where both people. you're clicking on sunday and it's like on fire, you can watch that and it's like msnbc always those prison shows that it's always like i fear that and i can't say. and then you click again and it's like is not the chopper with a new biography. i've been meaning to talk about a lot more when i do my talking and you listen and you realize it's esoteric, it's weird, it's ridiculous, but that's who we are. we readers. i was getting my hair dried at the salon. i've seen my hair dried at the salon, but no stranger kind of this nice young man about booktv. and i was like yeah, it's really gay. their writers and they read from their work in the talk about their work and he said the father is? so like the golf channel without the punishing excitement. it's all it is his books and writers and it's like 24/7?

i might 242 because monday through friday it's like c-span c-span 2. but at the end i thought i'm really glad that we are so rare on the ground. we're readers that we care about books and were so happy in los angeles with a great writer like you comes out, judy. and i was e-mailing friends about this event and everybody says you know her? ..

>> i'll also want to say if this is a wonderful event. it makes me feel important and i am glad to be here with caitlin who i have admired for so long. she is the kind of writer you read qn"ájjrv botherño i will never be that good. as far as your writing for years i have a terrible admission. in my household we watch those shows. i usually walk out at that point. it isn't a subject for a calling. thank you for coming. it is a real treat for me. >> tell me about the writer's block you experienced in your

writing. >> it was too easy. it was sold based on conversations with an editor. i had gone to new york to meet with my editor for my last book and i had some ideas for a magazine story. i thought she had some good contacts to pitch ideas to and one of the ideas was this world i saw around me in washington looked so strange to me. these were young kids. who had never heard of these? kids who were getting diagnosed with pathologies' i had never heard about. older kids were taking vacations. and being completely immersed in the world of anxious parents king and parents who were pushing their kids to be perfect. and i just thought this was an

offshoot of the same phenomenon. i heard a conversation about this. went home and that was it. it was too good to be true. it wasn't a good idea. it took awhile to find that out. i tried to report the first idea and find members and doctors to back the idea up. i started with doctors who i thought shared the same ideas i did. when i actually reached them i found they didn't actually believe these things. they said there was some medication and some disorders but overall kids were not being overdiagnosed. >> this is a real dinner party.

because people will really say kids are just being turned into lab rats and their parents, just a terrible perfection and what you found out was people were really paying to get their children medication. >> it was a long process. it was a few years. i didn't know what i was talking about. i have to start over completely and the place to start over is by talking to parents and getting a sense of what they are going through. the main part of it was talking with parents and when i talked to parents i heard stories that were so completely different from the stories i had in my mind and found in the media all the time to throw medication that the kids.

this was never the case. >> not that any of us have ever sold a book and if they didn't want to write a different look how did that go over when i said i no longer believe that kids are being overmedicated? [talking over each other] >> a complete turnover at the publishing house. i think they felt whatever. just get it in and they had three years to wait. >> we have got issues. i was a teacher for three years before i became a writer and when i started teaching in 87 we talked about learning disabilities and issues. what do you mean issues?

why is it so stigmatized cote -- to call something what is? >> it is used so ironically. it has become a euphemism for mental health issues. a broad way to find and generally you don't referred to some of these specifics. it is more the lower intensity mental health problems but also this little bit of doubt attached to the word, little bit of doubt of what you are talking about. it is interesting that the title we got issues survived from the book's first incarnation. at that time we as a society have issues and our kids are getting sick. now we have a society of issues and we are holding a mirror up to ourselves to see how it is that our prejudices are in the

way of allowing us to constructively and realistically interact with children's mental health. >> there was a narrative that kids are being overmedicated and a terrible world and we are struggling and that is not really true and there are a lot of narratives are around this and one thing we always say when you address this is we get really a angry that little boys need to run and play and fit into this narrow constructs which i took part and could have handled it differently, just being a boy. and you think maybe it is true and it could be true that within that population there was pain over these issues. >> there are lot of valid

observations about the problems in family life today in school and pressures put on children. and really important things to say and all of these conditions which are a natural for kids creates stress for them and some of optimal conditions and that is entirely different, a whole different matter than health issues. all kids today are subject to a certain level of stress or pressure. it is a different stress or pressure but not all kids come down these issues. it is a very naive idea that society causes problems for adults. the truth is more complicated than that. sometimes i find i am so busy

