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Buildup in Persian Gulf Continues; U.N. Inspectors Do Not Find Smoking Gun in Iraq; Bush's Economic Plan to Be Tested on Wall Street

Aired January 10, 2003 - 10:00   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.


BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Welcome to CNN's SATURDAY EDITION, where our journalists have the inside scoop on the stories we covered this week. I'm Barbara Starr.
The U.S. military puts more machines and muscle in and around the Persian Gulf. The latest on the strategy and the timetable for possible war.

LIZ NEISLOSS, CNN PRODUCER: I'm Liz Neisloss in New York. United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq say they haven't found the smoking gun. So what's next in the search that may spell uneasy peace or war?

DANA BASH, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: I'm Dana Bash. For President Bush, a new Congress and challenges to push new policies and some old nominations.

KATHLEEN HAYS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: I'm Kathleen Hays. The Bush economic plan delivered big headlines, but the real test on Wall Street and Main Street has just begun.

ANDREA KOPPEL, CNN STATE DEPARTMENT CORRESPONDENT: And I'm Andrea Koppel. The Bush administration continues its high-stakes diplomacy on two fronts -- Iraq and North Korea.

We'll talk about all these stories, and I'll talk about a story that's often overlooked -- drought and famine in Africa, where I spent the New Year's holiday. Plus, we'll listen to the president's weekly radio address at the bottom of the hour, but first, a check on what's making headlines right now from CNN headquarters in Atlanta.

(NEWSBREAK)

STARR: Well, the military brass at the Pentagon keeps reminding anyone who will listen that it is President Bush's decision whether to wage war. But the military is getting ready.

Just yesterday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a deployment order to send 35,000 more U.S. troops to the region. And we were reminded that war preparations are under way. The movement of ships, planes, heavy equipment, men and women is very visible to both friend and foe.

And the order was signed last night, but there may be a few questions, as we all know, just lurking under the horizon about the timing of this entire possible war in Iraq.

HAYS: Yes. How concerned are they about the fact that a number of the allies, key allies like Turkey and Saudi Arabia, don't seem to be on board yet?

STARR: This week it seems, both I think at the State Department and the Pentagon, to have taken a slightly different tone. The U.K., France are both saying, "Hey, let's let the weapons inspectors do their job."

Turkey, very, very important, has yet to give the U.S. the authority to base thousands of troops in Turkey for the possible move into northern Iraq. If the U.S. can't get Turkish basing rights, it's going to complicate the war-planning a great deal.

HAYS: Does it complicate whether we have the war we're supposed to have, late January, early February? That's been the word for so long, "Do it in the winter, do it now." Is there any chance that that whole thing gets thrown off?

STARR: Well, it's really interesting, Kathleen, because the calendar is ticking away every day for the president and for the U.S. military. They are sending troops over there, but can't leave them there forever. You can't leave people in the desert. Equipment has to be maintained...

(CROSSTALK)

STARR: Absolutely. So one of the things that is very much happening underneath the surface is what they call a phased deployment. They're going to send some people. They're going to see what happens with Saddam Hussein. Then they'll send more people. Then they'll see what happens with Saddam Hussein.

They have some hope -- we keep hearing the phrase, "Maybe we can win this war without firing a shot." That's a very vague hope at this point. But phase it all in and maybe they don't have to have 100,000 troops sit there until they decide what to do.

NEISLOSS: With all this talk about deployment, one question that's raised is the draft, which was an issue I guess raised by Congressman Rangel this week. How was that thought received, the idea that, hey, we've got to spread the burden out among classes, among races? What was the reaction to that?

STARR: Well, there were a lot of questions, Liz, at the Pentagon about this issue this past week. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs addressed it, and they really put a stake through it.

It's an economic issue these days. It's just -- their feeling is, in today's economy, it makes no sense, it's not practical to compel people to serve in the military, spend all of that money training them for what, two or three years of service, and then they leave, and they you have to bring in more people and train them. Much more economic these days to bring people in, train them, let them have a 10-, 20-year career.

It was something that didn't work terribly well back in Vietnam, and they really have no intention of doing it now.

BASH: Barbara, I want to ask you about a fascinating story that you broke yesterday about this e-mail, kind of, system that the Pentagon is employing to try to get into the Iraqi military. What are they doing?

STARR: Well, you know, that's -- it was fascinating story. We keep hearing about 21st century warfare, but these days it's really turning out to be, you know, bits, bytes, computers, the e-mail, the Internet as much as bombs and bullets.

The Pentagon basically spammed Saddam Hussein and all his top...

(LAUGHTER)

... his top associates.

BASH: That's one way to do it.

STARR: They -- within the last 48 hours, they have sent thousands of e-mails into e-mail addresses inside Iraq. Basically, the Pentagon is taking on the role of Tokyo Rose.

KOPPEL: And what do they say?

STARR: They are trying to demoralize the Iraqis. They are sending messages saying, "Don't stick with Saddam. You can't win. Defect now. And here's the..."

HAYS: Are they getting any replies?

(LAUGHTER)

STARR: Well, that's what we don't know at the moment. They are instructing people, if they want to defect, to contact the U.N. in Baghdad. Saddam is not likely to be terribly amused.

(CROSSTALK)

(LAUGHTER)

HAYS: I'm struck by the fact that Saddam's society is open enough that he hasn't put parental controls on everybody's e-mail, quite seriously, to block things.

STARR: Well, this was why this -- this is exactly why this was a very surreptitious, covert operation, because they knew -- again, it's something they have to think about these days -- once Saddam found out, he would have the Internet gateway into Iraq shut down. There is every reason to believe he has now done that, but at least they got their initial message out.

And now they're going to in the next -- we know now that they will start broadcasting radio messages into Iraq with these same efforts to demoralize. It's called psychological warfare. It's a really valuable tool if it works. It remains to be seen if it will.

KOPPEL: What's the sense that you get, in terms of the folks that you were talking with over at the Pentagon, as to what the likelihood that they think is that this will either cause some sort of palace coup or that somebody will, you know, kill Saddam Hussein because of this...

STARR: Well, you know, I think you and I -- you cover the State Department, I cover the Pentagon -- we hear much of the same thing. The unknown, really, in all of this is will the Iraqi people, will the Iraqi military ever turn away from Saddam?

What I hear is that the intelligence isn't very solid on that. They just don't know.

KOPPEL: Exactly. He's managed to layer himself with so many of his fellow Tikritans from his home town and gives them so much and so many benefits, that the chances of their trying to kill him are very slim.

STARR: But it did...

NEISLOSS: Right, and I have heard many analysts say that any chance the average Iraqi could get to actually kill the guy, they would, if only they could get to him.

But, you know, any road to war will pass through the United Nations headquarters in New York. And U.N. inspectors reported this week on their search for Iraq's weapons. We'll have more on that when SATURDAY EDITION returns.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HANS BLIX, CHIEF U.N. WEAPONS INSPECTOR: The resolutions do not put a time limit of that kind. We are -- have now been there for some two months and been covering the country in ever-wider sweeps, and we haven't found any smoking guns, no.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

NEISLOSS: That's chief United Nations arms inspector Hans Blix with what was basically the soundbite of the week: No smoking gun found by weapons inspectors so far.

Welcome back to CNN's SATURDAY EDITION.

Blix was also saying, you know, he has no looming deadline. This search, he thinks, is going to go on for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

But Blix made it clear Iraq isn't exactly getting straight A's in this ongoing test. He did make it clear in his meeting with the Security Council, "Look, 12,000 pages are showing growing gaps," as they continue to comb. And they are not getting new information. He said, rather than new information, these documents are really devoid of evidence.

HAYS: Well, Liz, fill us in then on what kind of evidence isn't there that Blix and the inspectors think should be there. What's missing?

NEISLOSS: Well, they did give some hints, actually, this week inside the Security Council. Hans Blix talked about the need to still answer questions about VX. He said Iraq admitted having missile engines, importing them, material for making missile engine fuel. He talked about biological agents that still hadn't been accounted for.

And the nuclear weapons counterpart, Mohamed Elbaradei -- that's Blix's counterpart on nuclear weapons -- basically said, "Look, there are many questions still unanswered."

And we also are finding an interesting thing related to something called HMX, which is high melting explosive. This is something that could be used to trigger a dirty bomb, a nuclear bomb, an explosive device. The Iraqis say, "We're using this for commercial mining purposes."

KOPPEL: You know, Liz, it's as if -- or almost as if Blix took a page out of Colin Powell's playbook. This is what I'm hearing behind the scenes, that Colin Powell is really preparing the way. You heard him this week say, you know, "The inspections are working. We are starting to give them intelligence. Let's see."

What I'm being told is, come January 27th, you're going to hear the administration say, "Let's give inspections more time to work, and containment is working, and to disarm Saddam."

NEISLOSS: Well, that was pretty much the political change that we saw, a little bit of a shift this week. That January 27th date, which the U.S. has really been pitching as the drop date, the decision date, on how, whether to go to war.

Now the diplomats seem to be kind of slowing down. I think one British diplomat put it best. He said, "Let's calm down about the 27th." I think there's a lot of push now to make it clear it's just another reporting date; "Hey, if nothing dramatic happens before then, we'll just keep going."

