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Life & Times Transcript

8/22/07

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

A tiny creature is invading southern California waters and the threat is enormous.

Mike Giusti>> You can't eradicate them. All you can try to do is control and manage their impacts. You know, it's a very expensive process. The Great Lakes area has expended upwards of a billion dollars a year.

Val Zavala>> And then, is putting a man on Mars the best way to explore space? The debate over human space flight.

It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val Zavala>> California Fish and Game authorities are trying to head off a disaster for California's lakes and reservoirs. The culprit is a mollusk, or a small mussel, which, once established, is virtually impossible to get rid of, and it's already created havoc in the waters in the state of Michigan. Now it's turned up here in southern California. What can we do to stop it? Roger Cooper has our story.

Roger Cooper>> It's a clear blue, picture-perfect morning at Diamond Valley Lake near Hemet about ninety miles southeast of Los Angeles, and there is unusual activity at this manmade reservoir, the largest fresh body of water in California.

Teams of divers plunge below the surface, but this is not a pleasure dive. They're on an urgent mission. They're on a search for any signs of a tiny life form. It has just been confirmed that California is under invasion by a creature with a ferocious reputation, the Quagga mussel.

The Quagga mussel is barely an inch long, but it can create enormous problems as authorities halfway across the country discovered. In 1989, Quaggas were accidentally introduced to the Great Lakes after hitching a ride in the water compartments of ships from the Ukraine. Since then, they have taken over. They've done billions in damage, clogging water intake pipes, fouling boat motors and even changing the ecosystem by pushing out other mussels in the Great Lakes region.

Mic Stewart>> Once it was introduced in the Great Lakes region, it virtually exploded in terms of growth.

Roger Cooper>> Mic Stewart is a microbiologist with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

Mic Stewart>> The Zebra mussel can grow up to seven hundred thousand mussels per square meter. That's a lot. The Quagga mussel, their close relative, twenty to forty thousand per square meter. That is significant growth.

Roger Cooper>> And California's worst nightmare came true in early January. Divers found Quagga mussels for the first time here in the west in Lake Mead and in the California side of Lake Havasu.

Mike Giusti>> We all have learned a lot about Zebra mussels and Quagga mussels in the last few days, believe me.

Roger Cooper>> And a State Game and Fish biologist, Mike Giusti, is quick to note that those lakes feed the Colorado Aqueduct and that gives the Quagga mussels a direct path to California's water system. Does Fish and Game feel you have a problem on your hands?

Mike Giusti>> Yeah. The state feels we have a problem on our hands and not just Fish and Game because we've known the problem was out there. It's just never been on the west coast and now it is, so the potential impacts are extremely significant for the state. Not just in terms of the fisheries, but water delivery and everything else.

Roger Cooper>> By now, you've probably got one burning question. How could a Quagga mussel from the Great Lakes turn up thousands of miles away in California?

Mic Stewart>> You know, the prevailing theory is that it comes in on recreational boats. People in the Great Lakes region, when the winter months set in and they want to come to a little bit warmer climate, they bring their boat out to enjoy the sunny western part of the country and Quagga mussels either attached or were inside the chamber of the engine or the quarter aft and was introduced into Lake Mead.

Roger Cooper>> To get a preview of what California might be in for, it helps to take a trip out on the Great Lakes. We're aboard a research vessel from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Dr. Russell Cuhel of the Great Lakes Water Institute leads a team that has years of experience using underwater robotic cameras. They can document the impact Quagga mussels have had on Lake Michigan.

Dr. Russell Cuhel>> "The camera is moving along a plane or a valley between two hills. We can see a hill in the background. Each rock is completely covered with Quagga mussels which have displaced the Zebra mussels that used to live there. Virtually every surface here is covered with Quagga mussels and, in only two years, all the mussels that used to live there, the Zebra mussels, were replaced with Quaggas."

Roger Cooper>> By using a suction tube attached to the underwater rover, Dr. Cuhel's team is able to capture some Quagga mussels right off the bottom of Lake Michigan.

Dr. Russell Cuhel>> "There goes the vacuum and he'll slurp some mussels up and the sand will go right through the filter."

Roger Cooper>> Once they hoist the rover back on deck, you can meet the enemy face to shell.

Dr. Russell Cuhel>> So in the space of three years from 2003 to 2006, of which this is early, the Quagga mussel invader has completely replaced the Zebra mussels in near-shore waters.