and my kids are so pressured because of my husband's busyness do you think i ever leave anyone to say the reason my child isn't succeeding is they are caught up in this double career life the parents are leading? i get questions like that all the time and a lot of people probably don't know -- they are just caught up in it. some children thrive in this environment. they are -- pediatricians will tell you you can't make these blanket statements. [talking over each other] that is the problem when you get invested in it one way or the other. i made the mistake of overscheduling. is really bad for me because i hate driving around going

places. it is torture. it has to be bad for children's mental health. and the overscheduling problem, it is kind of interesting. the real problem is there are a lot of kids who don't do extracurriculars at all and these other kids we are focusing on and he didn't have children beach -- he was right. i did -- >> when we get three things you talk about depression which i told you earlier. as a former teacher nothing got my attention more than sadness in a child. they couldn't do the work. sadness always caught my

attention and when you are in a teacher's meeting, tell us about depression in children because nothing hurts parents more than to know there's nothing that hurts more than when their child is sad and parents quickly and too often, sadness or depression, i must be doing something wrong but there's a quiet -- clinical diagnosis of depression. >> it is one of the most painful diagnoses for a parent to witness because it is all but impossible not to take that sadness onto yourself. even if you look at your life and don't see doctors tell you there's nothing causing this, is just about impossible. until the 1970s it was believed children couldn't suffer depression. their egos were not well enough

developed. and then you had children who were depressed or suffering depression and all of a sudden you have anti-depressant for kids with medications on the market that could be given to kids. there weren't any. clearly children are being helped. it has been shown to really help children. there are treatment options that are possible but there was skepticism about this that didn't help and the role that this is asian of depression you see with children. you read big romanticizes asian of depression in adults all the time and it simply is impossible if you have ever been depressed to take part in that kind of romantic as asian of a disorder that is crippling.

>> you write about what we love to claim, we all say our careers are built on a dd and impulses and all that. talks unless about that because that is the one. people don't get very judgmental about depression but the notion that kids aren't marching along in line at their school in the proper way and medication bring them down to keep them in a row. that has gotten people angry with the subject of the book which is why it is opening up this valuable conversation. >> that is the flashpoint for so long. it is perceived not to be a real mental health disorder and i didn't believe that it was. it sounds so much like a response to crazy times when the

symptoms described as put forward in the media. part of it is it has consistently been described as a disorder of boys who can't sit still or don't behave well and we all know children that behave well because their parents don't know how to discipline them and too permissive and don't say no. just by defining it as a boy who can't sit still is so incorrect that it is so much more wide reaching. there are children who aren't hyperactive at all who are primarily inattentive. a lot of children suffer enormously. they suffer socially and academically and you don't see this at all. that is the common perception of what it is. if it is presented as trivial people believe it is trivial and it is presented that way.

>> how does a parent go about making a good decision for their children? if a teacher notices something or another parent does, there is a big piece on the cover of time magazine, child who has autism and the most frustrating thing was she got the diagnosis and said tell me what to do. whatever it is i will do it. but we don't know what to do. what is the right path? >> the right path is finding a doctor you can trust who is going to -- [talking over each other] >> aren't these from the ritalin company? >> i was thinking of the pediatricians. a pediatrician who has been able to get to know the child over a long time. you have to rule out physical

problems. could there be something else going on? you want to rule that out. a false sense of what the child's life is but how do you get a recommendation to the right person or mental health specialists? you need someone to act in a medical home and give you good recommendations and help to coordinate care if you are going to be involved in different therapies whether it is medication or not or some form of therapy or surgeon disorders, a lot of things are at play. [talking over each other] >> part of your book that was fascinating was this issue of children psychiatrists or any who are being paid by drug companies. how does that work? what do they get? for each prescription or what?

>> they can't take money for prescribing certain drugs directly but what they can do is give lectures, participate in continuing medical education, in the pay of the drugmakers. they can put their names on papers that are ghostwritten by people working for drug companies and have their research underwritten by drug companies. >> you had the amazing statistic i had never heard that 96% of all harvard med school students been paid by drug company -- [talking over each other] >> they get used to this relationship that has been put in place that starts in medical school with pizza. >> enjoy your pizza. >> some research into

giftgiving. decisionmaking -- when you get the prozac and no one cares about that anymore. [talking over each other] they have shown all of this gift-giving plays a role and certainly consulting on the advisory board and there are many ways these relationships happen and have happened over the years and terrible damage has been done. this was a profession that already wasn't highly esteemed in america. psychiatrist generally and probably child psychiatry even more. has had a terrible image for long time. that there has been a terrible blow to the public trust for good reason. [talking over each other] >> my favorite part of the book,