STARR: And of course all of this is making the Pentagon just a little bit nuts, because, again, they feel they can't sit in the desert for, you know, a year while the inspectors continue to do their job.

And this whole issue of the intelligence that the United Nations is now getting has got the Pentagon very uneasy. Because Don Rumsfeld says, "Look, if we give them our best intelligence, the Iraqis will figure it all out, they'll start moving stuff. It's going to be our, you know, target list if we have to go to war, so we don't want to show our hand just yet." Don Rumsfeld, this week, said the president is going to have to make a final decision on how much intelligence to still really give the weapons inspectors.

BASH: Meanwhile, you heard the officials both in New York and then Mohamed Elbaradei when he came down to Washington saying, "We're not getting enough intelligence information. It's not actionable. You're not showing us the way to go."

NEISLOSS: Yes, that has been a long frustration for these weapons inspectors. But now we are starting to hear -- Hans Blix said to me, "Look, it's coming, it's starting to move." I think that the U.S. is making it clear as they gain confidence in the weapons inspectors, as they feel that the hot tips that they give them will be kept secure, they're starting to dole out more.

The best analogy I think I heard was, really good intelligence is like fresh fruit. You pick it and you eat it.

(LAUGHTER)

If you hold on to it, it's not going to be any good.

KOPPEL: Well, I have to tell you, Liz, I may be speaking with the cynics in this administration, but they're also looking at the intel. And they're telling me that there really isn't anything terrific out there. And so, you know, all this talk about give us, you know, give us the path to the cache of sarin gas or...

STARR: There's no map with a big red arrow on it.

KOPPEL: Exactly.

(CROSSTALK)

STARR: This is all satellite intelligence, and it's all open to interpretation.

NEISLOSS: Yes, well, that may be the ultimate problem that the administration will have.

In fact, in the Security Council, Mohamed Elbaradei told ambassadors, look, on this one piece of information that the U.S. is really touting, these high-strength aluminum tubes that the U.S. has been saying, look, this is evidence of a nuclear program, Mohamed Elbaradei said, "You know, we have been looking at that. We've taken samples, we're talking to people. We really think that they are more consistent with rocket-making, what the Iraqis say, and not really suitable for centrifuges." So...

HAYS: Liz, I wanted to ask you, speaking of ambassadors, a big story this week about an ambassador in trouble.

NEISLOSS: Yes, a little bit of a diplomatic, perhaps, snafu, tabloid kind of story. Pakistan is a new, fresh member to the Security Council. They started in January.

What happened this week though, was the New York City police got a 911 phone call from a woman who said, "Look, my husband is beating me. He's holding me against my will." The police go to a luxury townhouse and they go up to an apartment. The woman says, "This is my boyfriend actually." And the man introduces himself. It's the Pakistani ambassador, and he claims diplomatic immunity.

So very tricky situation because this new Council member will -- the U.S. will want to get support from them. The State Department did ask for this guy's diplomatic immunity to be lifted so that charges can be pressed.

And Pakistan has to make a decision on what they will do. Do they help sweep this under the rug, remove the guy? There's a lot of, kind of, betting going on in the U.N. hallways that, you know, Pakistan might really just want to smooth things over, get rid of the guy and move on.

HAYS: Well, it certainly wouldn't be the first time that that's happened with, you know, the diplomatic misbehavior in New York City.

Well, something that's certainly not getting swept under the rug on Wall Street, the uncertainty over the war keeps rattling the markets, and it also hangs over the Bush economic package he unwrapped on Tuesday.

More on that when CNN's SATURDAY EDITION comes back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: By speeding up the income tax cuts, we will speed up economic recovery and the pace of job creation.

If tax relief is good enough for Americans three years from now, it is good enough for Americans today.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYS: President Bush began the week talking about his plan to kick the economy into a higher gear, but he ended it hearing just how sluggish the economy remains, with the loss of more than 100,000 jobs in December.

In fact, in the past year, 2002 I should say, the economy lost 180,000 jobs. The two-year loss is a loss of 1.6 million.

Now, this isn't surprising. We're in a recession. We're coming out. The beginning part of recovery you do get slow job growth. We know that this is going to be a big political football over the next couple of years.

So I think if anybody had any doubt about how much steam, how much gas this push to get some kind of plan in place to the kick the economy up, if it was going to lack (ph) or not, that job support, I think, really guaranteed that this is going to stay very much a front- burner, hot issue. STARR: Kathleen, that's what I don't understand as a taxpayer, not a reporter. You know, you use the phrase "some kind of plan." That's what I don't get about what President Bush is doing.

What is his real economic goal here, and is he really matching the goal and the medicine? And why do we hear so much about the dividend exemption issue here?

HAYS: Well, one economist I talked to this week called this the "kitchen sink" approach. Just throw everything in and kind of -- something for everyone.

I think that one of the fundamental debates, if you get past the social aspects of who should get the most tax cuts and who shouldn't, if you look at the economic issue, what would do the most good for the economy, then what you get is a lot of disagreement.

But I think many people would agree that the president's plan, if passed, would probably work over the longer term. He really is suggesting a long-term overhaul of the economy. And the question of a short-term fix, a short-term push, isn't so clear because most economists don't see you get an immediate big boost to the economy from this.

BASH: That's exactly what I was going to ask you.

And I wanted to show you nothing comes out of the White House or really any place in Washington without a glossy brochure. And this was the White House glossy brochure on the economic plan.

And notice that there is not one word in here that starts with an S. No "stimulus," the S word.

HAYS: Stimulus.

BASH: It's the president's plan for job and economic growth.

So they're intentionally, they're actually -- the word is out at the White House and to Republicans around town, "Don't say stimulus," because they're not -- they're saying that they're not pretending it is supposed to stimulate the economy immediately. It's a long-term thing.

But they are trying to make the point -- Dick Cheney last night in an interview said, "Well, accelerating the tax cuts from 2001, that is going to put a little bit of a zip into the economy now."

Do you think that that's going to...

HAYS: Well, I think people figure, sure. I mean, we've already had tax cuts. And what some people would say, "Look, the consumer isn't the problem. Consumers have been spending. So what you really need to do is get businesses to invest."

The whole thing about the dividend tax cut is very controversial. Again, over the long term, sure, it could encourage more companies to pay dividends. One of the great things about dividends is you can measure that. I get that check, right? The problems with earnings, where companies played so many games, is you can fudge those. A dividend is clear.

So people figure it would create more confidence in the stock market, get more people to invest. if the stock market rises, businesses are more confident. You know, they'll invest. They'll make those expenditures. They'll hire more workers.

So again, it has a lot to do, I think, with psychology and not so much about putting money in the regular American's pocket right away.

STARR: What in this package is going to directly address the issue of solving this problem of these horrendous job losses? HAYS: Well, I think that's the question. In fact, when you say -- I want to toss this to you, because when you talk about nothing about near-term stimulus, this is long-term, it sounds to me very political.

In other words, if things are soft in 2003, we don't care.

BASH: Political in Washington.

(LAUGHTER)

HAYS: It's 2004 we're aiming at, and that's when we want to hope that things are really going on.

I think this question of creating jobs is very difficult, because many economists say this plan, even if it's passed in its entirety, would add something like .2, .3 percentage worth of growth every year for five years. That's not a lot.

BASH: Well, I'll the White House statistic is, they say that this is going to create 2 million jobs over the next 10 years. How? They say that if you give people money back through dividends and if you help businesses, because there are some things in here for small businesses that kind of helps them keep some of their money with some tax breaks, that that all will, in the end, go to helping them hire more workers, which will help the jobless rate. That's what they say.

KOPPEL: OK. What I want to know is, what is the real difference between the Democratic plan and the Republican plan? Just...

HAYS: Well, it seems like the Democrat is more of a stimulus plan. Let's spend a $100 billion to $150 billion this year. Give it to low and middle-income workers. Do more in extending unemployment benefits. Make sure we help small business.

Whereas the Republicans' plan -- well, actually Bush's plan still includes a lot of that, doesn't it? But it's much broader, and it's going to spend $360 billion for this dividend tax cut.

I also want to say in fairness to supply-side economists, who really came into their own during the Ronald Reagan administration, right, they say that this will have an immediate salutary effect on the economy, that in the second half of the year, we'll see a lot more growth. They really believe that if you change incentives, if you cut people's taxes, if you give them more of their money, they will save more and invest more, and that will really help the economy a lot.

NEISLOSS: Didn't we go through this with the Reaganomics and the supply-side economics? I mean, hadn't that sort of been proven to be problematic?

HAYS: Well, the one thing that's interesting about this plan...

BASH: Depends on who you talk to, whether that was proven or not. (LAUGHTER)

HAYS: Right, exactly. And one thing that's interesting about this plan is that the White House readily admits that this will force the economy into -- and the federal budget -- further into deficit, like by $300 billion.

BASH: But they say, you know, that's short-term...

STARR: Exactly.

BASH: ... deficits, and that in the end this is a long-term proposal, that this will help long term.

So, you know, here you have...

KOPPEL: But didn't they just have a tax cut? They just had one where we got our rebates, and that didn't stimulate the economy. What makes them think...

BASH: But the administration would argue -- the administration would say that tax cut softened the blow of the recession.