Roger Cooper>> So how can you stop them from muscling in on our waters? State officials have launched an aggressive million dollar multi-agency effort to combat the Quagga invasion. All boaters are being asked to inspect their vessels for mussels before trailering them from one lake to another. And since the mussels depend on water to live, all boaters are being asked to let their boats dry out for at least five days.

Mike Giusti>> Undo the drain plug on the very back of the boat. Drain the water out of that. When they get done fishing for the day, they bring their boats out. They need to wipe them down and not just wipe them dry, but also they need to make sure they run their hand over the hull to feel if there are any bumps because these larval stages are so small that you may not see them.

Roger Cooper>> Authorities are acting fast because, as their colleagues in the Great Lakes will tell you, once Quaggas are established, it's too late.

Mic Stewart>> As we understand it, the eradication is virtually impossible once you have Quaggas or Zebras in your system.

Roger Cooper>> Once they establish a foothold, what can you do?

Mike Giusti>> It's difficult. You can't eradicate them. All you can try to do is control and manage their impacts. You know, it's a very expensive process. The Great Lakes area has expended upwards of a billion dollars a year just in trying to control Zebra mussels and Quagga mussels.

Roger Cooper>> One ray of hope for California is that the Quaggas here are in isolated pockets and have only been around a short time.

Mic Stewart>> It's believed that the infestation in Lake Mead is relatively in its first stages, perhaps less than two or three years, so it's just getting started. They're very sensitive to chlorine, so we have an opportunity to add chlorine in our aqueduct perhaps to inactivate or kill these guys before they make it down to our reservoirs.

Roger Cooper>> Meanwhile back at Diamond Valley Lake, the Water District divers are surfacing with an answer to the crucial question. Have Quagga mussels made it this far up the aqueduct?

>> They were clean. No signs of any Zebra or Quagga mussels.

Roger Cooper>> Does this mean that they're not there?

>> It doesn't mean they're not there. They weren't in the obvious places that they would normally populate. It's very encouraging, the fact that we didn't find anything.

Roger Cooper>> And there's more good news. Other dives at Lake Matthews near Riverside and Lake Skinner in Temecula didn't find any Quaggas either. However, Quaggas continue to be detected in the Colorado River Aqueduct.

And back in July, water officials shut the aqueduct down for ten days and dried it out in an effort to stop their spread and the state continues to encourage boaters not to let Quagga mussels hitch a ride to new bodies of water. At Diamond Valley Lake near Hemet, I'm Roger Cooper for Life and Times.

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Val Zavala>> It's been about six years since 9/11 and the man at the heart of it all, Osama Bin Laden, is still at large, assuming he's alive. In the meantime, how many Americans really understand what Al Qaeda wants? There are, of course, the familiar list of issues, but the truth may be more disturbing. Now a new book, "The Al Qaeda Reader", translates certain text from the Koran, Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda leaders, some of it never translated into English before.

The editor is Raymond Ibrahim, whose parents came to America from Egypt. He speaks fluent Arabic, studied Middle East history at Cal State Fresno and did graduate work at Georgetown University Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. He now works at the Library of Congress. So, Raymond, why did you think we need a book like this? Because most of us kind of know that Osama Bin Laden hates America.

Raymond Ibrahim>> Right. Well, I think we needed a book like this to put things in a better perspective because we just get half of his writing and half of his communiqu�s which are all propaganda.

Val Zavala>> And sort of custom-made for the west.

Raymond Ibrahim>> They're made for our consumption basically, which is to create a guilt trip and make us seem as totally unjust and that he and the Muslim world are the victims, whereas the theology section which we've never seen and which are not ever sent to us and what's why we haven't seen them before kind of contradicts all that by saying that, no matter what, the west is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't until it actually accepts Islamic rule.

Val Zavala>> The reasons for Osama Bin Laden's animosity toward the west are well known. United States support of Israel, occupation of Iraq and the decadence of western society. But Ibrahim says that these political issues are not addressed in the theological writings, that the theological texts of Al Qaeda reveal a deeper divide.

Raymond Ibrahim>> When you read the theological treatises, it contradicts and doesn't address any of this. All it says is what Muslims are commanded to do per se vis-�-vis infidels. I need to read one quote. This is Osama Bin Laden talking.

