beginning saturday morning at 8 a.m. monday morning at 8 a.m. eastern. nonfiction books all weekend every weekend right here on c-span2. >> as the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches, a number of events to mark the occasion are planned this week. >> in 1844 henry clay ran for president of the united states and lost by the changed political history. he is one of the 14 been featured in c-span's new weekly series the contender's. this week henry clay's kentucky home, friday at eight eastern. >> the afl-cio and the king center hosted a symposium late last month focusing on jobs, social justice and martin luther

king, jr.'s vision of the american dream. this portion of the event involves a panel discussion on the current challenges surrounding economic and social justice issues. speakers include former civil rights commission chair mary frances berry, along with lgbt immigration youth and labor activists. this is about an hour 30 minutes. >> so, we are still in the morning part of this wonderful day, and i just wanted to say hello again. my name is liz shuler, secretary treasurer of the afl-cio. and welcome to the second panel of this national symposium on jobs and the american dream. and our next panel is focused on justice and the american dreams. it will examine the contrast between dr. king's vision for just a america and our current reality. and before i get started, i wanted to also acknowledge we

have a very important elected official you with us today from los angeles, california, county board of supervisors for the second district, mark ridley thomas was in front with us here today. [applause] who i think was on his electronic devise just because he is an avid tweeter, and is probably tweeting right now, in fact. so thanks for being with us here today. nearly half a century later, how close that we come to realizing the dream that dr. king had for our country? has america fulfilled its promise of equality and justice for all citizens? dr. king worked, fought, and gave his life so that all people would be afforded these rights are basic rights. so we have to ask ourselves, what can we do, week, everyone in this room and who is

watching, what can we do to assure that dr. king's struggle was not in vain? that the quality and justice are not afforded only to the rich and the powerful? but to all people. today we know that our communities are facing difficult economic, political and social challenges. and we as leaders and activists must continue to heed dr. king's words, and i quote, i can never stop quoting dr. king, right? if you can't fly, then run. if you can't run, then walk. if you can't walk, then crawl. but what ever you do, you have to keep moving forward. together, we will keep moving forward. [applause] now this next panel will provide an opportunity for us to discuss the issues and the challenges working people face in our

country, from attacks on bargaining rights and education that we heard on the first panel, the widespread threat, widespread threats to equal justice. and also hear stories about victories and gains. so with that i'm honored to introduce our moderator for the next panel, maria elena salinas. she is the emmy award-winning coanchor of noticiero univision. she also cohosts the primetime television newsmagazine. which in english is here and now. ms. salinas is a former vice president and founding member of the national association of hispanic journalists. she also is a columnist whose work in both english and spanish is distributed by king speech to more than 55 newspapers. "the new york times" calls

ms. salinas the voice of hispanic america. she reaches millions of people daily in the united states and in 18 countries throughout latin america. we are so pleased to have her with us today. welcome maria elena salinas. [applause] >> mucho gracias. i am inclined to do this in asp and no. how do you like this? anybody go for it? no? also limit myself to buenos dias. let's leave it at that for now. it really is a pleasure to be here today, and that i am glad i have the opportunity to come

early and see the first panel. it was impressive, and really both of these panels go hand-in-hand. jobs and justice. interesting that there's an organization called jobs for justice. one goes hand in hand with the other. as you mentioned, we are here in this panel specifically to discuss whether or not martin luther king's dream has come true, or if we are still stuck in the same place, or maybe if we've taken a few steps back. you know, 48 years after the i have a dream famous speech we're going to examining the contrast between his vision for just decided and the many challenges we face now in this country. we are witnessing what some have called the great return to the battle place, not the good old days but the bad old days, for the working families, for the poor, for the lgbt community, that people of color, women, for

