clinton president s press conference the white house office of the press secretary for immediate release april press conference by the president the east room p m edt the president terry do you have a question q mr president there s a growing feeling that the western response to bloodshed in bosnia has been woefully inadequate holocaust survivor elie wiesel asked you yesterday to do something anything to stop the fighting is the united states considering taking unilateral action such as air strikes against serb artillery sites the president well first let me say as you know for more than a week now we have been seriously reviewing our options for further action and i want to say too let s look at the last three months since i became president i have worked with our allies and we have tried to move forward first on the no fly zone on enforcement of it on the humanitarian airdrops on the war crimes investigation on getting the bosnian muslims involved in the peace process we have made some progress and now we have a very much tougher sanctions resolution and leon fuerth who is the national security advisor to the vice president is in europe now working on implementing that that is going to make a big difference to serbia and we are reviewing other options i think we should act we should lead the united states should lead we have led for the last three months we have moved the coalition and to be fair our allies in europe have been willing to do their part and they have troops on the ground there but i do not think we should act alone unilaterally nor do i think we will have to and in the next several days i think we will finalize the extensive review which has been going on and which has taken a lot of my time as well as the time of the administration as it should have over the last days or so i think we ll finish that in the near future and then we ll have a policy and we ll announce it and everybody can evaluate it q can i follow up the president sure q do you see any parallel between the ethnic cleansing in bosnia and the holocaust the president i think the holocaust is on a whole different level i think it is without precedent or peer in human history on the other hand ethnic cleansing is the kind of inhumanity that the holocaust took to the nth degree the idea of moving people around and abusing them and often killing them solely because of their ethnicity is an abhorrent thing and it is especially troublesome in that area where people of different ethnic groups live side by side for so long together and i think you have to stand up against it i think it s wrong we were talking today about all of the other troubles in that region i was happy to see the violence between the croats and the muslims in bosnia subside this morning and i think we re making progress on that front but what s going on with the serbians and the ethnic cleansing is qualitatively different than the other conflicts both within the former yugoslavia and in other parts of the region q mr president by any count you have not had a good week in your presidency the tragedy in waco the defeat of your stimulus bill the standoff in bosnia what did you do wrong and what are you going to do differently how do you look at things are you reassessing laughter the president i don t really believe that the situation in bosnia it s not been a good week for the world but i don t know that the administration could have made it different on the stimulus package i d like to put it into the larger context and remind you that in this days we have already fundamentally changed the direction of an american government we have abandoned trickle down economics we ve abandoned the policies that brought the debt of this country from trillion to trillion in only a decade the budget plan which passed the congress which will reduce the deficit and increase investment has led to a year low in mortgage rates dramatically lower interest rates there are probably people in this room who have refinanced their home mortgages in the last three months or who have had access to cheaper credit that s going to put tens of billion dollars coursing throughout this economy in ways that are very very good for the country and so we are moving in the right direction economically i regret that the stimulus did not pass and i have begun to ask and will continue to ask not only people in the administration but people in the congress whether there is something i could have done differently to pass that part of the reason it didn t pass was politics part of it was a difference in ideas there are really people still who believe that it s not needed i just disagree with that i think the recovery the economists say it s been underway for about two years and we ve still had months of seven percent unemployment and all the wealthy countries are having trouble creating jobs so i think there was an idea base an argument there that while we re waiting for the lower interest rates and the deficit reduction and the investments of the next four years to take effect this sort of supplemental appropriation should go forward now i have to tell you i did misgauge that because a majority of the republican senators now sitting in the senate voted for a similar stimulus when ronald reagan was president in and voted times for regular supplemental appropriations like this i just misgauged it and i hope that i can learn something i ve just been here days and you know i was a governor working with a contentious legislature for years and it took me a decade to get political reform there so it takes time to change things but i basically feel very good about what s happened in the first days with regard to the congress q waco the president well with regard to waco i don t have much to add to what i ve already said i think it is a i want the situation looked into i want us to bring in people who have any insights to bear on that i think it s very important that the whole thing be thoroughly gone over but i still maintain what i said from the beginning that the offender there was david koresh and i do not think the united states government is responsible for the fact that a bunch of fanatics decided to kill themselves and i m sorry that they killed their children q mr president to follow up partly on helen on your stimulus package and on your political approach to capitol hill ross perot said today that you re playing games with the american people in your tax policy he was strongly critical of your stimulus package he said he s going to launch an advertising campaign against the north american free trade agreement how are you going to handle his political criticism will it complicate your efforts on the hill with your economic plan and do you plan to repackage some of the things