HAYS: Well, absolutely.

BASH: That's what they would say.

HAYS: And remember all those car sales last year? I mean, zero- incentive financing helped, but people bought a lot of homes, a lot of cars. And I think because the economy's not stronger, people say that Bush's tax cuts didn't work and that the Federal Reserve's rate cut didn't work. But you have to -- I think another way to look at it is, they put in a lot of stimulus.

Oh, and that makes me think of something I think very important that the White House is going to struggle with, Congress is going to struggle with. Whatever they pass this year, as long as everyone's worried about a war with Iraq, many businesses right now are waiting to see what happens. They don't want to take big steps until they see how this all plays out. So it's going to be an uphill struggle.

KOPPEL: Well, from money and the markets back to war and peace, we'll talk about how the U.S. is juggling the double threat of Iraq and North Korea. Dana will talk about the White House and the new Congress, and I'll share what some of what I learned and saw two weeks ago in Ethiopia, a country again facing drought and famine. Plus a news alert from Atlanta, when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(NEWS BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ARI FLEISCHER, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: We'd be happy to talk about how North Korea will come into compliance. But it won't be a negotiation. It won't be any additional offers, because we have made offers before. They accepted the offers, an agreement was reached, and then North Korea walked out on it's end of the agreement.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KOPPEL: White House press secretary Ari Fleischer with the administration line that just talking to North Korea is not negotiating with North Korea.

You know, I came back from vacation over the weekend and Sunday night called up one of my sources and said, "So what's going on? You're going to have talks with the Japanese and the South Koreans Monday and Tuesday. What do you want to achieve?" He said, "We're not going to talk to the North Koreans."

Well, hello -- come to the end of the day Tuesday, they're saying they're going to talk and not negotiate. Obviously a lot of pressure on the administration to engage with the North and try to diffuse the crisis.

BASH: Andrea, actually I also wanted to ask you about Bill Richardson and his role. You know, we were told over at the White House that he got two messages on his answering machine from North Koreans saying, "We want to talk." And he called Colin Powell and left him a message saying, "What do I do? Do I call them back?" And Powell called back and said, "Yes, you can call them back."

What is Powell saying about this?

KOPPEL: Well, Powell is saying that he is -- that Bill Richardson is not a mediator, he's not an emissary of the Bush administration, and that in fact, the guy's a Democrat, remember. He -- they probably would have had a different choice if they could have.

And in fact, the Koreans just arrived back to talk with Richardson in New Mexico today. This is now the third day of talks. The North Koreans, as you said Dana, out of the blue, called Bill Richardson, who they have a relationship with dating back 10 years ago. When I was a foreign correspondent based in Tokyo, he was there trying to get an American airman whose helicopter had been shot down over North Korea freed from the North.

So Bill Richardson has a long history with the North Koreans, but whether or not he's actually going to achieve anything remains to be seen. NEISLOSS: And Bill Richardson used to be based actually at the U.N., where he was not seen as one of your typical button-down diplomats. He was kind of a free-wheeling guy, loves to roam around the world, obviously, dive into tricky situations.

But, Andrea, are you hearing at State criticism maybe of the Bush administration, this approach, which is really like a hard ball? You know, you call the North Koreans a part of the axis of evil. You cut off these fuel shipments.

Is this seen as the wrong approach, the wrong game for the North Koreans? And are they waking up to that?

KOPPEL: I think that the best way to describe it is there is not one opinion within the administration. There are mixed messages. There's a heated debate going on as to just how to get out of this crisis.

There are some who are saying, "The North Koreans, this is their way. They've done this, you know, they did 10 years ago. They're doing it again, now. This is the way that they get concessions. They play the nuclear card."

Then there are others who told me, "No, we actually think, due to the rapidity, the speed with which this has unfolded in recent weeks, that the North Koreans really do want to get the nukes and that they are not going to back down." And...

STARR: So, just giving the North Koreans their fuel shipment back is not going to solve this?

KOPPEL: Well, remember, this is the reason the administration and the North Koreans -- excuse me, the South Koreans and the Japanese and the EU agreed to cut off the fuel shipments, was because the North Koreans had a secret nuclear weapons program and kicked the IAEA out.

And so now of course, they've withdrawn from the nonproliferation treaty, which has further escalated matters.

BASH: You know, Barbara, on that question about whether or not fuel shipments will help, the administration honestly doesn't have a clue why North Korea is doing this.

And that's part of the problem in their sense -- at least what we're hearing at the White House -- in their sense of how to deal with this. They don't know if they're really serious about starting up their nuclear program or whether or not they think, well, they want something. They want the fuel shipments back. They want a non- aggression treaty.

STARR: And do they see the administration's preoccupation possibly with Iraq as a window of opportunity to make their move?

KOPPEL: Just to kind of follow up on your question as well, in point of fact, this fuel shipment only supplies 5 percent of the North Korean energy needs. And so it really isn't about the fuel. It's China that supplies most of North Korea's energy, which is why President Bush spoke to China's president, Jiang Zemin, yesterday in the hopes of getting China to put the squeeze on North Korea, which they've been unwilling to do.

HAYS: What I'm so interested in asking you about is the rising anti-American sentiment, including in South Korea, and this divide between the older generation, which appreciates the U.S. presence there, and the younger generation. Is that being talked about?

At some point, I think Americans seeing that will say (inaudible) upset the geopolitical balance. People say, "Why are we there anyway if there's a growing group of people who really don't want us there?"

KOPPEL: Right, right. 37,000 American troops have been stationed on the Korean Peninsula. It will be 50 years ago this year that they took up their posts.

In point of fact, the reason that this has started -- and you're absolutely right, Kathleen, this is a generational divide -- but the reason that this has reached such a pitch, two reasons: One, two young South Korean girls were run over by two American soldiers. They were just acquitted by military tribunal.

Secondly, there were presidential elections. And this has fed into the political fervor and the political campaigning, that, you know -- basically elected another president who wants to engage with the North.

BASH: Well, Andrea, North Korea and Iraq and the U.S. economy are just part of what's simmering at the Bush White House. A new Congress is in town with hundreds of politicians, many of them thinking they should be president themselves. More on that coming up on CNN's SATURDAY EDITION.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BUSH: We're going to work together. We owe that to the American people. It's the spirit that now prevails in this room. And I look forward to working with members of both parties.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: President Bush making a pitch for bipartisanship just after his party cleaned up in the off-year election. But this week he fired up some partisan sparks when he renominated Judge Charles Pickering, a controversial choice for the U.S. Court of Appeals who was defeated last year in committee by Democrats on a party line vote.

And I remember being in the Senate just before that vote, and Al Gore's brother-in-law, Frank Hunger (ph), was standing outside the Democratic Caucus, buttonholing Democratic Senators, saying, "This guy is getting a bad rap. You've got to vote for him. He's a good guy. And he doesn't have a civil rights problem," which was what a lot of the Democrats were saying.

Of course he failed, but that's exactly the kind of support that the administration is hoping will really help get Charles Pickering through again.

NEISLOSS: But given what the Republicans went through after Trent Lott, how could Bush propose this kind of candidate, who there is still controversy looming around this guy's judgment on racial issues? So isn't it something that they want to stay away from?

BASH: Liz, I asked that very question, and I wasn't the only one asking it, when we heard that Pickering was renominated.

But here's what administration officials are saying. They're saying that there were 30 judges that did not -- that were nominated last time around, that didn't -- either were defeated, two of them were defeated by the Democrats, or they just didn't get votes at all.

The president said, "Look, the Democrats are determined to make an issue, a civil rights issue out of somebody. So if we don't renominate Charles Pickering, they're going to do it over Priscilla Owen or Miguel Estrada or any of the other 27 judges that they're going to nominate." So they said, "We're just going to through them all up there. We stood behind them the first time. We think that he's getting a bad rap, that the Democrats are misrepresenting what his record is."

HAYS: So basically what you're saying is this is -- they're saying this is politics, that this man is not -- he's probably not perfect, but the Democrats are making this a political issue, which makes it sound like right away, partisan politics are back to the fore.

BASH: That's exactly right. They're saying that it's politics on the part of the Democrats, that the Democrats are absolutely determined to keep the Trent Lott issue alive, the issue that the whole Trent Lott controversy really sparked, and that they're going to do it no matter what.

But, you know, the partisanship issue is really interesting here, because President Bush of course came in as a compassionate conservative, saying, "I'm going to change Washington." And this week one, kind of, event at the White House really struck me, showed me that things are really kind of different than they were even a year ago, in terms of the ramping up of the partisanship.

The president had an event to mark the one-year anniversary of his big education proposal. Last year there were all kinds of Democrats there. I don't know if we have this tape. But last year, there were all kinds of Democrats there. Ted Kennedy, I mean, the liberal lion, was standing by his side, signing this legislation.

This year, to mark the year anniversary, there was one Republican senator. The Democrats refused to come because they said, "He's not funding what they have." There you see, there's President Bush with Judd Gregg. He was the only Republican senator there. Democrats refused to come. They were sending letters, sending out press releases saying that the president is bad on education.

What a difference a year makes. The partisanship already is really out there.

STARR: But at least one senator also decided not to get into the partisan game, Tom Daschle. Why did he decide not to run?