latinos. this may be the worst time that we have seen in a generation, as we know the unemployment rates are soaring. when someone was talking about the unemployment rates for the general population of african-americans, for hispanics its 11.3, 11.5, or somewhere around there. many of our voter rights are under attack, our bargaining rights are under attack in nearly every state. racism and hate crimes are on the rise again, if i may say, the highest level of hate crimes against hispanics right now. and, of course, we're in the greatest economic crisis since the great depression with communities of color most affected, the safety net for most of the vulnerable is vanishing, and these are definitely challenging times. i want to introduce you to the very distant which then we have today to address some of these issues come and let me begin first to my right with dr. mary

frances berry. dr. berry is a professor of american social thought and professor of history at the university of pennsylvania for over 20 years. shoes on the commission of civil rights. she served as chair from 1993 1993-2004. dr. berry had served as vice president of the american a circle society and was president of the organization of americans historians. she was assistant secretary for education and the is department of health, education and welfare doing -- during the carter administration. i don't know how when she has time but she has authored nine books. and she is super woman on top of everything else. and, of course, she's a very distinguished activists. and thank you for being here. to my left, rea carey, she's national recognize and had

regarded leader in the struggle for equal rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender communities. she's worked extensively in the area of hiv/aids prevention and a cofounder of the organization came in and lesbian, opposing violence. thank you for being here. isabel castillo is a dreamer, a strong national voice and advocate for the dream act. she's a activist, an organizer, she's led rallies, organized marches instead, sit ins, majority leader harry reid's office at i think dr. king would be very proud of her and all the dreamers and the struggle that they have at this moment. just to be recognized and that has to be hiding behind the shadows. she spoke out publicly, she's a one on one member, with a one-to-one number of congress with a dream that when it was considered by congress in december of last year, so we know it has come up a few times and it has not been approved.

and according to some of the senators i've spoken to, it does not look like the d.r.e.a.m. act has much of a future but we'll get into that a little bit further on. kurston cook is a coordinator of afl-cio, young workers program. previously served as national field director at the rows of institute. is involved with the roosevelt institute began as a student at the university of michigan when he took a leadership role in running roosevelts release, post-katrina new orleans development project, and he told us a little while ago his family was in new orleans during katrina and, unfortunately, never went back because of the situation. we will hear more about that. and mahlon mitchell, president of professional fire fighters of wisconsin. he was elected in january 2011. he is the youngest and first

ever african-american president of the wisconsin pf fw who are members of the national association of fire fighters. is one of the leaders in maine spokesman's in the effort to stop the attacks on workers rights in wisconsin and run this country. we will have an opportunity here to hear from each and everyone of you but let's begin with dr. barry. dr. mary frances berry, i think there's a basic question right now, where are we today, what would dr. king say about society today? >> well, those of you who know me, know that i would do exactly as i'm told. [laughter] so i will of course answer the question and do nothing beyond that, and speak only for the number of minutes that i'm supposed to. i have no idea what i will say or how long i will say it, but i will try. i just came in from hawaii

stopping off in san francisco, and got your midnight last night so it's little early in the morning for me. but as to where we are today, and i wrote some notes because maybe that will keep me from talking too long. i'll try. much of the agenda has been impacted of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s. we've got basic civil rights laws, but a lot of it hasn't been, and a lot of it was not enacted when martin was assassinated. and a lot of it was not enacted in may of 1979 when, at the white house, we had a big ceremony in the east room commemorating the brown decision, and word came that a. philip randolph had died. and, of course, that if there had been no a. philip randolph in many ways that might not have been a march.

and so it hadn't been, and it hadn't been enacted today. we've done a lot of things using coalitions, we've learned that year but we need to do a lot more. what would king say today? people are always talking every year about what martin would say about this, that and the other. and we don't know exactly what he would say. we know what he did say, and we know that he would say that jobs and justice are connected, that freedom and justice are connected, that you really can't have one without the other. he would understand that, and then the agenda, there's the quote. injustice, anywhere, you know, just about. and everything he wrote, including his nobel prize speech when he talked about the audacity of belief, he talked, and the audacity of hope. anyway, he in fact talked about