that have been in your stimulus program and try to resubmit them to the hill the president let me answer that question first we re going to revisit all of that over the next few days i m going to be talking to members of congress and to others to see what we can do about that with regard to the economic plan i must say i found that rather amazing i don t want to get into an argument with mr perot i ll be interested to hear what his specifics are but i would go back and read his book and his plan there s a remarkable convergence except that we have more specific budget cuts we raise taxes less on the middle class and more on the wealthy but otherwise the plans are remarkably similar so i think it would be i ll be interested to see if maybe perhaps he s changed his position from his book last year and he has some new ideas to bring to bear i ll be glad to hear them q to follow up sir how do you plan to handle his political criticism he s launched a campaign against you do you think you can sit back and just the president well first of all i will ask you to apply the same level of scrutiny to him as you do to me and if he s changed his position from the positions he took in the campaign last year then we need to know why and what his ideas are maybe he s got some constructive ideas i think the american people have shown that they re very impatient with people who don t want to produce results and the one thing i think that everybody has figured out about me in the last even if they don t agree with what i do is that i want to get something done i just came here to try to change things i want to do things and i want to do things that help people s lives so my judgment is that if he makes a suggestion that is good that is constructive that takes us beyond some idea i ve proposed that will change people s lives for the better fine but i think that that ought to be the test that we apply to everyone who weighs into this debate and not just to the president q mr president to go back to bosnia for a minute you continue to insist that this has to be multilateral action a criteria that seems to have hamstrung us when it comes to many options thus far and makes it look as if this is a state of paralysis the united states is the last remaining superpower why is it not appropriate in this situation for the united states to act unilaterally the president well the united states surely you would agree that the united states even as the last remaining superpower has to act consistent with international law under some mandate of the united nations q but you have a mandate and the president they do and that is one of the things that we have under review i haven t ruled out any option for action i would remind all of you i have not ruled out any option except that we have not discussed and we are not considering the introduction of american forces into continuing hostilities there we are not so we are reviewing other options but i also would remind you that to be fair our allies have had the french the british and the canadians have had troops on the ground there they have been justifiably worried about those but they have supported the airdrops the toughening of the sanctions they welcomed the american delegation now in europe working on how to make these sanctions really work and really bite against serbia and i can tell you that the other nations involved are also genuinely reassessing their position and i would not rule out the fact that we can reach an agreement for a concerted action that goes beyond where we have been i don t have any criticism of the british the french and others about that q would that be military action q mr president several of the leading lights in your administration ranging from your fbi director to your u n ambassador to your deputy budget director to your health services secretary have issued statements in the last couple of weeks which are absolutely contradictory to some of the positions you ve taken in your administration why is that are you losing your political grip the president give me an example q example judge sessions said that there was no child abuse in waco madeleine albright has said in this morning s newspapers at least that she favors air strikes in bosnia all of these are things you said that you didn t support the president first of all i don t know what we know that david koresh had sex with children i think that is undisputed is it not is it not does anybody dispute that where i come from that qualifies as child abuse and we know that he had people teaching these kids how to kill themselves i think that qualifies as abuse and i m not criticizing judge sessions because i don t know exactly what he said in terms of madeleine albright madeleine albright has made no public statement at all about air strikes there is a press report that she wrote me a confidential letter in which she expressed her or memo in which she expressed her views about the new direction we should take in response to my request to all the senior members of my administration to let me know what they thought we ought to do next and i have heard from her and from others about what they think we ought to do next and i m not going to discuss the recommendations they made to me but in the next few days when i make a decision about what to do then i will announce what i m going to do so i wouldn t say that either one of those examples qualifies speaking out of school q how about the value added tax mr president the president what was that q the value added tax mrs rivlin and miss shalala both said that they thought that that was a good idea the president i don t mind them saying they think it s a good idea there are all kinds of arguments for it on policy grounds that does not mean that we have decided to incorporate it in the health care debate no decision has been made on that and i have no objection to their expressing their views on that we ve had a lot of people from business and labor come to us saying that they thought that tax would help make their particular industries more competitive in the global economy i took no that wasn t taking a line against an administration policy q mr president a week ago a group of gay and lesbian representatives came out of a meeting with you and expressed in the most ringing terms their confidence in your understanding of them and their political aspirations and their belief that you would fulfill those aspirations do you feel now that you will be able to meet their now enhanced expectations the president well i don t know about that and i don t know what their it depends on what the expectations are but i ll tell you this i believe that this country s policies should be heavily biased in favor of nondiscrimination i believe when you tell