"Thus our talks with the infidel west and our conflict with them ultimately revolve around one issue, one that demands our total support with power and determination with one voice, and it is does Islam or does it not force people by the power of the sword to submit to its authority corporeally if not spiritually? Yes.

There are only three choices in Islam. Either willing submission" -- conversion to Islam -- "or payment of the jizya" -- which is tribute -- "through physical though not spiritual submission" -- to the authority of Islam -- "or the sword, for it is not right to let him" -- an infidel -- "live. The matter is summed up for every personal life. Either submit, live under Islam or die."

Val Zavala>> There is also a passage in there about mingling or becoming friends with Christians and Jews, right?

Raymond Ibrahim>> Right. He has this whole essay. This is Ayman al-Zawahiri's doctrine called Loyalty and Enmity. It's about a sixty-page document and it's totally grounded in Koranic verses and the traditions of Mohammed. Basically in short, what it says is that "Muslims must always be loyal to other Muslims. Love and friendship for them" -- non-Muslims -- "contradicts faith.

Allah Most High said, 'Oh you who believe,' -- this is a verse from the Koran -- 'do not take the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors. They are but friends and protectors to each other. Whoever among you takes them for a friend, then surely he is one of them." In other words, he's an infidel.

Val Zavala>> There's also the issue of compatibility between Islam and democracy and, according to some of these writings, they are not compatible at all.

Raymond Ibrahim>> Right. There's an entire treatise written by Ayman al-Zawahiri which is on sharia and democracy and, after basically showing how antithetical democracy or any kind of government, not just democracy, but socialism, communism, how antithetical they are to Islam law because one of the main aspects of Islam is that there's the law to follow derived from the Koran and the deeds of Mohammed.

So Ayman al-Zawahiri even concludes it by saying, "Thus whoever claims to be a democratic Muslim or a Muslim who calls for democracy is like one who says about himself, 'I am a Jewish Muslim' or 'I am a Christian Muslim', the one worse than the other. He is an apostate infidel."

Val Zavala>> So basically, it's impossible to be, according to him, Muslim and participate or support democratic or other governments?

Raymond Ibrahim>> Right. And the reason for that is because, from the inception of Islam in the seventh century, one of the key features of it was following the law of Allah, sharia law, Islamic law. It has many names. Sharia law, Islamic law, divine law. So basically, you read the Koran and it's full of prohibitions and commandments. So the way to really prove that you're a Muslim is that you want to follow this.

His argument ultimately is how can you say you're a Muslim and then get together with a bunch of other Muslims and vote something that has already been fixed from on high and vote against it?

Val Zavala>> So this would be very disturbing to Americans, obviously. What percentage of Muslims actually believe in this or are willing to fight for these kinds of ideas?

Raymond Ibrahim>> Well, that's a very complicated question. I obviously personally don't know. I don't think anyone does know. But it really all depends on how much a person wants to identify himself or herself with being Muslim and how literally they want to take the Islamic sources, the text.

So just as it is with Christians and Jews and Buddhists and all sorts of other people of other faiths, you have all kinds of people that identify with a religion, but not only do they not follow it, but they don't even necessarily know so much of their religion. I think that's the case with a lot of Muslims.

The question, though, in Christianity, I think this is what we don't see so much fanaticism of Christians in that sense because Christianity, if you really read the text, is very metaphysical. It's not so much grounded in the law. Jesus said, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, render unto God" -- the spiritual -- "what is God's."

Val Zavala>> So we separate religion and state.

Raymond Ibrahim>> Church and state, based on Jesus' own words, was really separated. Now, of course, with the Catholic church in history, that's different. But go into actually the text, it has always been separated. Christianity is passive. Turn the other cheek. Pray for those who persecute you. But in Islam, you have all these laws. It's so grounded in what you do in the now.

In fact, every single action a human being can commit in this life is classified under five categories in Islam. Forbidden; disliked, which means you can do it, but we don't want you to do it; permission, which doesn't matter. Do it or don't; recommended, we'd like you to do it, but you don't really have to; and obligatory. You have to do it.

Val Zavala>> Really?

Raymond Ibrahim>> Every single action in this life under sharia law.

Val Zavala>> Secular or religious?

Raymond Ibrahim>> Oh, yeah.

Val Zavala>> It's all bound into one.

Raymond Ibrahim>> It's all one. There is no separation between secular. Life is religion.