that. and everyone uses those phrases in every movement that has come along since then. as for why we are where we are today, and why it is so hard, first of all, the issues have expanded in terms of what we deal with. there were issues then that we didn't deal with them, to those at we talked about by the folks who are on this panel. for example, someone asked what about lgbt issues? well, i remembered knowing what martin would say that i rather talk to me on the phone one time and asked me to talk to stand with associate come out in favor indian don't ask, don't tell because all the men who had been with morgan, that's the way she put it, didn't want her to do it, she said if you can stand with the i would do. she said martin believes in justice. so martin would have believed in that. so we know that martin believe

in justice so why is it we can't get done all the things that we need to get done today and it's so hard as we work. what is our problem? is that americans, and this is important. i thought about all the way on the plane, americans believe generally in individual freedom. if you ask any american, even if they don't know what is in the great documents of our national rights, and many of them don't, they believe in individual freedom, liberty. we believe in liberty, freedom. we believe in it. but not everybody believes that justice is just as important as liberty. that's what our problem is. we've got many believe -- many people in our political life and many fellow citizens and residents who don't believe that justice is the major priority that freedom is, and they don't understand that you can't have one without the other. and that is the dichotomy that

creates all of these issues and these problems. we can get an agreement in any political discussion about freedom pretty much, before we can get it about justice. people fight over under god and the pledge of allegiance. they are fighting about this. but many of them, these same people don't believe justice, even though they save with liberty and justice for all, they don't believe them. so what the fight is about is getting people to understand that justice is essential, if you're going to have freedom. if we believe in justice for all, then jobs would be a major priority, that everybody can have a job over budget cuts. if we belief in justice, we would think that justice for all means that health care should be a basic human right and wouldn't be fighting about, we would even

have single-payer if we believed in and we certainly wouldn't be fighting about obamacare. if we believed in justice for all we would think the hard-fought right for collective bargaining should be secure, instead presenting a false argument that's going around today that we need to get rid of it because it's too hard to bargain. we would understand that the struggle and why we need to keep it. we would understand better why people come is seeking a better life ought to be embraced and add to the national productivity instead of harassed and abused. we are to believe in the rhetoric of opportunity even as we use it without believing in it. we would focus education reform on dropout and jobs for parents and drug treatment and rehab instead of push outs and more crime and more prisons and prisoners, and blaming teachers, even some who teach in the worst schools and ought to be getting combat pay.

fundamentally, the great clinical an ideological battle that we have to fight and is this one about justice. now, it is hard. we thought it was impossible, but we won some things. but now we have mainstream opinion is against us. whenever i talk about this, people telling, don't you know public opinion is against us, and the pundits say, whatever the pundits say. and i said well, the pundits all have jobs. [laughter] and i understand, and i understand that we are all centrist now. we are all supposed to be centrist now and we're supposed to argue abstractly about on one hand and then on the other hand. but the tide can be turned. i recall how rosa parks loved it whenever i would say that if she had taken a poll before she sat down on the bus she would've kept on standing up. but she didn't take a poll. if john lewis had taken a poll

before he walked across the bridge, yet again and maybe he would have stayed home. and if martin had taken a poll before excepted a call to become a leader he might have lived a long happy life with coretta and his children. but all of these folks answered the call to justice. we know that these -- each generation has to make a dent in the wall of injustice. that's why i'm so glad there are young people. each generation has to do, has to make a dent. now is the time for all of us, not just to praise martin as a symbol for all of those who worked and died, and not just to be happy that finally there's a memorial on the mall and how far we've come, but to also try to be like martin. and take up a call to action. and if you do this this way, we will someday have liberty and justice for all. thank you. [applause]