BASH: What a story. Of course, at the White House, they're saying this is all background noise, all of this fighting among Democrats, it's all background noise. They're just running the country. But for everybody else, this Tom Daschle story was really fascinating.

Just one week ago on this show, we were talking about the fact that there was no question he was going to run. He had basically said that he would to all of his aides.

I talked to one of his aides the day that we found out that he wasn't going to run, who was on his way in Aberdeen, South Dakota, to Tom Daschle's high school gym to put the final touches on his announcement, which was supposed to happen as we speak today, and he got the call and they said, "Cease and desist, turn around, come home. It's not happening."

What happened? Well, apparently what happened was the very first day Tom Daschle got back to work as the Democratic leader, he got the calls the Democratic leaders get from every single member of his caucus saying, "I want this, I need that, can you do this for me, could you do that for me."

And he apparently, according to his aides, went home and said, "I can't do this. I can't answer all of the questions and problems of everybody I need to answer, and run for president at the same time. It's too much. I'm going to stay here."

It really shocked even the people who were the closest to him.

KOPPEL: Well, from the political problems of the Bush administration to life and death problems half a world away, I'm just back from Africa where millions of people in Ethiopia find themselves caught again in a deadly cycle of drought and famine.

More when CNN's SATURDAY EDITION returns.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. TOM DASCHLE (D-SD), MINORITY LEADER: The more I thought about it, the more I felt my passion is still here. I love what I'm doing. I'm honored to be the leader of the Democratic Caucus, and I wanted to continue.

(END VIDEO CLIP) (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KOPPEL: Some of the sites in Ethiopia, mostly hidden from many of us in the developed world.

I actually was the camerawoman behind that there. I was in a village in eastern Ethiopia. And that was some of the dry -- it's actually a supplemented food mixture of maize and sorghum and all kinds of things with a little sweetness so that the kids will eat it.

Now, the reason that they don't add water, they told me two reasons. One, because it waters it down, it's not as filling, and most of these people are only eating one meal a day. And secondly, because they don't have water. There's been a drought.

And what you have right now are 11 million people who are on food assistance, at risk. And you have 3 million others who are at risk. That's 20 percent of the Ethiopian population who are in dire need of more aid because aid organizations are about to run out.

HAYS: Andrea, why is this happening again? Why -- is this a people, a land, that is just doomed to drought and famine over and over? Or is there something the rest of the world isn't doing or Africa is not doing to prevent this from happening?

KOPPEL: Well, there are a whole bunch of reasons, Kathleen. And the fact of the matter is, a lot of it has to do with global warming. They kept saying that while I was there.

The rains, they've actually had some pretty good crops in recent years. And then in the last several years, what you've got -- this actually is a camel that I shot, a dead camel that was being picked apart by vultures, to me just sort of symbolized how bad the drought the was, that a camel had died due to lack of water.

Bones of cattle are lining the streets, lining people's villages because they -- the cycle of droughts has shortened in the last several years so they haven't had a chance to recover. And initially, maybe they'd sell of a cow or they'd sell of a couple of goats, but now they've done that. And they didn't get their crops. And even their animals, like oxen that they would use to plow the fields, are so weak they can't use them.

So it's really a terrible situation.

NEISLOSS: Andrea, I heard that this famine, you know, the government officials are predicting, could be worse than the last one, which was something like 1984 when nearly a million people died.

Your pictures are clearly very dramatic. How does that make you feel?

I mean, I think about me when I see horrible pictures of Rwanda and massacres, and it makes it very difficult to look at the issues that the world politics force you to focus on, whether it's Iraq that overwhelms everything else. Going back to the State Department, what does that feel like?

KOPPEL: Well, I have to say that one non-governmental worker said that if this turns into -- if people die from this situation, and some have, but it's nowhere near what it was in 1984, but if they die, we will be at fault for that because we know there was an early warning system. We're talking about it now, fortunately, on CNN and some of the newspapers are covering this, but due to Iraq, it doesn't really get that much play. So aid organizations need help now.

And you're absolutely right, Liz, in '84 it was more of a political reason. The government then didn't want that to get out. Now the government is saying, "Hey, we need help. Please give us food aid."

And actually, I just want to point out one other thing. Somebody asked me when I came back to the State Department and said, "You know, are we keeping these people reliant on food aid?" They're eating one meal a day. Most of these people are walking an hour and a half, six hours, to get a bag of wheat that they're eating. You saw what those children are eating.

In fact, I went into a classroom -- I think we've got video of that -- if you can call it that. It was sort of a mud structure in which these children from ages like to 6 to 15 are trying to learn, study English, as you can see. Here's their teacher. And they're -- this is due to a project by the World Food Programme to encourage kids to come to school because they give them food.

Well, the irony that day is that -- look at the muddy feet. I mean, they don't even have shoes. The irony that day, I said, "Well, I'd love to see the kids get their meal." And there was all sorts of chatter. Turns out, they had run out of food. They were saving a little bit of food for later this month when they had final exams to try to encourage the kids to come to class.

So, you know, it's one of those things that is, I think, we need to be aware of so that we can try to help.

HAYS: You know what strikes me, obviously -- kids look like they are surviving to a certain extent, but is this generation of children going to be wiped out?

KOPPEL: Well, I don't think anybody expects that right now. And I should also point out that this is -- this is not a problem isolated in Ethiopia. It's a problem all across sub-Saharan Africa.

The one thing that you do notice when you meet Ethiopian people is that even though they are surviving hand to mouth right now, there's a tremendous amount of pride and dignity. And despite the fact that women, by the way, do most of the work and are walking hours upon hours upon hours -- no matter where I went, there were people lining the roads, women with water containers on their heads as they were walking perhaps four hours to try to get some drinking water. And they do that every day.

It's something that's hitting both the peasants, as well as the herdsmen, as well as the nomads.

HAYS: Andrea, thank you so much. That is such an amazing story. Thank you for bringing it to SATURDAY EDITION today.

Actually, that is it for SATURDAY EDITION today. We thank you for watching. We hope to see you here next week.

Our congratulations to one of our SATURDAY EDITION panelists, New York correspondent Deborah Feyerick, mother of a new baby girl born January 3rd.

Coming up, a news alert at the top of the hour and CNN's People in the News, focusing today on Iraq's President Saddam Hussein and U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. But first, the president's weekly radio address.

(BEGIN AUDIOTAPE)

BUSH: Good morning. As a new Congress convenes, we must take steps to speed up the economic recovery and to strengthen public confidence in the integrity of American corporations.

This week in Chicago, I announced my growth and jobs plan, specific proposals to help workers, employers and investors across America.

For unemployed Americans whose benefits expired on December 28th, I asked Congress to act to extend those benefits. Congress did so quickly, and I signed the extension of unemployment benefits into law this week.

For Americans who face the greatest difficulty finding work, I propose special re-employment accounts. These accounts will provide up to $3,000 to help pay for training, moving expenses or other costs of finding a job.

For all income-tax payers, I propose speeding up the tax cuts already approved by Congress, because Americans need that relief today. Instead of gradually reducing the marriage penalty between now and 2009, we should do it now. Instead of waiting until 2008 to move more taxpayers from the 15-percent bracket to the 10-percent bracket, we should make that change now. Instead of slowly raising the child credit to $1,000 by 2010, we should raise it now. When these changes are made, 92 million Americans will keep an average of $1,083 more of their own money.

And for America's 84 million investors and those who will become investors, I propose eliminating the double taxation on stock dividends. Double taxation is unfair and bad for our economy. It falls especially hard on seniors, many of whom rely on dividends for a steady source of income in their retirement.

Abolishing double taxation of dividends will leave nearly 35 million Americans with more of their own money to spend and invest, which will promote savings and return as much as $20 billion this year to the private economy. Overall, my tax cut proposals will add nearly $59 billion to the economy in 2003 alone.

Our government is also acting to restore investor confidence in the integrity and honesty of corporate America. In response to the abuses of some corporations, we passed serious reforms, and we will vigorously enforce them.

Our corporate fraud task forces obtained convictions or guilty pleas in over 50 cases. More than 160 defendants have been charged with criminal or civil wrongdoing, and 130 new corporate fraud investigations have been launched.

In my budget for the coming year, I will also propose major increases in funding for the prosecutors of corporate crime. My 2004 budget funding for the Securities and Exchange Commission will be 73 percent higher than 2002 levels. This will allow the agency to hire hundreds of new accountants, lawyers and examiners.

I'm also requesting an extra $25 million for the Department of Justice to expand corporate fraud investigations. This will allow the department to create 118 new positions in the FBI, including 56 agents.

In addition, 94 new people will be hired to serve in the U.S. Attorney's Offices and legal divisions across the nation.

The SEC and Justice Department are the referees of corporate conduct. Under my budget, they will have every resource they need to enforce the laws that punish fraud and protect investors.

I ask the Congress to support these enforcement measures and to pass my growth and jobs plan as soon as possible.

Our country has made great progress in restoring investor confidence and putting the recession behind us. We cannot be satisfied, however, until every corporate wrongdoer is held to account and every part of our economy is strong and every person who wants to work can find a job.

Thank you for listening.