people they can t do certain things in this country that other people can do there ought to be an overwhelming and compelling reason for it i believe we need the services of all of our people and i have said that consistently and not as a political proposition the first time this issue came up was in when i was in boston i was just asked the question about it and i might add it s interesting that i have been attacked obviously those who disagree with me here are primarily coming from the political right in america when i was governor i was attacked from the other direction for sticking up for the rights of religious fundamentalists to run their child care centers and to practice home schooling under appropriate safeguards i just have always had an almost libertarian view that we should try to protect the rights of american individual citizens to live up to the fullest of their capacities and i m going to stick right with that q are you concerned sir that you may have generated expectations on their end and criticism among others that has hamstrung your administration in the sense of far too great emphasis on this issue the president yes but i have not placed a great deal of emphasis on it it s gotten a lot of emphasis in other quarters and in the press i ve just simply taken my position and tried to see it through and that s what i do it doesn t take a lot of my time as president to say what i believe in and what i intend to do and that s what i ll continue to do q mr president getting back to the situation in bosnia and we understand you haven t made any final decisions on new options previously considered unacceptable but the two most commonly heard options would be lifting the arms embargo to enable the bosnian muslims to defend themselves and to initiate some limited air strikes perhaps to cut off supply lines without telling us your decision presumably you haven t made any final decisions on those two options what are the pros and cons that are going through your mind right now and will weigh heavily on your final decision the president i m reluctant to get into this there are those are two of the options there are some other options that have been considered all have pluses and minuses all have supporters and opponents within the administration and in the congress where i would remind you heavy consultations will be required to embark on any new policy i do believe that on the air strike issue the pronouncements that general powell has made generally about military action apply there if you take action if the united states takes action we must have a clearly defined objective that can be met we must be able to understand it and its limitations must be clear the united states is not should not become involved as a partisan in a war with regard to the lifting of the arms embargo the question obviously there is if you widen the capacity of people to fight will that help to get a settlement and bring about peace will it lead to more bloodshed what kind of reaction can others have that would undermine the effectiveness of the policy but i think both of them deserve some serious consideration along with some other options we have q do you think that these people who are trying to get us into war in bosnia are really remembering that we haven t taken care of hundreds of thousands of veterans from the last war and we couldn t take care of our prisoners and get them all home from vietnam and now many of them are coming up with bills for treatment of agent orange how can we afford to go to any more of these wars the president well i think that s a good argument against the united states itself becoming involved as a belligerent in a war there but we are after all the world s only super power we do have to lead the world and there is a very serious problem of systematic ethnic cleansing in the former yugoslavia which could have not only enormous further humanitarian consequences and goodness knows there have been many but also could have other practical consequences in other nearby regions where the same sorts of ethnic tensions exist q did you make any kind of agreement with boris yeltsin to hold off either on air strikes or any kind of aggressive action against the serbs until after sunday and in general how has his political situation affected your deliberation on bosnia the president no i have not made any agreement and he did not ask for that we never even discussed that interestingly enough the russians i would remind you in the middle of president yeltsin s campaign abstained from our attempt to get tougher sanctions through the united nations in what i thought was the proper decision for them and one that the united states and i m sure the rest of the free world very much appreciated q do you wish mr president that you d become more involved in the planning of the waco operation and how would you handle that situation differently now the president i don t think as a practical matter that the president should become involved in the planning of those kinds of things at that detail one of the things that i m sure will come out when we look into this is the questions will be asked and answered did all of us who up the line of command ask the questions we should have asked and get the answers we should have gotten and i look forward to that but at the time i have to say as i did before the first thing i did after the atf agents were killed once we knew that the fbi was going to go in was to ask that the military be consulted because of the quasi as least military nature of the conflict given the resources that koresh had in his compound and their obvious willingness to use them and then on the day before the action i asked the questions of the attorney general which i have reported to you previously and which at the time i thought were sufficient i have as i said i m sure i leave it to others to make the suggestions about whether there are other questions i should have asked q mr president what is your assessment of director sessions role in the waco affair and have you made a decision on his future and if you haven t will you give him a personal hearing before you do decide the president well first of all i have no assessment of his role since i had no direct contact with him and i mean no negative or positive inference i have no assessment there i stand by what i said before about my general high regard for the fbi and i m waiting for a recommendation from the attorney general about what to do with the direction of the fbi q mr president since you said that one side in bosnia conflict represents inhumanity that the holocaust carried to the nth degree why do you then tell us that the united states cannot take a partisan view in this war the president well i said that the