you took this big-time new york times reported to plunge to ask him some questions and really got into it. i can't imagine you have a fight with anybody. >> i can't identify the new york times reporter. he was with a large -- [talking over each other] >> he had no idea what i was talking about. a paper by the drug company. >> he was someone who covers the industry, who has written extensively on this topic, who has been helpful to me and we went to lunch to talk about this and i knew we'd disagree from the 10 or of his story. but we literally went to lunch and we sort of ended up yelling

at each other. [talking over each other] >> you are wrong. >> i wouldn't yell back necessarily. i will be honest. i respond very badly to what i perceive as male bullying. there's a certain way men can have of presenting their ideas as if they're not opinions but facts. i don't respond well to that. i may have taken some literary license to say we were yelling at each other but we were raising our voices but i was not going to back down. what was very useful about this lunch because it was relatively early on. it was early 2008 when i had my change of heart in 2007 and from this conversation i knew what direction i was going because i had done that at that point but

i still knew there were holes in getting the research and the numbers. i wanted to be able to have statistics to back up the opinions and information i had gone and from that point on i spent a few months digging in the library to find the statistics i could to look at the pictures that would be created on guidance and medication. >> we are familiar with the tom cruise/matt lauer incident. if you missed it. tom cruise went on the today show and went off on a tangent to a personal any kind of medicating -- why is that part of scientology? >> i don't know. i am not up on scientology except they have a museum here called psychiatry, the science of death. that tells you everything.

this strong feeling but have you been on the receiving end of some of this? >> not yet. >> i am glad about that because they can be very threatening. that is what i have heard. [talking over each other] >> any scientology is in the room? we are good. >> i have been disappointed. i have been waiting for years for the book to come out -- it wasn't getting done. i was going to write a column about how high wish i was in the pay of the drug companies because i have all kinds of work that went down in my house and i would like to have the pfizer pavilion -- [talking over each other] >> but i haven't had that opportunity. >> you used this in relation to children and therapy and i had to remember everyone knows about

that caribbean. you say there is this idea that kids are being sent to therapy. it is a -- upper middle-class driving thing. >> i borrowed a phrase from a washington post piece in 2004 coldwell this therapy and it was a description, was not an unsympathetic peace because it was written by a woman whose daughter had gone through a lot of these therapies and it described the frantic efforts parents make, it was very expensive, to find solutions and often going outside of mainstream medical opinion to try out various medical therapies that are not necessarily recommended by doctors but a lot of parents think will do their kids some good. i don't know if this would put occupational therapy in that category or not. it depends on what it is for.

it is somewhat debated. but things like auditory retraining therapy or a physician therapy or nutritional work or energy work, things like that, biofeedback can help people but it is extensive and considered experimental by insurance companies and what you see in upper middle class communities is these kids get therapy after therapy. a lot of times they take away the medication which is a lot of the goal. there is often a lot of time lost and it is the kind of atmosphere that sent me in the direction of the first book. it looks from the outside like they are running in circles trying to perfect children not accepting them for who they are. what you understand when you are

more compassionate is they are scared and they don't know what to do and they are not being given answers and they are trying to find the best way to help their child. >> shocking moment in the book. [talking over each other] >> the author of that piece brought up the scenario of a mother giving her child something, take your vitamins and i was shocked by that. that is the conversation doctors say -- what do you think of that? >> i haven't heard that. the mother in question was very uncomfortable about giving her child the medication in the first place and this was the way she handled it and what she wanted to do. it may have seemed simpler to do it that way but that mother has

the most wonderful quote. her son told her it was as though he had chameleon eyes. his eyes went in two different directions and his eyes turned straight. she really didn't want to get medication and a long-term he doesn't take it but at the time she said how do you argue with your child and tell him to turn his eyes straight and keeps his eyes straight? >> i am sure you have people who look in all these directions. are we going to lose something if we don't have this variety of inspection? >> the mother of a daughter who had this vision is debilitating. if your eyes go in two different directions it is debilitating. >> it sounds kind of romantic.

we want people to think outside the box and we want people to finish those thoughts and reach their potential and do what you might be able to do. if your eyes are going two different ways -- >> what about as a former high-school teacher these drugs in high school or adolescence? i learned about a kid taking these drugs when he or she was a child and they no longer needed it and what was that about? >> the same population. the kids described for them are selling them to other kids but we have to make the distinction through medication to justify medication and what we are talking about and all these stories we're seeing about college students in order to stay up all night to study more, it should be treated as such.