(END AUDIOTAPE)

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




Find Smoking Gun in Iraq; Bush's Economic Plan to Be Tested on Wall Street>


Aired January 10, 2003 - 10:00   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Welcome to CNN's SATURDAY EDITION, where our journalists have the inside scoop on the stories we covered this week. I'm Barbara Starr.
The U.S. military puts more machines and muscle in and around the Persian Gulf. The latest on the strategy and the timetable for possible war.

LIZ NEISLOSS, CNN PRODUCER: I'm Liz Neisloss in New York. United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq say they haven't found the smoking gun. So what's next in the search that may spell uneasy peace or war?

DANA BASH, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: I'm Dana Bash. For President Bush, a new Congress and challenges to push new policies and some old nominations.

KATHLEEN HAYS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: I'm Kathleen Hays. The Bush economic plan delivered big headlines, but the real test on Wall Street and Main Street has just begun.

ANDREA KOPPEL, CNN STATE DEPARTMENT CORRESPONDENT: And I'm Andrea Koppel. The Bush administration continues its high-stakes diplomacy on two fronts -- Iraq and North Korea.

We'll talk about all these stories, and I'll talk about a story that's often overlooked -- drought and famine in Africa, where I spent the New Year's holiday. Plus, we'll listen to the president's weekly radio address at the bottom of the hour, but first, a check on what's making headlines right now from CNN headquarters in Atlanta.

(NEWSBREAK)

STARR: Well, the military brass at the Pentagon keeps reminding anyone who will listen that it is President Bush's decision whether to wage war. But the military is getting ready.

Just yesterday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a deployment order to send 35,000 more U.S. troops to the region. And we were reminded that war preparations are under way. The movement of ships, planes, heavy equipment, men and women is very visible to both friend and foe.

And the order was signed last night, but there may be a few questions, as we all know, just lurking under the horizon about the timing of this entire possible war in Iraq.

HAYS: Yes. How concerned are they about the fact that a number of the allies, key allies like Turkey and Saudi Arabia, don't seem to be on board yet?

STARR: This week it seems, both I think at the State Department and the Pentagon, to have taken a slightly different tone. The U.K., France are both saying, "Hey, let's let the weapons inspectors do their job."

Turkey, very, very important, has yet to give the U.S. the authority to base thousands of troops in Turkey for the possible move into northern Iraq. If the U.S. can't get Turkish basing rights, it's going to complicate the war-planning a great deal.

HAYS: Does it complicate whether we have the war we're supposed to have, late January, early February? That's been the word for so long, "Do it in the winter, do it now." Is there any chance that that whole thing gets thrown off?

STARR: Well, it's really interesting, Kathleen, because the calendar is ticking away every day for the president and for the U.S. military. They are sending troops over there, but can't leave them there forever. You can't leave people in the desert. Equipment has to be maintained...

(CROSSTALK)

STARR: Absolutely. So one of the things that is very much happening underneath the surface is what they call a phased deployment. They're going to send some people. They're going to see what happens with Saddam Hussein. Then they'll send more people. Then they'll see what happens with Saddam Hussein.

They have some hope -- we keep hearing the phrase, "Maybe we can win this war without firing a shot." That's a very vague hope at this point. But phase it all in and maybe they don't have to have 100,000 troops sit there until they decide what to do.

NEISLOSS: With all this talk about deployment, one question that's raised is the draft, which was an issue I guess raised by Congressman Rangel this week. How was that thought received, the idea that, hey, we've got to spread the burden out among classes, among races? What was the reaction to that?

STARR: Well, there were a lot of questions, Liz, at the Pentagon about this issue this past week. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs addressed it, and they really put a stake through it.

It's an economic issue these days. It's just -- their feeling is, in today's economy, it makes no sense, it's not practical to compel people to serve in the military, spend all of that money training them for what, two or three years of service, and then they leave, and they you have to bring in more people and train them. Much more economic these days to bring people in, train them, let them have a 10-, 20-year career.

It was something that didn't work terribly well back in Vietnam, and they really have no intention of doing it now.

BASH: Barbara, I want to ask you about a fascinating story that you broke yesterday about this e-mail, kind of, system that the Pentagon is employing to try to get into the Iraqi military. What are they doing?

STARR: Well, you know, that's -- it was fascinating story. We keep hearing about 21st century warfare, but these days it's really turning out to be, you know, bits, bytes, computers, the e-mail, the Internet as much as bombs and bullets.

The Pentagon basically spammed Saddam Hussein and all his top...

(LAUGHTER)

... his top associates.

BASH: That's one way to do it.

STARR: They -- within the last 48 hours, they have sent thousands of e-mails into e-mail addresses inside Iraq. Basically, the Pentagon is taking on the role of Tokyo Rose.

KOPPEL: And what do they say?

STARR: They are trying to demoralize the Iraqis. They are sending messages saying, "Don't stick with Saddam. You can't win. Defect now. And here's the..."

HAYS: Are they getting any replies?

(LAUGHTER)

STARR: Well, that's what we don't know at the moment. They are instructing people, if they want to defect, to contact the U.N. in Baghdad. Saddam is not likely to be terribly amused.

(CROSSTALK)

(LAUGHTER)

HAYS: I'm struck by the fact that Saddam's society is open enough that he hasn't put parental controls on everybody's e-mail, quite seriously, to block things.

STARR: Well, this was why this -- this is exactly why this was a very surreptitious, covert operation, because they knew -- again, it's something they have to think about these days -- once Saddam found out, he would have the Internet gateway into Iraq shut down. There is every reason to believe he has now done that, but at least they got their initial message out.

And now they're going to in the next -- we know now that they will start broadcasting radio messages into Iraq with these same efforts to demoralize. It's called psychological warfare. It's a really valuable tool if it works. It remains to be seen if it will.

KOPPEL: What's the sense that you get, in terms of the folks that you were talking with over at the Pentagon, as to what the likelihood that they think is that this will either cause some sort of palace coup or that somebody will, you know, kill Saddam Hussein because of this...

STARR: Well, you know, I think you and I -- you cover the State Department, I cover the Pentagon -- we hear much of the same thing. The unknown, really, in all of this is will the Iraqi people, will the Iraqi military ever turn away from Saddam?

What I hear is that the intelligence isn't very solid on that. They just don't know.

KOPPEL: Exactly. He's managed to layer himself with so many of his fellow Tikritans from his home town and gives them so much and so many benefits, that the chances of their trying to kill him are very slim.

STARR: But it did...

NEISLOSS: Right, and I have heard many analysts say that any chance the average Iraqi could get to actually kill the guy, they would, if only they could get to him.

But, you know, any road to war will pass through the United Nations headquarters in New York. And U.N. inspectors reported this week on their search for Iraq's weapons. We'll have more on that when SATURDAY EDITION returns.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HANS BLIX, CHIEF U.N. WEAPONS INSPECTOR: The resolutions do not put a time limit of that kind. We are -- have now been there for some two months and been covering the country in ever-wider sweeps, and we haven't found any smoking guns, no.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

NEISLOSS: That's chief United Nations arms inspector Hans Blix with what was basically the soundbite of the week: No smoking gun found by weapons inspectors so far.

Welcome back to CNN's SATURDAY EDITION.

Blix was also saying, you know, he has no looming deadline. This search, he thinks, is going to go on for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

But Blix made it clear Iraq isn't exactly getting straight A's in this ongoing test. He did make it clear in his meeting with the Security Council, "Look, 12,000 pages are showing growing gaps," as they continue to comb. And they are not getting new information. He said, rather than new information, these documents are really devoid of evidence.

HAYS: Well, Liz, fill us in then on what kind of evidence isn't there that Blix and the inspectors think should be there. What's missing?

NEISLOSS: Well, they did give some hints, actually, this week inside the Security Council. Hans Blix talked about the need to still answer questions about VX. He said Iraq admitted having missile engines, importing them, material for making missile engine fuel. He talked about biological agents that still hadn't been accounted for.

And the nuclear weapons counterpart, Mohamed Elbaradei -- that's Blix's counterpart on nuclear weapons -- basically said, "Look, there are many questions still unanswered."

And we also are finding an interesting thing related to something called HMX, which is high melting explosive. This is something that could be used to trigger a dirty bomb, a nuclear bomb, an explosive device. The Iraqis say, "We're using this for commercial mining purposes."

KOPPEL: You know, Liz, it's as if -- or almost as if Blix took a page out of Colin Powell's playbook. This is what I'm hearing behind the scenes, that Colin Powell is really preparing the way. You heard him this week say, you know, "The inspections are working. We are starting to give them intelligence. Let's see."

What I'm being told is, come January 27th, you're going to hear the administration say, "Let's give inspections more time to work, and containment is working, and to disarm Saddam."

NEISLOSS: Well, that was pretty much the political change that we saw, a little bit of a shift this week. That January 27th date, which the U.S. has really been pitching as the drop date, the decision date, on how, whether to go to war.

Now the diplomats seem to be kind of slowing down. I think one British diplomat put it best. He said, "Let's calm down about the 27th." I think there's a lot of push now to make it clear it's just another reporting date; "Hey, if nothing dramatic happens before then, we'll just keep going."

STARR: And of course all of this is making the Pentagon just a little bit nuts, because, again, they feel they can't sit in the desert for, you know, a year while the inspectors continue to do their job.

