

BROWN: What?

ALLEN: Well, I think first of all, I think his ecumenical outreach, that is these efforts to kind of reunite the divided Christian family are a lot more prominent than we thought they would be. The one thing that the Catholic right has been expecting from day one is the great purge. And other than the Reese case, which actually dates before Benedict's election as pope, there hasn't been a single disciplinary move in his pontificate. Moreover, if you read everything he's said so far, which is about 50,000 words of stuff, the overwhelming thrust of it has been positive.

And finally, I think he's been surprisingly collegial, collegial in the Catholic sense, meaning somebody who doesn't need to put the press of his personality in absolutely everything that happens in the Vatican. I mean, if you take his trip to Bari last week, his first trip outside of Rome, you know, he got on a chopper, he went down, he spent three hours on the ground to celebrate mass, and he went home. He was not the star of the show, in the way that John Paul II certainly would have been.

BROWN: I said to you once, my sense is that you get selected pope, but you become pope over a period of time and a period, in fact, of years. Do you think you know yet what kind of pope he will be?

ALLEN: This is not a pope who needs a lot of on-the-job training. I mean, this is a man who has been at the center of power in the Catholic Church for a quarter century, with a front row seat for watching the pontificate of John Paul II, and he has a very clear vision already developed about where he wants his papacy to go.

So in that sense, I think these first 50 days, he's hit the ground running in a way that few popes ever do.

BROWN: It's nice to see you. I don't know what took you so long to get the book out, but, you know, it's taken me 56 years to come up with an idea; you crank one out in about 10 days. Nice to have you with us.

ALLEN: Aaron, always a pleasure. You're a class act.

BROWN: Thank you very much.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: John Allen.

Next on the program, bearing witness to the unbearable. How a man who lived through the genocide in Rwanda lives with what he saw.

And later, they are the first and in many cases the only line of defense against terrorism on the waterfront. From Maine to the Big Muddy and beyond. This is NEWSNIGHT. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Eleven years ago, the United Nations sent a Canadian, Romeo Dallaire, to Rwanda to command a small number of troops whose job it was to stop the killing that much of the world did not yet know about. It was an impossible mission.

What General Dallaire experienced in Rwanda has haunted him. He spent years reliving the horrors and making peace with the inner demons. His story is the focus of a new film, "Shake Hands With the Devil." Our "Newsdoc" feature tonight.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

PETER RAYMONT, DIRECTOR, "SHAKE HANDS WITH THE DEVIL": The Rwandan genocide is not very well known. Eight hundred thousand people died in 100 days. And General Dallaire was at the center of it. And I thought that the most useful way to draw people into this very important story was to do it through the eyes and experiences of the general who commanded the U.N. troops at the time.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Heavy fighting has broken out around the capital of Rwanda, hours after the president died in a plane crash.

GEN. ROMEO DALLAIRE (RET.), COMMANDER, U.N. PEACEKEEPING FORCE, RWANDA: It became evident within about the third day that this was expanding. And the Belgians and everybody else decided to pack it in and to simply pull out their expatriates. From that day on, we knew what what we would be able to do at best is bear witness, attempt to stop the fighting, so cease-fires, attempt to save as many as we could, because we ended up with about 30,000 in our small little enclaves.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Do you think the worst of it's over now as far as civilian deaths?

DALLAIRE: I'd be at a loss to tell you if it is, because every day we hear about another horror story here or another mortar bomb dropped, wipe out a whole bunch.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So he actually approached reporters, and Mark Doyle of BBC was the most classic example of a guy who accepted; he said, if you stay on the ground, we'll water you, we'll feed you, we'll protect you. I really don't care what you report, but I want you to file a story a day, and I'll ensure that it gets out.

DALLAIRE: I shifted then from trying to convince the U.N. and the structures of government directly to the media.

A journalist once asked me, what in the hell are you doing here? I mean, why are you staying? And I blurted out, I said, if I can save one Rwandan, then it's worth it. And the journalist said, yeah, but there are tens of thousands being slaughtered every day. And I said, then maybe if I can be a witness.

RAYMONT: He stayed there. He saved lives. He witnessed. And he's here to tell the story through his book and through this film. I think that people can identify with someone like the general, can get to know and understand this very complex, horrific situation through this one man's experience.