>> it is the same as other stimulants medication. >> they don't affect them the way they affect the people who are calm down by them and those who are not meant to take them are not taken seriously. >> you started writing about this and the way people reacted and get -- you realize you were on to something. they really split -- there were parents that had chosen a mental health issue who were so happy to have someone saying you are not a bunch of lazy pill pushers and you care about your children. they were the doctors who work with these kids and parents who were glad to have that too and the people who feel very strongly that kids are being stuffed full of drug than this is a terrible thing and we're living in a natural time that we are not willing to look at the pathologies of our society or

people in the mental-health field is professional orientation is hospital medication and they continue to be very vocal saying this is a long way to go whether it is the few that you hear from. i am not sure why these have to be opposing ways of dealing with children and certainly no children who -- you want professional turf battles. >> when i was a little girl you would be in your classroom and there would be a variety of kids like the bully. is such a big thing to talk about all the time. is that part of a mental health issue? >> i wouldn't know how to

address that. the area of interest as opposed to being the lead with psychologists suggesting the kids who boule have problems of their own but whether they have problems, that is the question you have to ask. everybody has up problem. that doesn't mean you have a mental health disorder. in the golden age of classrooms, the golden age was over but i remember the bad they started, there were always kids in the hall. kids spent most of their early school career sitting in the hallway because they didn't behave well so they didn't learn anything. it was the classroom management technique. where they being well served or the kid you hated because he was always in your face so he was

always getting yelled at and being told how awful he was. what happened to him long term? >> this is a subject that a lot of people have questions about. we have a microphone set up down there. i wonder if anyone wants to join this conversation. >> right here. >> this is not in the form of a question but i would like to comment on how grateful i am that you pointed this out but to balance the situation more clearly, i had a child who was hyperactive end his father was a surgeon and psychiatrist and

every possible treatment before we found ritalin and it changed his life. and licensed read that the counterbalance to children who are overmedicated is true, but from my own experience and his experience it made it possible for him to concentrate the study, he is an attorney who is successful but neither do i how that without that -- i am curious what it was like for you to give that medication 40 years ago. how did other people react? it was -- >> he is -- he felt was appropriate.

it is fine with me and i saw the change in behavior, questioning at that time. >> i am a physician who treats a lot of kids and adults and i worked in an integrated health facility and most of my practice in inro feedback or brain wave biofeedback and if any drug had studies that had already been done using that feedback it would be widely licensed and everybody would know about it. quite a few studies have been done. mental health is doing that as well and come out this summer. it really is something many more

people should know about. i treat very successfully 70% of the time both adults and kids with a dd very successfully. they are able to get off the ritalin or reduce it significantly. i treat kids was autism also. >> it is fantastic because if they are able to come out with positive results from a body that has that kind of wait and power it might change the situation with insurance companies because the difficulty for families is it is a very expensive and not reimbursed. >> i have to give my plug for natural feedback but it will be more mainstream because it treats anxiety extremely well

and post-traumatic stress disorder. >> where is that available? >> i am in santa monica. my name is dr. do good. >> thank you. >> that is great to hear. >> can you hear me? two things i want to address. when you asked the question before about what other parents fought when you had your child medicated that is a really good point. that is the stigma. we have to educate people so parents don't think it is a stigma so they will take those actions. advocates are work with like families and in my family, you

could write a book on genetic disorders. we have everything and i am very open about it but many parents aren't. the learning disability and everything. i thank you for that and we feel it is -- there's nothing wrong with them. it is like they have an illness and need medication. the other point was about the creativity and medication. my son has hit on top of dyslexia, ocd 11 and anxiety we were going to medicate him and the psychiatrist put it very well. my son is an extremely creative -- you couldn't give him medication enough to get him in a box.

there's not enough medication. he is into science. the doctor said that obsessiveness will be really good in the lab. use those strengths or whatever you can get in that area but you don't need it in the other areas. >> i am glad you raised the issue of stigma because it is so important and something we need to talk about. not only because it is hurtful and cool but keeps children from getting help because parents don't want to confront these issues because of the fear of what other people will say because they feel bad themselves

to think their children have problems and the real tragedy is kids don't get help. >> the story of the one parent who did something that really worked. made an intervention with the scheduler and other parents said maybe i am not a good parent because i didn't come up with that strategy but the two children have different diagnoses. >> i come not as a writer. i am a terrible rider but i do have a child who has autism. and another has a ph.d. -- adhd. one of them has been miraculously healed through medication and intervention. we don't necessarily have a road map as to how to proceed.