And this whole issue of the intelligence that the United Nations is now getting has got the Pentagon very uneasy. Because Don Rumsfeld says, "Look, if we give them our best intelligence, the Iraqis will figure it all out, they'll start moving stuff. It's going to be our, you know, target list if we have to go to war, so we don't want to show our hand just yet." Don Rumsfeld, this week, said the president is going to have to make a final decision on how much intelligence to still really give the weapons inspectors.

BASH: Meanwhile, you heard the officials both in New York and then Mohamed Elbaradei when he came down to Washington saying, "We're not getting enough intelligence information. It's not actionable. You're not showing us the way to go."

NEISLOSS: Yes, that has been a long frustration for these weapons inspectors. But now we are starting to hear -- Hans Blix said to me, "Look, it's coming, it's starting to move." I think that the U.S. is making it clear as they gain confidence in the weapons inspectors, as they feel that the hot tips that they give them will be kept secure, they're starting to dole out more.

The best analogy I think I heard was, really good intelligence is like fresh fruit. You pick it and you eat it.

(LAUGHTER)

If you hold on to it, it's not going to be any good.

KOPPEL: Well, I have to tell you, Liz, I may be speaking with the cynics in this administration, but they're also looking at the intel. And they're telling me that there really isn't anything terrific out there. And so, you know, all this talk about give us, you know, give us the path to the cache of sarin gas or...

STARR: There's no map with a big red arrow on it.

KOPPEL: Exactly.

(CROSSTALK)

STARR: This is all satellite intelligence, and it's all open to interpretation.

NEISLOSS: Yes, well, that may be the ultimate problem that the administration will have.

In fact, in the Security Council, Mohamed Elbaradei told ambassadors, look, on this one piece of information that the U.S. is really touting, these high-strength aluminum tubes that the U.S. has been saying, look, this is evidence of a nuclear program, Mohamed Elbaradei said, "You know, we have been looking at that. We've taken samples, we're talking to people. We really think that they are more consistent with rocket-making, what the Iraqis say, and not really suitable for centrifuges." So...

HAYS: Liz, I wanted to ask you, speaking of ambassadors, a big story this week about an ambassador in trouble.

NEISLOSS: Yes, a little bit of a diplomatic, perhaps, snafu, tabloid kind of story. Pakistan is a new, fresh member to the Security Council. They started in January.

What happened this week though, was the New York City police got a 911 phone call from a woman who said, "Look, my husband is beating me. He's holding me against my will." The police go to a luxury townhouse and they go up to an apartment. The woman says, "This is my boyfriend actually." And the man introduces himself. It's the Pakistani ambassador, and he claims diplomatic immunity.

So very tricky situation because this new Council member will -- the U.S. will want to get support from them. The State Department did ask for this guy's diplomatic immunity to be lifted so that charges can be pressed.

And Pakistan has to make a decision on what they will do. Do they help sweep this under the rug, remove the guy? There's a lot of, kind of, betting going on in the U.N. hallways that, you know, Pakistan might really just want to smooth things over, get rid of the guy and move on.

HAYS: Well, it certainly wouldn't be the first time that that's happened with, you know, the diplomatic misbehavior in New York City.

Well, something that's certainly not getting swept under the rug on Wall Street, the uncertainty over the war keeps rattling the markets, and it also hangs over the Bush economic package he unwrapped on Tuesday.

More on that when CNN's SATURDAY EDITION comes back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: By speeding up the income tax cuts, we will speed up economic recovery and the pace of job creation.

If tax relief is good enough for Americans three years from now, it is good enough for Americans today.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYS: President Bush began the week talking about his plan to kick the economy into a higher gear, but he ended it hearing just how sluggish the economy remains, with the loss of more than 100,000 jobs in December.

In fact, in the past year, 2002 I should say, the economy lost 180,000 jobs. The two-year loss is a loss of 1.6 million.

Now, this isn't surprising. We're in a recession. We're coming out. The beginning part of recovery you do get slow job growth. We know that this is going to be a big political football over the next couple of years.

So I think if anybody had any doubt about how much steam, how much gas this push to get some kind of plan in place to the kick the economy up, if it was going to lack (ph) or not, that job support, I think, really guaranteed that this is going to stay very much a front- burner, hot issue. STARR: Kathleen, that's what I don't understand as a taxpayer, not a reporter. You know, you use the phrase "some kind of plan." That's what I don't get about what President Bush is doing.

What is his real economic goal here, and is he really matching the goal and the medicine? And why do we hear so much about the dividend exemption issue here?

HAYS: Well, one economist I talked to this week called this the "kitchen sink" approach. Just throw everything in and kind of -- something for everyone.

I think that one of the fundamental debates, if you get past the social aspects of who should get the most tax cuts and who shouldn't, if you look at the economic issue, what would do the most good for the economy, then what you get is a lot of disagreement.

But I think many people would agree that the president's plan, if passed, would probably work over the longer term. He really is suggesting a long-term overhaul of the economy. And the question of a short-term fix, a short-term push, isn't so clear because most economists don't see you get an immediate big boost to the economy from this.

BASH: That's exactly what I was going to ask you.

And I wanted to show you nothing comes out of the White House or really any place in Washington without a glossy brochure. And this was the White House glossy brochure on the economic plan.

And notice that there is not one word in here that starts with an S. No "stimulus," the S word.

HAYS: Stimulus.

BASH: It's the president's plan for job and economic growth.

So they're intentionally, they're actually -- the word is out at the White House and to Republicans around town, "Don't say stimulus," because they're not -- they're saying that they're not pretending it is supposed to stimulate the economy immediately. It's a long-term thing.

But they are trying to make the point -- Dick Cheney last night in an interview said, "Well, accelerating the tax cuts from 2001, that is going to put a little bit of a zip into the economy now."

Do you think that that's going to...

HAYS: Well, I think people figure, sure. I mean, we've already had tax cuts. And what some people would say, "Look, the consumer isn't the problem. Consumers have been spending. So what you really need to do is get businesses to invest."

The whole thing about the dividend tax cut is very controversial. Again, over the long term, sure, it could encourage more companies to pay dividends. One of the great things about dividends is you can measure that. I get that check, right? The problems with earnings, where companies played so many games, is you can fudge those. A dividend is clear.

So people figure it would create more confidence in the stock market, get more people to invest. if the stock market rises, businesses are more confident. You know, they'll invest. They'll make those expenditures. They'll hire more workers.

So again, it has a lot to do, I think, with psychology and not so much about putting money in the regular American's pocket right away.

STARR: What in this package is going to directly address the issue of solving this problem of these horrendous job losses? HAYS: Well, I think that's the question. In fact, when you say -- I want to toss this to you, because when you talk about nothing about near-term stimulus, this is long-term, it sounds to me very political.

In other words, if things are soft in 2003, we don't care.

BASH: Political in Washington.

(LAUGHTER)

HAYS: It's 2004 we're aiming at, and that's when we want to hope that things are really going on.

I think this question of creating jobs is very difficult, because many economists say this plan, even if it's passed in its entirety, would add something like .2, .3 percentage worth of growth every year for five years. That's not a lot.

BASH: Well, I'll the White House statistic is, they say that this is going to create 2 million jobs over the next 10 years. How? They say that if you give people money back through dividends and if you help businesses, because there are some things in here for small businesses that kind of helps them keep some of their money with some tax breaks, that that all will, in the end, go to helping them hire more workers, which will help the jobless rate. That's what they say.

KOPPEL: OK. What I want to know is, what is the real difference between the Democratic plan and the Republican plan? Just...

HAYS: Well, it seems like the Democrat is more of a stimulus plan. Let's spend a $100 billion to $150 billion this year. Give it to low and middle-income workers. Do more in extending unemployment benefits. Make sure we help small business.

Whereas the Republicans' plan -- well, actually Bush's plan still includes a lot of that, doesn't it? But it's much broader, and it's going to spend $360 billion for this dividend tax cut.

I also want to say in fairness to supply-side economists, who really came into their own during the Ronald Reagan administration, right, they say that this will have an immediate salutary effect on the economy, that in the second half of the year, we'll see a lot more growth. They really believe that if you change incentives, if you cut people's taxes, if you give them more of their money, they will save more and invest more, and that will really help the economy a lot.

NEISLOSS: Didn't we go through this with the Reaganomics and the supply-side economics? I mean, hadn't that sort of been proven to be problematic?

HAYS: Well, the one thing that's interesting about this plan...

BASH: Depends on who you talk to, whether that was proven or not. (LAUGHTER)

HAYS: Right, exactly. And one thing that's interesting about this plan is that the White House readily admits that this will force the economy into -- and the federal budget -- further into deficit, like by $300 billion.

BASH: But they say, you know, that's short-term...

STARR: Exactly.

BASH: ... deficits, and that in the end this is a long-term proposal, that this will help long term.

So, you know, here you have...

KOPPEL: But didn't they just have a tax cut? They just had one where we got our rebates, and that didn't stimulate the economy. What makes them think...

BASH: But the administration would argue -- the administration would say that tax cut softened the blow of the recession.

HAYS: Well, absolutely.

BASH: That's what they would say.