>> thank you, doctor perry. we're going to mahlon mitchell. you're fighting for workers rights in wisconsin. described to us what your struggle is about, and if there's anyway you can make parallel with what is going on at the national level. >> thank you. first i wanted to thank the afl-cio for having me. i'm not going into a rally speech or. if i get on, i apologize. i have been rallying for six months. thank afl-cio for having me. president trumka, secretary-treasurer schueler, vice president baker, thanks a lot for having me. because of them to as well as my united able to go around to speak about what's happened in wisconsin. you thought wisconsin before was just over cheese and the green bay packers, but now we have this fight on her hand. now we're on the map again. but this is not just a union fight. this is a middle-class fight. and right now we are under

attack. the middle class is under attack. it is like were no longer in the united states of america but united corporations of america. but in remembrance of dr. king, you have a lot of people that talk about the civil rights, but today what's so special because we're talking of workers rights as well as human rights. we know in 1968 in april when he was assassinated he was there or the memphis sanitation workers. because of their despicable and horrible conditions they were working in. a couple things that stick out of my head, when i do my speaking, is one, to actually very simple but yet so profound messages. one, i am a man. i can the man. something so simple but yet so powerful. the other one is an entry to one is an injury to all. we correlate that with present-day with what's happening in the state of wisconsin, what's happening around the nation. collective bargaining, workers rights under attack. let me give you a quick timeline on what's really happened but

i'm sure you've seen on tv but let me to you what really happened in january they told us our state has no money and we would have a $3.6 billion deficit over the next two years. the state is broke. but what they did in january, corporate tax loopholes for the wealthy, but our state is broke. they opened up las vegas loophole. but again remember our state is broken. we have a business where we are called open for business, we are open for business. so you can bring your companies to the state of wisconsin, from illinois, minnesota, iowa and ohio and you will have to years would you not have to pay any taxes on your income. but our state is broke. tax cuts for the top 1% of the wealthiest wisconsinites, but our state is broke. they told us it would cost seven and half million dollars to clean the capital after all the protesters, but our state is broke.

so our fiscal bureau, legislative fiscal bureau which is a nonpartisan bureau in the state estimated that over the next 10 years there will be $2.3 billion in tax cuts for the wealthy and loopholes for corporations, but our state is broken. so i hate to put it this way but we said come on now, we are not buying it. so now february comes, february comes, now we have this collective bargaining fight. he says because our state is broke him as we give all these corporations these tax breaks, we will require all public sector employees pay five-point a% of the pension and 12 with 6% into the health care bring because our state is broke. this is a good. but not only that, we have to get rid of collective bargaining as well because our state is broke. you have to recertify your union every year. you have to have a standing vote, 51% of your membership has to vote, which it doesn't say

51% to be elected governor by chapter 51% of your membership to vote in order to have it. so no more can you sit down and talk with your employer over hours, wages and working to going thing you can collectively bargain over wages and nothing above inflation. now, firefighters and police officers are exempt of this entire legislation. so my union, the police officers union, we are not affected at all. we don't have to stand up in session and we not have to, we still retain our collective bargaining rights. now, an injury to one is an injury to all. so we could have easily said, did nothing, said what taking care but we didn't do that. when the administration came to us and said firefighters, police officer, we will put you on an island by yourselves, we have i said no, but we said hell no. and i'm sorry for cursing but a revolution -- [applause]

>> i'm sorry to curse, but a revolution is not always nice. so i asked a question and asked it to the country, at what time did firefighters and nurses come please others, snow plow drivers, janitors, teachers become the problem? let's talk about the real problem. deregulation of bank. despot a whole nother panel. at what time do we call the rich wealthy, which is fine to be rich and welcome what time do we transcend from the rich and wealthy, now we call them job creators. back in the day, back in the 19th century before i was born of course they used to call them robert barons. barons. malakhov and job creators. this is not just a union fight again. this is a fight of middle-class, this is an attack on the middle class. we're under attack. shared sacrifice. i'm going to answer your question briefly. [laughter] but the talk by shared sacrifice interstate. i say okay. we sacrifice and a shared.