Val Zavala>> We don't want necessarily this kind of thing to shade our perception of Muslims here or cause all sorts of discrimination and hate crimes against Muslims here. Yet that's kind of what it's doing.

Raymond Ibrahim>> Well, that's why I would caution people when they read this to always do what I do, which is I basically separate Islam from Muslims just like I separate Christianity from Christians. One is an objective ideology, the religion. It can be studied, quantified, analyzed. I can sit here and say that Islam commands and Islam does not command this.

Muslims, on the other hand, are just human beings like everyone else. They're subjective. So you can be a Muslim and, A, you don't even know about the violent verses; B, you know about it and you just don't care. You're not going to apply it to your life. That's what a moderate Muslim would be. Or you know, just indifference to it like a lot of people of whatever faith.

Val Zavala>> Or you can be sympathetic, but not be willing to actually --

Raymond Ibrahim>> -- or you can be sympathetic with the cause, but you're not going to actually commit to it physically.

Val Zavala>> Pick up and gun and --

Raymond Ibrahim>> -- exactly, but you understand it, you see? So that's the thing. Ultimately, you have to keep that dividing line. There's religion and we can talk about Christianity. We can sit here and really say that Christianity says this, but it doesn't say that. Does that mean Christians do that? Does that mean they follow that? Maybe a small percentage. It's the same thing, I guess, with Islam.

Val Zavala>> Well, Raymond Ibrahim, thank you very much for bringing some very interesting writings in your book to us.

Raymond Ibrahim>> Thanks for having me, Val.

Val Zavala>> So what do you think of some of those passages? You can post your opinion. Just go to kcet.org and click on the Life and Times Blog.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> Space shuttle landings have become so common that we hardly notice them anymore and yet the space shuttle's days are numbered and a new era of space exploration is being developed. President Bush wants to put a man on Mars, but some scientists say that's not the best way to go. NewsHour's Tom Bearden takes a look at the issues and uncertainties of NASA's future.

[Film Clip]

Tom Bearden>> The space shuttle, the icon and workhorse of America's human space program, is just three years from retirement.

>> "Returning to the Space Station, paving the way for future missions beyond."

Tom Bearden>> So NASA is now looking to the future, planning a whole new chapter in manned space flight, a whole new fleet of rockets and crew capsules, and a demanding new mission to send astronauts back to the moon and eventually to mount a mission to Mars. It's a vision that was laid out by President Bush in 2004.

George W. Bush>> "We will build new ships to carry man forward into the universe, to gain a new foothold on the moon and prepare for new journeys to the worlds beyond our own."

Tom Bearden>> NASA is currently designing the vehicles that the agency hopes will put astronauts back on the moon by 2020, almost fifty years after Neil Armstrong's "giant leap for mankind". Jeff Hanley manages NASA's program to develop new manned space flight systems.

Jeff Hanley>> Mars is the edge of the edge of the frontier and the frontier is where we really test the limits of human endurance and really push technology to the extent of being able to improve life back here for the rest of the planet's inhabitants.

Tom Bearden>> But NASA's history is littered with ambitious programs that have been cancelled because of technical challenges and funding problems. Over a billion dollars was spent on an earlier project to replace the shuttle, dubbed Venture Star, before that program was killed in 2001. The new rockets and manned spacecraft will cost one hundred four billion dollars, according to NASA Director Michael Griffin, the man who has to persuade Congress to spend the money.

Michael Griffin>> I hope to convince the Congress that that request is worth honoring and that NASA is a good place for them to spend their money. But this is a democratic representative government and we have absolutely no guarantee from year to year that any request of any type will be honored.

Tom Bearden>> Using money already appropriated, NASA engineers and contractors are working on the blueprints for a new rocket called Aries One and a new space capsule that will sit atop it, a vehicle called Orion. Orion would be used both for low earth orbital missions such as trips to the International Space Station and for round-trip voyages to the moon.

It looks a lot like the Apollo spacecraft from the 1960s and 1970s, but it's considerably bigger. Meant to carry between four to six astronauts, Orion will return to earth via parachutes instead of gliding to a landing like the space shuttle. NASA also hopes it will be cheaper than the space shuttle because of the tried and true capsule design and the use of off-the-shelf technology such as onboard flight systems adopted from commercial aircraft.

Jeff Hanley>> Getting the operations cost and the production cost down is the key to making this system really and truly a next generation human space flight system.