HAYS: And remember all those car sales last year? I mean, zero- incentive financing helped, but people bought a lot of homes, a lot of cars. And I think because the economy's not stronger, people say that Bush's tax cuts didn't work and that the Federal Reserve's rate cut didn't work. But you have to -- I think another way to look at it is, they put in a lot of stimulus.

Oh, and that makes me think of something I think very important that the White House is going to struggle with, Congress is going to struggle with. Whatever they pass this year, as long as everyone's worried about a war with Iraq, many businesses right now are waiting to see what happens. They don't want to take big steps until they see how this all plays out. So it's going to be an uphill struggle.

KOPPEL: Well, from money and the markets back to war and peace, we'll talk about how the U.S. is juggling the double threat of Iraq and North Korea. Dana will talk about the White House and the new Congress, and I'll share what some of what I learned and saw two weeks ago in Ethiopia, a country again facing drought and famine. Plus a news alert from Atlanta, when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(NEWS BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ARI FLEISCHER, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: We'd be happy to talk about how North Korea will come into compliance. But it won't be a negotiation. It won't be any additional offers, because we have made offers before. They accepted the offers, an agreement was reached, and then North Korea walked out on it's end of the agreement.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KOPPEL: White House press secretary Ari Fleischer with the administration line that just talking to North Korea is not negotiating with North Korea.

You know, I came back from vacation over the weekend and Sunday night called up one of my sources and said, "So what's going on? You're going to have talks with the Japanese and the South Koreans Monday and Tuesday. What do you want to achieve?" He said, "We're not going to talk to the North Koreans."

Well, hello -- come to the end of the day Tuesday, they're saying they're going to talk and not negotiate. Obviously a lot of pressure on the administration to engage with the North and try to diffuse the crisis.

BASH: Andrea, actually I also wanted to ask you about Bill Richardson and his role. You know, we were told over at the White House that he got two messages on his answering machine from North Koreans saying, "We want to talk." And he called Colin Powell and left him a message saying, "What do I do? Do I call them back?" And Powell called back and said, "Yes, you can call them back."

What is Powell saying about this?

KOPPEL: Well, Powell is saying that he is -- that Bill Richardson is not a mediator, he's not an emissary of the Bush administration, and that in fact, the guy's a Democrat, remember. He -- they probably would have had a different choice if they could have.

And in fact, the Koreans just arrived back to talk with Richardson in New Mexico today. This is now the third day of talks. The North Koreans, as you said Dana, out of the blue, called Bill Richardson, who they have a relationship with dating back 10 years ago. When I was a foreign correspondent based in Tokyo, he was there trying to get an American airman whose helicopter had been shot down over North Korea freed from the North.

So Bill Richardson has a long history with the North Koreans, but whether or not he's actually going to achieve anything remains to be seen. NEISLOSS: And Bill Richardson used to be based actually at the U.N., where he was not seen as one of your typical button-down diplomats. He was kind of a free-wheeling guy, loves to roam around the world, obviously, dive into tricky situations.

But, Andrea, are you hearing at State criticism maybe of the Bush administration, this approach, which is really like a hard ball? You know, you call the North Koreans a part of the axis of evil. You cut off these fuel shipments.

Is this seen as the wrong approach, the wrong game for the North Koreans? And are they waking up to that?

KOPPEL: I think that the best way to describe it is there is not one opinion within the administration. There are mixed messages. There's a heated debate going on as to just how to get out of this crisis.

There are some who are saying, "The North Koreans, this is their way. They've done this, you know, they did 10 years ago. They're doing it again, now. This is the way that they get concessions. They play the nuclear card."

Then there are others who told me, "No, we actually think, due to the rapidity, the speed with which this has unfolded in recent weeks, that the North Koreans really do want to get the nukes and that they are not going to back down." And...

STARR: So, just giving the North Koreans their fuel shipment back is not going to solve this?

KOPPEL: Well, remember, this is the reason the administration and the North Koreans -- excuse me, the South Koreans and the Japanese and the EU agreed to cut off the fuel shipments, was because the North Koreans had a secret nuclear weapons program and kicked the IAEA out.

And so now of course, they've withdrawn from the nonproliferation treaty, which has further escalated matters.

BASH: You know, Barbara, on that question about whether or not fuel shipments will help, the administration honestly doesn't have a clue why North Korea is doing this.

And that's part of the problem in their sense -- at least what we're hearing at the White House -- in their sense of how to deal with this. They don't know if they're really serious about starting up their nuclear program or whether or not they think, well, they want something. They want the fuel shipments back. They want a non- aggression treaty.

STARR: And do they see the administration's preoccupation possibly with Iraq as a window of opportunity to make their move?

KOPPEL: Just to kind of follow up on your question as well, in point of fact, this fuel shipment only supplies 5 percent of the North Korean energy needs. And so it really isn't about the fuel. It's China that supplies most of North Korea's energy, which is why President Bush spoke to China's president, Jiang Zemin, yesterday in the hopes of getting China to put the squeeze on North Korea, which they've been unwilling to do.

HAYS: What I'm so interested in asking you about is the rising anti-American sentiment, including in South Korea, and this divide between the older generation, which appreciates the U.S. presence there, and the younger generation. Is that being talked about?

At some point, I think Americans seeing that will say (inaudible) upset the geopolitical balance. People say, "Why are we there anyway if there's a growing group of people who really don't want us there?"

KOPPEL: Right, right. 37,000 American troops have been stationed on the Korean Peninsula. It will be 50 years ago this year that they took up their posts.

In point of fact, the reason that this has started -- and you're absolutely right, Kathleen, this is a generational divide -- but the reason that this has reached such a pitch, two reasons: One, two young South Korean girls were run over by two American soldiers. They were just acquitted by military tribunal.

Secondly, there were presidential elections. And this has fed into the political fervor and the political campaigning, that, you know -- basically elected another president who wants to engage with the North.

BASH: Well, Andrea, North Korea and Iraq and the U.S. economy are just part of what's simmering at the Bush White House. A new Congress is in town with hundreds of politicians, many of them thinking they should be president themselves. More on that coming up on CNN's SATURDAY EDITION.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BUSH: We're going to work together. We owe that to the American people. It's the spirit that now prevails in this room. And I look forward to working with members of both parties.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: President Bush making a pitch for bipartisanship just after his party cleaned up in the off-year election. But this week he fired up some partisan sparks when he renominated Judge Charles Pickering, a controversial choice for the U.S. Court of Appeals who was defeated last year in committee by Democrats on a party line vote.

And I remember being in the Senate just before that vote, and Al Gore's brother-in-law, Frank Hunger (ph), was standing outside the Democratic Caucus, buttonholing Democratic Senators, saying, "This guy is getting a bad rap. You've got to vote for him. He's a good guy. And he doesn't have a civil rights problem," which was what a lot of the Democrats were saying.

Of course he failed, but that's exactly the kind of support that the administration is hoping will really help get Charles Pickering through again.

NEISLOSS: But given what the Republicans went through after Trent Lott, how could Bush propose this kind of candidate, who there is still controversy looming around this guy's judgment on racial issues? So isn't it something that they want to stay away from?

BASH: Liz, I asked that very question, and I wasn't the only one asking it, when we heard that Pickering was renominated.

But here's what administration officials are saying. They're saying that there were 30 judges that did not -- that were nominated last time around, that didn't -- either were defeated, two of them were defeated by the Democrats, or they just didn't get votes at all.

The president said, "Look, the Democrats are determined to make an issue, a civil rights issue out of somebody. So if we don't renominate Charles Pickering, they're going to do it over Priscilla Owen or Miguel Estrada or any of the other 27 judges that they're going to nominate." So they said, "We're just going to through them all up there. We stood behind them the first time. We think that he's getting a bad rap, that the Democrats are misrepresenting what his record is."

HAYS: So basically what you're saying is this is -- they're saying this is politics, that this man is not -- he's probably not perfect, but the Democrats are making this a political issue, which makes it sound like right away, partisan politics are back to the fore.

BASH: That's exactly right. They're saying that it's politics on the part of the Democrats, that the Democrats are absolutely determined to keep the Trent Lott issue alive, the issue that the whole Trent Lott controversy really sparked, and that they're going to do it no matter what.

But, you know, the partisanship issue is really interesting here, because President Bush of course came in as a compassionate conservative, saying, "I'm going to change Washington." And this week one, kind of, event at the White House really struck me, showed me that things are really kind of different than they were even a year ago, in terms of the ramping up of the partisanship.

The president had an event to mark the one-year anniversary of his big education proposal. Last year there were all kinds of Democrats there. I don't know if we have this tape. But last year, there were all kinds of Democrats there. Ted Kennedy, I mean, the liberal lion, was standing by his side, signing this legislation.

This year, to mark the year anniversary, there was one Republican senator. The Democrats refused to come because they said, "He's not funding what they have." There you see, there's President Bush with Judd Gregg. He was the only Republican senator there. Democrats refused to come. They were sending letters, sending out press releases saying that the president is bad on education.

What a difference a year makes. The partisanship already is really out there.

STARR: But at least one senator also decided not to get into the partisan game, Tom Daschle. Why did he decide not to run?