principle of ethnic cleansing is something we ought to stand up against that does not mean that the united states or the united nations can enter a war in effect to redraw the lines geographical lines of republics within what was yugoslavia or that that would ultimately be successful i think what the united states has to do is to try to figure out whether there is some way consistent with forcing the people to resolve their own difficulties we can stand up to and stop ethnic cleansing and that is obviously the difficulty we are wrestling with this is clearly the most difficult foreign policy problem we face and that all of our allies face and if it were easy i suppose it would have been solved before we have tried to do more in the last days than was previously done it has clearly not been enough to stop the serbian aggression and we are now looking at what else we can do q yesterday you specifically criticized the roosevelt administration for not having bombed the railroads to the concentration camps and things that were near military targets aren t there steps like that that would not involve conflict direct conflict or partisan belligerence that you might consider the president there may be i would remind you that the circumstances were somewhat different we were then at war with germany at the time and that s what made that whole incident so series of incidents so perplexing but we have as i say we ve got all of our options under review q the diplomatic initiative on haiti is on the verge of collapse what can you do to salvage it short of a full scale military operation the president well you may know something i don t that s not what our people tell me i think mr caputo and ambassador pezzullo have done together a good job the thing keeps going back and forth because of the people who are involved with the de facto government there it s obvious what their concerns are they were the same concerns that led to the ouster of aristide in the first place and president aristide we feel should be restored to power we re working toward that i get a report on that we discuss it at least three times a week and i m convinced that we re going to prevail there and be successful i do believe that there s every reason to think that there will have to be some sort of multilateral presence to try to guarantee the security and the freedom from violence of people on both sides of the ledger while we try to establish the conditions of ongoing civilized society but i believe we re going to prevail there q mr president would you care to make your assessment of the first days before we make one for you laughter the president well i ll say if i believe first of all we passed the budget resolution in record time that was the biggest issue that confirmed the direction of the administration and confirmed the commitments of the campaign that we could both bring the deficit down and increase investment and that we could do it by specific spending cuts and by raising taxes almost all of which come from the highest income people in this society reversing a year trend in which most of the tax burdens were borne by the middle class whose incomes were going down when their taxes were going up while the deficit went from trillion to trillion the total national debt and the deficit continued to go up we have a year low in interest rates from mortgages we have lower interest rates across the board we have tens of billions of dollars flooding back into this economy as people refinance their debt we have established a new environmental policy which is dramatically different the secretary of education has worked with me and with others and with the governors to establish a new approach in education that focuses on tough standards as well as increasing opportunity we have done an enormous amount of work on political reform on campaign finance and lobbying reform and i have imposed tough ethics requirements on my own administration s officials these things are consistent with not only what i said i d do in the campaign but with turning the country around the vice president is heading a task force which will literally change the way the federal government operates and make it much more responsive to the citizens of this country we are working on a whole range of other things the welfare reform initiative to move people from welfare to work and of course a massive amount of work has been done on the health care issue which is a huge economic and personal security problem for millions of americans so i think it is amazing how much has been done more will be done we also passed the family leave bill a version of the motor voter bill that has not come out of conference back to me yet and everything has been passed except the stimulus program so i think we re doing fine and we re moving in the right direction i feel good about it q sir a follow up wouldn t you say though that one of your biggest initiatives aid to soviet russia is now practically finished if we can t pass a stimulus bill in our own country how can we do it for them the president let me recast the question a little bit it s a good question laughter it s a good question but to be fair we ve got to recast it we have already the first round of aid to the soviet to non soviet russia to a democratic russia is plainly going to go through the first billion the aid that we agreed with our partners in the g to provide through the international financial institutions which is a big dollar item is plainly going to go through the question is can we get any more aid for russia that requires a new appropriation by the united states congress and that is a question i think mary that will be resolved in the weeks ahead in part by what happens to the american workers and their jobs and their future i think the two things will be tied by many members of congress q the tailhook report came out this morning documenting horrendous and nearly criminal conduct on the part of the navy how much did you discuss the incident and what might be done about it with your nominee to be the secretary of the navy the president first let me comment a little on that the inspector general s report details conduct which is wrong and which has no place in the armed services and i expect the report to be acted on in the appropriate way i also want to say to the american people and to all of you that the report should be taken for what it is a very disturbing list of allegations which will have to be thoroughly examined it should not be taken as a general indictment of the united states navy or of all the fine people who serve there it is very specific in its allegations and it will be pursued the only thing i said to the secretary designate of the navy and the only thing i should have said to him