Marc Sommers>> "This is a facility called Point Lookout. It's our early . . ."

Tom Bearden>> A plywood mock-up of an Orion capsule sits in a warehouse just across the street from NASA's Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston. It was built by Lockheed Martin which has a four billion dollar design contract. Engineer Marc Sommers says the model helps engineers figure out everything from where to put the flight controls to how to give astronauts enough elbow room.

Marc Sommers>> Where we're standing right here actually would be a sixth seat, you know, for people when they're going to the Space Station. When they're going to the moon for lunar ops, then we'd just use these four seats right here.

Tom Bearden>> Astronauts who have actually lived and worked in space have offered practical suggestions to the designers. Astronaut Lee Morin has logged over two hundred fifty-nine hours in orbit.

Lee Morin>> The guys who built this have done a great job building this mock-up, but the first iteration of this was lower because it was designed to be sitting here seated. That's fine for the tasks when you're on your back launching or re-entering, but for evaluating the windows and the docking, you're floating in space. So you need to be able to represent what's it like to be here floating and moving around? So that's more of a standing environment.

Tom Bearden>> Astronauts going to the moon and Mars will also need new spacesuits. These are being tested in the Arizona desert. NASA's Joe Kosmo is in charge of spacesuit development. Why do we need a new suit?

Joe Kosmo>> Well, the shuttle suit wasn't designed for planetary environments, for walking. It's a fine suit for Zero-G operations and working in foot restraints and it doesn't have the kind of mobility features that you really need for walking on a planetary surface. You need additional mobility in the hip and the waist area and, of course, this suit represents that kind of an approach to developing some of that mobility technology.

Tom Bearden>> And off the Florida Keys, astronauts live in an underwater lab for weeks at a time to simulate a future lunar habitat or a long voyage aboard a deep space mission. Jeff Hanley says that all of this has already started to reinvigorate NASA, giving it a new sense of purpose.

Jeff Hanley>> There's a talent being applied across the agency that is excited abut the prospect of doing something big, our generation's monument building. It's doing something greater than ourselves.

Tom Bearden>> But not everyone is completely happy about all this. A lot of scientists are deeply worried that competition for increasingly scarce dollars will starve space science, the satellites that study earth's climate, robotic probes to the planets and orbiting space telescopes.

Louis Friedman>> Currently, the vision is siphoning some money away from the space science and certainly from the space science planning that was being done several years ago.

Tom Bearden>> Louis Friedman is the Executive Director of the Planetary Society, a grassroots space advocacy group. The Society complains that some three billion dollars shifted to manned space flight programs from NASA's science budget has killed or delayed many robotic missions.

Louis Friedman>> A mission to Mars sample return has been cut out. A mission to find planets around other stars that are earth-like, terrestrial planets around other stars, has been cut out. So, yes, there are great losses to the exploration program, where I mean the robotic exploration program, as well as to the future of space exploration as a result of the current requirements on funding.

Fiona Harrison>> In our case, we were cut completely, just cancelled.

Tom Bearden>> Physicist, Fiona Harrison, managed a one hundred twenty million dollar project called New Star, an orbiting telescope that would have searched the cosmos for black holes. When NASA cut her program, Harrison was forced to stop work at her Caltech lab and let dozens of researchers go.

Fiona Harrison>> Certainly, I wouldn't argue that one should sacrifice the manned program. The question is, how do you find the appropriate balance and exercise wide stewardship of the science program?

Tom Bearden>> So you think the cuts were unbalanced?

Fiona Harrison>> Yes. I think the cuts were unbalanced and I think they were done quickly without enough planning and without enough forethought and input from the community.

Jeff Hanley>> There are some hard choices to be made, no doubt.

Tom Bearden>> Jeff Hanley acknowledges the ongoing battle for money among competing programs, but he says the percentage of NASA's budget for science has actually increased.

Jeff Hanley>> Science is as healthy as it's ever been in this agency. During the Apollo era, the science part of the NASA portfolio was something on the order of fifteen to twenty percent. Today, science is a full third of the agency portfolio. It's around thirty-two percent of the agency portfolio where it stands today.

Tom Bearden>> But Hanley, like other NASA veterans, knows the space agency's soaring ambitions could be brought thudding back to earth by cost overruns and changes in national budgetary priorities.

Val Zavala>> That story by NewsHour's Tom Bearden. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Sponsored in part by:


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