BASH: What a story. Of course, at the White House, they're saying this is all background noise, all of this fighting among Democrats, it's all background noise. They're just running the country. But for everybody else, this Tom Daschle story was really fascinating.

Just one week ago on this show, we were talking about the fact that there was no question he was going to run. He had basically said that he would to all of his aides.

I talked to one of his aides the day that we found out that he wasn't going to run, who was on his way in Aberdeen, South Dakota, to Tom Daschle's high school gym to put the final touches on his announcement, which was supposed to happen as we speak today, and he got the call and they said, "Cease and desist, turn around, come home. It's not happening."

What happened? Well, apparently what happened was the very first day Tom Daschle got back to work as the Democratic leader, he got the calls the Democratic leaders get from every single member of his caucus saying, "I want this, I need that, can you do this for me, could you do that for me."

And he apparently, according to his aides, went home and said, "I can't do this. I can't answer all of the questions and problems of everybody I need to answer, and run for president at the same time. It's too much. I'm going to stay here."

It really shocked even the people who were the closest to him.

KOPPEL: Well, from the political problems of the Bush administration to life and death problems half a world away, I'm just back from Africa where millions of people in Ethiopia find themselves caught again in a deadly cycle of drought and famine.

More when CNN's SATURDAY EDITION returns.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. TOM DASCHLE (D-SD), MINORITY LEADER: The more I thought about it, the more I felt my passion is still here. I love what I'm doing. I'm honored to be the leader of the Democratic Caucus, and I wanted to continue.

(END VIDEO CLIP) (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KOPPEL: Some of the sites in Ethiopia, mostly hidden from many of us in the developed world.

I actually was the camerawoman behind that there. I was in a village in eastern Ethiopia. And that was some of the dry -- it's actually a supplemented food mixture of maize and sorghum and all kinds of things with a little sweetness so that the kids will eat it.

Now, the reason that they don't add water, they told me two reasons. One, because it waters it down, it's not as filling, and most of these people are only eating one meal a day. And secondly, because they don't have water. There's been a drought.

And what you have right now are 11 million people who are on food assistance, at risk. And you have 3 million others who are at risk. That's 20 percent of the Ethiopian population who are in dire need of more aid because aid organizations are about to run out.

HAYS: Andrea, why is this happening again? Why -- is this a people, a land, that is just doomed to drought and famine over and over? Or is there something the rest of the world isn't doing or Africa is not doing to prevent this from happening?

KOPPEL: Well, there are a whole bunch of reasons, Kathleen. And the fact of the matter is, a lot of it has to do with global warming. They kept saying that while I was there.

The rains, they've actually had some pretty good crops in recent years. And then in the last several years, what you've got -- this actually is a camel that I shot, a dead camel that was being picked apart by vultures, to me just sort of symbolized how bad the drought the was, that a camel had died due to lack of water.

Bones of cattle are lining the streets, lining people's villages because they -- the cycle of droughts has shortened in the last several years so they haven't had a chance to recover. And initially, maybe they'd sell of a cow or they'd sell of a couple of goats, but now they've done that. And they didn't get their crops. And even their animals, like oxen that they would use to plow the fields, are so weak they can't use them.

So it's really a terrible situation.

NEISLOSS: Andrea, I heard that this famine, you know, the government officials are predicting, could be worse than the last one, which was something like 1984 when nearly a million people died.

Your pictures are clearly very dramatic. How does that make you feel?

I mean, I think about me when I see horrible pictures of Rwanda and massacres, and it makes it very difficult to look at the issues that the world politics force you to focus on, whether it's Iraq that overwhelms everything else. Going back to the State Department, what does that feel like?

KOPPEL: Well, I have to say that one non-governmental worker said that if this turns into -- if people die from this situation, and some have, but it's nowhere near what it was in 1984, but if they die, we will be at fault for that because we know there was an early warning system. We're talking about it now, fortunately, on CNN and some of the newspapers are covering this, but due to Iraq, it doesn't really get that much play. So aid organizations need help now.

And you're absolutely right, Liz, in '84 it was more of a political reason. The government then didn't want that to get out. Now the government is saying, "Hey, we need help. Please give us food aid."

And actually, I just want to point out one other thing. Somebody asked me when I came back to the State Department and said, "You know, are we keeping these people reliant on food aid?" They're eating one meal a day. Most of these people are walking an hour and a half, six hours, to get a bag of wheat that they're eating. You saw what those children are eating.

In fact, I went into a classroom -- I think we've got video of that -- if you can call it that. It was sort of a mud structure in which these children from ages like to 6 to 15 are trying to learn, study English, as you can see. Here's their teacher. And they're -- this is due to a project by the World Food Programme to encourage kids to come to school because they give them food.

Well, the irony that day is that -- look at the muddy feet. I mean, they don't even have shoes. The irony that day, I said, "Well, I'd love to see the kids get their meal." And there was all sorts of chatter. Turns out, they had run out of food. They were saving a little bit of food for later this month when they had final exams to try to encourage the kids to come to class.

So, you know, it's one of those things that is, I think, we need to be aware of so that we can try to help.

HAYS: You know what strikes me, obviously -- kids look like they are surviving to a certain extent, but is this generation of children going to be wiped out?

KOPPEL: Well, I don't think anybody expects that right now. And I should also point out that this is -- this is not a problem isolated in Ethiopia. It's a problem all across sub-Saharan Africa.

The one thing that you do notice when you meet Ethiopian people is that even though they are surviving hand to mouth right now, there's a tremendous amount of pride and dignity. And despite the fact that women, by the way, do most of the work and are walking hours upon hours upon hours -- no matter where I went, there were people lining the roads, women with water containers on their heads as they were walking perhaps four hours to try to get some drinking water. And they do that every day.

It's something that's hitting both the peasants, as well as the herdsmen, as well as the nomads.

HAYS: Andrea, thank you so much. That is such an amazing story. Thank you for bringing it to SATURDAY EDITION today.

Actually, that is it for SATURDAY EDITION today. We thank you for watching. We hope to see you here next week.

Our congratulations to one of our SATURDAY EDITION panelists, New York correspondent Deborah Feyerick, mother of a new baby girl born January 3rd.

Coming up, a news alert at the top of the hour and CNN's People in the News, focusing today on Iraq's President Saddam Hussein and U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. But first, the president's weekly radio address.

(BEGIN AUDIOTAPE)

BUSH: Good morning. As a new Congress convenes, we must take steps to speed up the economic recovery and to strengthen public confidence in the integrity of American corporations.

This week in Chicago, I announced my growth and jobs plan, specific proposals to help workers, employers and investors across America.

For unemployed Americans whose benefits expired on December 28th, I asked Congress to act to extend those benefits. Congress did so quickly, and I signed the extension of unemployment benefits into law this week.

For Americans who face the greatest difficulty finding work, I propose special re-employment accounts. These accounts will provide up to $3,000 to help pay for training, moving expenses or other costs of finding a job.

For all income-tax payers, I propose speeding up the tax cuts already approved by Congress, because Americans need that relief today. Instead of gradually reducing the marriage penalty between now and 2009, we should do it now. Instead of waiting until 2008 to move more taxpayers from the 15-percent bracket to the 10-percent bracket, we should make that change now. Instead of slowly raising the child credit to $1,000 by 2010, we should raise it now. When these changes are made, 92 million Americans will keep an average of $1,083 more of their own money.

And for America's 84 million investors and those who will become investors, I propose eliminating the double taxation on stock dividends. Double taxation is unfair and bad for our economy. It falls especially hard on seniors, many of whom rely on dividends for a steady source of income in their retirement.

Abolishing double taxation of dividends will leave nearly 35 million Americans with more of their own money to spend and invest, which will promote savings and return as much as $20 billion this year to the private economy. Overall, my tax cut proposals will add nearly $59 billion to the economy in 2003 alone.

Our government is also acting to restore investor confidence in the integrity and honesty of corporate America. In response to the abuses of some corporations, we passed serious reforms, and we will vigorously enforce them.

Our corporate fraud task forces obtained convictions or guilty pleas in over 50 cases. More than 160 defendants have been charged with criminal or civil wrongdoing, and 130 new corporate fraud investigations have been launched.

In my budget for the coming year, I will also propose major increases in funding for the prosecutors of corporate crime. My 2004 budget funding for the Securities and Exchange Commission will be 73 percent higher than 2002 levels. This will allow the agency to hire hundreds of new accountants, lawyers and examiners.

I'm also requesting an extra $25 million for the Department of Justice to expand corporate fraud investigations. This will allow the department to create 118 new positions in the FBI, including 56 agents.

In addition, 94 new people will be hired to serve in the U.S. Attorney's Offices and legal divisions across the nation.

The SEC and Justice Department are the referees of corporate conduct. Under my budget, they will have every resource they need to enforce the laws that punish fraud and protect investors.

I ask the Congress to support these enforcement measures and to pass my growth and jobs plan as soon as possible.

Our country has made great progress in restoring investor confidence and putting the recession behind us. We cannot be satisfied, however, until every corporate wrongdoer is held to account and every part of our economy is strong and every person who wants to work can find a job.

Thank you for listening.

(END AUDIOTAPE)

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Find Smoking Gun in Iraq; Bush's Economic Plan to Be Tested on Wall Street>