i think is that i expected him to take the report and to do his duty and i believe he will do that q mr president to back to russia for just a minute the latest poll show that mr yeltsin will probably win his vote of confidence but there seems to be a real toss up on whether or not voters are going to endorse his economic reforms the president i understand that q can you live with a split laughter can you live with a split decision though or do you need both passed in order to then build support for russian aid the president i believe the answer to your question is for the united states the key question should be that which is posed to any democracy which is who wins the election if he wins the election if he is ratified by the russian people to continue as their president then i think we should do our best to work with him toward reform you know we had a lot of other countries here for the holocaust museum dedication their leaders were here leaders from eastern europe leaders from at least one republic of the former soviet union all of them having terrible economic challenges as they convert from a communist command and control economy to a market economy in a world where there s economic slowdown everywhere and in a world in which there s economic slowdown and difficulty all leaders will have trouble having their policies be popular in a poll because they haven t produced the results that the people so earnestly yearn for you can understand that but if they have confidence in the leadership i think that s all we can ask and the united states will if the russian people ratify him as their president and stick with him then the united states will continue to work with him i think he is a genuine democrat small d and genuinely committed to reform i think that we should support that q mr president mr perot has come out strongly in what is perceived behind the line against a free trade agreement nafta how hard are you going to fight for this free trade agreement and when do you expect to see it accomplished the president i think we ll have the agreement ready in the fairly near future you know our people are still working with the mexican government and with the canadians on the side agreements we re trying to work out what the environmental agreement will say what the labor agreement will say and then what the fairest way to deal with enforcement is the mexicans say and there is some merit to their position that they re worried about transferring their sovereignty in enforcement to a multilateral commission even in the united states to be fair we have some folks who are worried about that about giving that up on the other hand if we re going to have an environmental agreement and a labor standards agreement that means something then there has to be ultimately some consequences for violating them so what we re trying to do is to agree on an approach which would say that if there is a pattern of violations if you keep on violating it past a certain point maybe not an isolated incident but a pattern of violation there is going to be some enforcement there must be consequences and we re working out the details of that but i still feel quite good about it and this is just an area where i disagree with mr perot and with others i think that we will win big if we have a fair agreement that integrates more closely the mexican economy and the american economy and leads us from there to chile to other market economies in latin america and gives us a bigger world in which to trade i think that s the only way a rich country can grow richer if you look at what japan and other countries in the pacific are doing to reach out in their own region it s a pretty good lesson to us that we had better worry about how to build those bridges in our own area so this is an idea battle you know you ve got a lot of questions and i want to answer them all but let me say not every one of these things can be distilled simply into politics you know who s for this and who s for that and if this person is for this somebody else has got to be for that a lot of these things honestly involved real debates over ideas over who s right and wrong about the world toward which we re moving and the answers are not self evident and one of the reasons that i wanted to run for president is i wanted to sort of open the floodgates for debating these ideas so that we could try to change in the appropriate way so i just have a difference of opinion i believe that the concept of nafta is sound even though as you know i thought that the details needed to be improved q mr president there was a tremendous flurry of interest earlier this month in the russian document that purported to show that the vietnamese had held back american prisoners general vessey has now said publicly that while the document itself was authentic he believes that it was incorrect do you have a personal view at this point about that issue and more broadly do you believe that in fact the vietnamese did return all the american prisoners at the time of the paris peace accord the president first let me say i saw general vessey before he went to vietnam and after he returned and i have a high regard for him and i appreciate his willingness to serve his country in this way as to whether the document had any basis in fact let me say that the government of vietnam was more forthcoming than it had been in the past and gave us some documents that would tend to undermine the validity of the russian documents claim i do not know whether that is right or wrong we are having it basically evaluated at this time and when we complete the evaluation we ll tell you and of course we want to tell the families of those who were missing in action or who were pows i think that we ll be able to make some progress in eliminating some of the questions about the outstanding cases as a result of this last interchange but i cannot say that i m fully satisfied that we know all that we need to know there are still some cases that we don t know the answer to but i do believe we re making some progress i was encouraged by the last trip q i d like to follow up on that before the u s normalizes relations allows trade to go forward do you have to be personally sure that every case has been resolved or would you be willing to go forward on the basis that while it may take years to resolve these cases the vietnamese have made sufficient offerings to us to confirm good faith the president a lot of experts say you can never resolve every case every one that we couldn t resolve all the cases for them and that there are still some cases that have not been factually resolved going back to the second world war but what i would have to be convinced of is that we had gone a long way toward resolving every