my question is you have a gentleman who comes to speak about biofeedback and as parents with special needs children we have all the we grasp at. my husband and i are one of the lucky ones. our child has done amazing and it has not been easy. what is being done in the way of the special needs community to offer a holistic approaches? your approach which is truly very important to parents like ourselves who struggle to put them on medication, is this going to be detrimental to our child, how are we going to be judged? in the case of our daughter it has been miraculously that she has been on medication.

it has given her a new lease on life. we are not a panel to get together with people who have ballistic approaches and appealing to the special needs community to which i am. and they want a road map. >> getting a roadmap with the various choices and one road map people can turn to. [talking over each other] >> it is -- there is no road map for each child. every child is individual and every child has that unique cocktail of problems and it is not as a writer but if you truly believe in this medication to

help these children, why is there not a panel of good people going to the special needs community offering different options? >> one of the things you are saying is people have an idea that it is too much and it is not enough offered. is that what you are saying with medication? >> i am saying there is no road map for these children. they are all unique. they're all different. medication works for some. natural feedback works for other. cognitive behavior therapy works for another. parents are out there struggling trying to grasp anything that can help their children. we are one of the lucky ones that medication was helpful but this effort has to be joined

together with all of these different disciplines to offer parents a way to pick and choose what is going to work for their children. >> in response to that a lot of these different disciplines are mutually exclusive or at least current and battling and different orientations at work here. and one set of answers. people who have more alternative orientation and another -- and the web site where the proven form of care.

the evidence is there hair stand on head. because that is -- my science is my son and this is a really sort of philosophical orientation. i am finishing an article on vision therapy and i see this split around the area of vision of therapy. so i hear what you are saying and it is difficult because you end up with a panel of people who vehemently and passionately disagree with each other and for individual parents it comes down to finding somebody who can guide you. we are not doctors. we are not trained in these different areas.

we have to put our face on somebody who is trained to make informed decisions and it gets back to the tragedy of what happened with pharmaceutical research and the information is so corrupted that it is difficult to trust what the decisions can be. [talking over each other] >> i love to work on -- we can't cure you. we can heal you and it is great. >> i have a different view. my son was diagnosed when he was 6 and we tried medication and nothing worked and it makes no

difference. he's skinny as a rail and is wearing off and you have to figure it out. he is a slow processor. to this day a psychiatrist -- it doesn't work. this is what it is. just because he is similar to what i am like it is a processing issue. you need to pay attention. he tried the neural feedback and that was a $5,000 bust. [talking over each other] >> i wish they were. i shouldn't be light-hearted.

congratulations. where is he going to go? i am from northern california. from kids outgrow their symptoms. 40% outgrow their symptoms. when their brain finished maturing it came out at the end of 2008 and showed they have a delay in maturation of three to five years. >> let me ask you. young adulthood. >> i am not a doctor. 40% of them do. >> i haven't read your book and at the risk of offering

opinions, i will -- i am curious -- what confuses me in what has come forward, 90% of those with pharmaceutical industry influence -- [talking over each other] >> it seems the treatment protocol that exists in this culture are solely based around pharmaceutical prescriptions and the reason is this is an easily cut defied treatment protocol and these are not easily -- they are more easily codify than i thought. there is something -- which is

not to question the relative effectiveness of the treatment, but if you're going for a biofeedback you can't get picked up by your insurance policy if you have insurance. that is the other side of this. the other side of the story. let's hope you have insurance to even address these issues with your children because a good portion of us may not from one month to the next. the fact is the culture is so completely corrupt than it is amazing to toss these ideas around in this manner. parents aren't given options particularly and there may be other options. when you talk about biofeedback,

that is a westernized description of medication. at least in my experience to some degree, these are orientations' simply are not allowed. >> it will be easy to put the drug in the bottle. when people do have insurance it doesn't cover the mental health coverage and such large numbers of professionals don't participate in insurance so you may find somebody who takes it on the waiting list but just goes on indefinitely when