DALLAIRE: There were two occasions where I met with the interahamwe leaders, and when I shook their hands, their hands were cold. But they weren't cold as a temperature; they were cold as if another body -- although they had a human form, their eyes were not human. Their eyes were reflecting the most evil that I could ever imagine.

When I left Rwanda 11 years ago, I said that I'd keep the Rwandan genocide alive. The 10th anniversary was last year, in 2004. And I had an opportunity to return.

The whole place has changed.

Over the 10 days, it was both a mixture of formal meetings, formal venues, to which I was invited as one of the VIPs, and a lot of the other was simply returning 10 years later and taking a look at the people, at the infrastructure, the sites.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Remember this place?

DALLAIRE: Yes, sir, very much.

One place I absolutely wanted to go was to the University of Butare, which is the national university. When you speak, university campuses are excellent venues. The original plan was to just meet with a class. The morning we arrived, there were so many people interested that we did it in a stadium. And there was over 7,000 people.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): Standing here, I say to you that Romeo Dallaire, as force commander...

RAYMONT: We all have a responsibility as citizens of the world, if we really do believe in this notion of a global village, of a global community, of mutual security, we should reach out to the Rwandans today.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: The film, again, is "Shake Hands With the Devil."

Ahead on the program, some of the other news of the day, and then a river of opportunity, more than 2,000 miles long. A liquid highway for hazardous cargo. So who's keeping watch? We are. This is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: In a moment, guarding against terrorism on the Mississippi. But first, at a quarter to the hour, almost exactly, time for other headlines of the day. Erica Hill in Atlanta with that. Good evening, again. HILL: Good evening to you. And like you said, very on time tonight.

BROWN: Thank you.

HILL: No, thank you.

We start off with a warning tonight, to war crimes fugitive General Radko Mladic: Your days are numbered. That coming from a State Department official, who said the Bosnian Serb military commander may soon be captured. Now, the State Department official also announced the U.S. is lifting its freeze on a $10 million aid package to Serbia Montenegro. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns saying he hopes Mladic will surrender and be on trial by July 11th. That is the 10-year anniversary of the slaughter at Srebrenica; 8,000 men and boys were killed in Europe's worst massacre since World War II. Burns told leaders in Belgrave, extraditing Mladic would also help the country's chances of joining the European Union and NATO.

Near Conroe, Texas today, a twin engine plane crashes into and ignites this home. The pilot was killed. The house destroyed in the fire. It was unoccupied at the time. No word yet on the cause of the crash. We do know that it happened shortly after takeoff, and there was no radio contact with the pilot.

And the Consumer Products Safety Commission may tighten restrictions on all-terrain vehicles. It's looking at them following a rise in injuries and deaths among kids riding them. ATVs, we should point out, are not designed for children, but it turns out riders under 16 account for a third of all deaths and injuries. And the number of ATVs being used is also up, doubling to an estimated 6,000 between 1998 and 2003.

There's been a lot of pressure, Aaron, to -- for them to look at those guidelines, those safety guidelines much more closely.

BROWN: (INAUDIBLE) would say that too. They also shouldn't talk on cell phones when they're doing that.

HILL: Probably not the best idea. Yeah.

BROWN: Thank you, see you tomorrow.

Human nature being what it is, sexy gets attention, even when sober ought to prevail. Sexy is Ebola; the flu is not. Sexy is a tiny Cessna buzzing the White House. Sober and sobering is the fact that 2,300-mile stretch of the American heartland, lined with people and vital to the economy goes largely unprotected from terrorism. Largely, but not entirely. From the Mississippi River Delta and on the "Security Watch" tonight, CNN's Jeanne Meserve.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JEANNE MESERVE, CNN HOMELAND SECURITY CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Long before sun-up, the Southwest House pilots station is cooking.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's a Monday morning. You automatically have red beans, because that's a tradition.

MESERVE: The men who work here live here for two weeks at a stretch.

The pilots station is a small village on stilts, situated at the remote southernmost stretch of the Mississippi. The pilots' job is to meet every ship entering or exiting the river at the Gulf of Mexico.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, Captain, this is the pilot boat. We're on our way out to you now. What's your distance and speed from the buoy, please?

MESERVE: There is a bit of the daredevil in the river pilots. They scale the sides of massive moving ships on rope ladders to help navigate the vessels through the shifting shoals and the narrow channel at the entrance to the Mississippi.

The pilots are in most cases the first Americans to board incoming ships. They're not government employees, but they provide by default a first thin line of defense for the river.