case that could be resolved at this moment in time and that there was a complete open and unrestricted commitment to continue to do everything that could be done always to keep resolving those cases and we re not there yet again i have to be guided a little bit by people who know a lot about this and i confess to being much more heavily influenced by the families of the people whose lives were lost there or whose lives remain in question than by the commercial interest and the other things which seem so compelling in this moment i just am very influenced by how the families feel q your economic stimulus package are you doing some kind of reality check now and scaling back some of your plans your legislative plans for the coming year including the crime bill the health care initiative and other things are there any plans to do that and also did you underestimate the power of senator bob dole the president no what i underestimated was the extent to which what i thought was a fairly self evident case particularly after we stayed below the spending caps approved by this congress including the republicans who were in this congress last year when we had already passed a budget resolution which called for over billion in deficit reduction when they had voted repeatedly for supplemental appropriations to help foreign governments i thought at least four of them would vote to break cloture and i underestimated that i did not have an adequate strategy of dealing with that i also thought that if i made a good faith effort to negotiate and to compromise that it would not be rebuffed instead every time i offered something they reduced the offer that they had previously been talking to the majority leader about so it was a strange set of events but i think what happened was what was a significant part of our plan but not the major part of it acquired a political connotation that got out of proportion to the merits so that a lot of republicans were saying to me privately mr president i d like to be for this but i can t now and we re all strung out and we re divided and i think we need to do a reality check as i said what i want to know let me go back to what i said what i want to know from our folks and from our friends in the senate on and republicans or democrats is what could i have done differently to make it come out differently because the real losers here were not the president and the administration the real losers were the hundreds of thousands of people who won t have jobs now we could have put another kids to work this summer i mean we could have done a lot of good things with that money and i think that is very very sad and it became more political than it should have but the underlying rationale i don t think holds a lot of water that it was deficit spending that just won t wash q and redo the president no i mean you know for example you mentioned the crime bill i think it would be a real mistake not to pass the crime bill i mean the crime bill was almost on the point of passage last year and they were all fighting over the brady bill surely surely after what we have been through in this country just in the last three months with the kind of mindless violence we have seen we can pass a bill requiring people to go through a waiting period before they buy a handgun and surely we can see that we need more police officers on the street that s another thing that i really believe that once we move some of that money not all but some of it up into this jobs package to make some of the jobs rehiring police officers on the street who d been laid off that would be a compelling case i mean people are scared in this country and i think we need to go forward i feel very strongly that we need to go forward on the crime bill q mr president back to the tailhook report for a second that report contained very strong criticism of the navy s senior leadership in general but did not name any of the senior officers do you believe that the senior officers who are implicated in this including admiral kelso who was there one night in las vegas should they be disciplined and do you believe the public has a right to know the names of the senior officers the president you should know that under the rules of law which apply to this i am in the chain of command there is now an inspector general s report and the law must take its course if i were to answer that question i might prejudice any decisions which might be later made in this case i don t really think i think all i can tell you is what i have already said i was very disturbed by the specific allegations in the inspector general s report and i want appropriate action to be taken until the proper procedures have a chance to kick in and appropriate action is taken i have been advised that because i am the commander in chief i have to be very careful about what i say so as not to prejudice the rights of anybody against whom any action might proceed or to prejudice the case in any other way either pro or con so i can t say any more except to say that i want this thing handled in an appropriate and thorough way q mr president could i ask you for a clarification on bosnia you said that you were not considering introduction of american forces does that include any air forces as well as ground forces sir the president i said ground forces q you said ground forces could i ask you sir if you fear that using u s air strikes might draw the united states into a ground war there the president i just don t want to discuss our evaluation of the options anymore i ve told you that there s never been a serious discussion in this country about the introduction of ground forces into an ongoing conflict there q with hundreds of thousands of gays in washington this weekend for the march did you ever reconsider your decision to leave town for this weekend did you ever consider in any way participating in some of the activities the president no q why not the president because i and basically i wouldn t participate in other marches i think once you become president on balance except under unusual circumstances that is not what should be done but more importantly i m going to the american society of newspaper editors a trip that presumably most of you would want me to make to try to focus anew on what i think are the fundamental issues at stake for our country right now and i expect that i will say something about the fact that a lot of americans have come here asking for a climate that is free of discrimination asking basically to be able to work hard and live by the rules and be treated like other american citizens if they do that and just that and that s always been my position not only for the gays who will be here but for others as well thank you very much end p m edt