there's such a shortage in the first place. the whole access issue is a huge one. we can have all kinds of critiques of our culture and everything. the problem is where i started out too, the abstractions are maybe perfectly valid and important and interesting but when it gets down to it and you are talking about real children and their lives, you have to deal with what is in front of you. what i learned as a teacher is the mother and father really know something and it can be very argumentative outside the family. when that mom came up and said this is bull cit, parents have a strong sense and i learned not to question them if they knew

something. >> i wanted to make some statements about using different therapies of medicine or therapy in conjunction with each other. this came up a few times in the course of the talk tonight and pediatrics specifically. i don't have children but i have done my practice for ten years clippers delay large portion of my caseload and something that i found, the opportunity to do conventional therapy, might help the occupational therapy, and the pharma logical approach to sustain attention long enough, to perceptual issues thatitie and to not take it as let's

medicaid our kids or give them therapy, and out those approaches can support families. so i see both sides that struggle to medicate them. my job is to go in and say sometimes you need both. keeping an open mind that way. you have this book to say they shouldn't be a stigma for medicine. it is another tool to help children but not to take that too far in the other direction that other approaches whether they are reimbursed or not are not as effective if we bring them together. >> that is an important point and it is interesting because the big thing about looking at our culture and talking about children with mental health issues and the way to talk about it, you should medicate your

child or not medicate your child, we naturally end up falling into camps once the conversation is launched, this works or that works or opposing this or that, that is what is so interesting because there is a larger investment in a lot of these positions that we have to think about because i find myself back in the corner sometimes. i am a journalist, not a doctor. i am just trying to look at the big picture and this happens so easily and so naturally. the thing that is obsessing me this week, we have these camps and the camps say a lot about our orientation generally towards medicine, toward mainstream opinion, where your power seems to be coming from.

we want to thank you so much. i love this book and i am telling everybody to read it and it is an outstanding -- the strength of your boat is when these parents share these -- i really found that it is not a bunch of peopleç around a dinn table. it is parents who love their kids. anybody who wants to meet you, the book is available in the back. [talking over each other] [applause] >> judith warner is author of perfect madness and hillary clinton:the inside story. she is the inside correspondent for newsweek in paris. for more information visit judithwarneronline.com. >> we are here with christina,

author of the new book sisters in war:a story of love and survival in the new iraq. who is via? >> they are two iraqi sisters who are 18 and 21 years old at the start of the war. they're filled with hope for what the americans will do for iraq because they have suffered horribly ended the iraqi regime. the older sister goes to work for the americans and falls in love with an american contractor and the other sister is struggling to get her degree at the university which becomes harder and harder as the americans lose control of the country and radical islam gains control. >> where did you meet them? >> early 2003 at the start of the war. >> you talked to two other women. >> heather:is the u.s. soldier, a reservist at the start of the war who eventually becomes in

charge of the biggest initiative to bring americans version of women's rights to the middle east and the other is a boston american activist and she is working for women for women international in iraq trying to help iraqi women with grass-roots efforts. >> you followed them through on your stay in iraq and where was that? >> i was there in 2003 until 2005. >> what >> did you see? >> tremendous change. we went from a country that was thrilled at the thought of the u.s. overthrowing saddam hussein, potential to rebuild the country and give the country a new lease, to the realization that the u.s. didn't know what it was doing and wasn't prepared for the problems that it faced and the country was spinning out of control. it was safe in the beginning for jewish journalists and became a

dangerous place by the end. >> these women come from different backgrounds. how did they see a change in the way they were treated in iraq? >> they have a lot of freedom under saddam hussein. there was no security so they were virtually under house arrest for a long time. that eventually got even worse and the power vacuum led to the arrival of radical islam, a conservative version of how women should live influenced by iran. iraqi women found themselves unable to leave the house possibly losing their rights in constitution and government and matters of divorce and inheritance, family law. the became desperate for what the future might hold and they never would have thought they would have ended up like that because they have a lot of rights under saddam hussein. >> you were in the middle east for many years.

have you seen a change in the way you have been treated as a female reporter on the ground in the middle east since september 11th? >> most arabs were welcoming to americans despite what the media portrayed them as being anti-american but i think the u.s. direction in iraq and afghanistan change their minds and a lot of them feel of all americans are against their world and against islam and their religion. i have to counter that and had to address that in meeting them. >> is it difficult to do that as a journalist? >> it is. there's a lot of suspicion about journalists in the middle east. a lot of them think we work for the cia or we are spies. they don't appreciate the wall that exists between the and the government in this country. they don't believe we are neutral observers. i have to counter that before i go anywhere