There is a lot to protect.

(on camera): In the first 250 miles of this river, there are five ports, including three that rank among the largest in the country.

(voice-over): In centuries past, Mississippi steamboats carried cotton, not tourists. But the once mighty plantations are relics now, and the river is lined instead with chemical plants and petroleum refineries. Ships and barges haul millions of tons of products to and from those facilities, including highly toxic chemicals, like ammonia, chlorine and benzene, and flammable materials like propane and liquefied natural gas.

The roster at the pilots house show what ships coming into the river are carrying.

CAPT. MIKE LORINO, BAR PILOT: There's a lot of dangerous products -- crude oil, chemical tankers, and whatever is in the containers.

MESERVE: The ships are arriving from all over the world with foreign crews.

(on camera): The Coast Guard looking at any of these, as far as you can tell?

LORINO: The Coast Guard is not looking at any of these, as far as I can tell.

MESERVE (voice-over): The Coast Guard does scrutinize crew lists and cargo manifests, and boards ships offshore that it classifies as high interest. But Mike Lorino, a pilot for 30 years, says the Coast Guard is overwhelmed.

LORINO: They do a great job with what they have.

MESERVE (on camera): Which isn't enough?

LORINO: Which isn't enough. They need more. They need more.

MESERVE (voice-over): A terrorist attack on a ship carrying dangerous cargo could cause environmental havoc at the southwest pass.

But 100 miles upriver, where the Mississippi flows through the city of New Orleans, there is a potential for massive loss of life.

LORINO: Highly, highly volatile cargo travels this river 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

MESERVE: As Mike Lorino watches 170-foot-wide ships squeeze past one another in the 600-foot-wide passage, he voices another fear, that a terrorist could simply turn a wheel and cause a collision, potentially shutting down the entire river.

LORINO: It would be an economic catastrophe to the United States.

MESERVE: Lorino loves the Mississippi for its lore and the livelihood it gives him. He says security has improved significantly. Though more could be done, ultimately, he admits, the volume of river traffic and the Mississippi's sheer size make it impossible to protect it absolutely.

LORINO: The only way to secure it would be not let any ships come in the Mississippi River, and that's not going to happen.

MESERVE: So Lorino keeps his eyes and ears open when he boards, looking for threats. But hoping the water never brings them this way.

Jeanne Meserve, CNN, on the southwest passage.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: An Alfred Hitchcock film comes to life. That's one of the "Morning Paper" headlines after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: OK. Time to check morning papers from around the country and around the world. I was distracted during the break by some disquieting news, but I'll get it together here.

"Christian Science Monitor." Over here, please, Ed. "Close encounters of the fluttering kind: A rise in bird attacks." This is not an attack on a bird; this is birds attacking humans, like in "The Birds," the Alfred Hitchcock movie, which has terrified me for 35, 40 years. I won't go into a phone booth if there's a crow around. Anyway, it's actually happening. Apologize to the birds. Whatever we did, we're sorry.

"Can't mask fanaticism," "San Antonio Express News." San Antonio Spurs and the Detroit Pistons playing ball in the NBA finals finally. And the game is tied unless you're watching the replay, in which case the game is over.

"The Washington Times," down at the bottom, this is too weird. "Aide orchestrates new power plan for pontiff, draws notice for being beautiful." The pope's number two is described as a handsome, tall, blond, sporty, like the pope's secretary, a Bavarian himself. The best news out of the Vatican of late.

"The Daily News" is into more substance, thankfully. "Gumfella: Toothless jailed Mafia boss wants furlough to get dentures." This is why there are tabloids, OK? Dominick "Quiet Dom" -- well, sure he's quiet, he's got no teeth, can't talk -- Cirillo wants out of jail so he can get a bridge.

"UAW OK's talks to help GM." That's "The Detroit News." We like that story.

And the weather in Chicago tomorrow, if you're in that area -- I don't like that you guys, OK? "Helter swelter" is the weather.

We'll wrap it up in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BRUCE MORTON, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): This week in history, allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy in 1944 in the D-Day invasion of World War II.

Secretariat wins the Triple Crown of horse racing in 1973.

And in 1987, President Ronald Reagan delivers a memorable speech at Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin.

RONALD REAGAN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Tear down this wall!

MORTON: And that is "This Week in History."

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Pretty good week. Pretty good week here too. We'll see you tomorrow. Good night for all of us.

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