$800 billion has been taken from education. voter id, voter registration, i call the voter suppression. reducing state income tax credits. $65 million over the next two years was taken from single-family homes. struggling, barely making it. 12,000 women that went to planned parenthood, not for abortion bridges for basic care, taken away. off funding for planned parent that is gone. our child labor law, if you're under 18 years in wisconsin you can work longer hours, more days. so this is not just a get a unified but one of the greatest strengths of the nsa from one of of the greatest is that we have developed and sustained a strong middle class pick the best middle class in the country. the unions, that's our job. we protect the middle class. we protect the american dream. but the american dream as we know it is dying.

but the american dream is about opportunity. it's the opportunity to live with benefit. if you can provide the opportunity to your families, i see it as my job. i see it as our job to protect what people have died for, died for us to be here. died for us to be able to secure, for me to be listed here in front of you and give this speech. and as then, it's only then, we all have this opportunity and we can to say that i am a man or now that i am a woman, so i have nothing but the outermost respect for dr. king and i'm going to continue to fight them and i know our state of wisconsin workers will fight as well. [applause] >> thank you very much. i think i answered your questi question. >> you did. you answered the question. an excellent it's to be a yes or no answer. [laughter] let's move on to rea carey. as we know right now, our country is probably more polarized and more divisive than we have seen in many, many

years. there seems to be more intolerance in the country, hate speech, hate crimes, violent. some of it is focus on the lgbt community. however, do you think that there is no more tolerance toward the gay and lesbian community that there was a decade ago? what types of discrimination over attacks has this community suffered? >> acuvue my favorite short answer, it depends. but i also do want to start out by thanking the afl-cio, and in particular our colleagues at pride at work, peggy and her colleagues are here. [applause] >> they and other out lgbt people in the labor movement remind us every day that our struggles are not separate. they are one, and i thank them very much for the work and other

colleagues in the labor movement including mary kay henry, as well. i was thinking about the idea of intolerance, and violence, and with the civil rights movement and the themes of peace and violence and nonviolence, and the choices that we all make as activists today, and those around the country who share in all of our collective struggles. and i want to talk about it in this way, and that is that i think what we are seeing is a playing out of intolerance and violence that we've seen many times before. and we all have choices to make about how we will stand up to that, or speak to it. and really, i would talk about it first in a sense of physical violence. ..

and people who are we would say gender variant. people who don't -- people who don't fit how they are supposed to move through society. those are the people who most often experience physical, intense violence. we have seen that in baltimore with the transgendered woman who was not only attacked but videotaped while the attack was going on and there were people who stood up for her but

sometimes there are not. we have also seen a very intense wave of physical violence in pr against lesbian, gay and bisexual. the physical violence, overt violence continues to play out in society particularly transgendered people and particularly people of color. we also see the more insidious violence. the less in-your-face type of violence which is the verbal violence or rhetorical violence we hear in society and unfortunately for our elected officials. it is both stated violence and the unstated verbal violence as well. some of you may be familiar with adrienne rich, lesbian poet. the things that are not spoken

about are also the types of harmful speech if you will. even though there are these over physical attacks what we are also seeing but don't hear as much about is the toll that he speech takes on people. with the peoples they had don't mind gave people but don't want them to flaunt it or why can't they just not act that way, or i really like you guys that don't think you should get married. these are forms of intolerance in this country that play out every single day. i am seeing ldp to people and the beauty of this forum is the firefighters, many are unemployed. i am not separating out but in fact speaking for the wholeness of us and the experience of

violence. the third piece of intolerance i would talk about is the systemic in tolerance and systemic violence. we have seen this play out again and again in different movement across the country. you laid out a full plan, systemic and tolerance that played out and has continued to play out and these types of in tolerance, systemic in tolerance are connected. the attacks on labor, voter suppression and communities of colored beepers middle the tax code and anti lcbt policies that deny families from getting social security. one one partner dies subjects the living partner to poverty if they build the social security over their lifetime and immigration policy which we will speak about a minute. these are interconnected forms of intolerance.

in some ways there is more tolerance for some type of lgbt in some situations. they are on tv. life must be better. is not better for homeless lesbians and their kids. it is not better for people who don't have jobs. it is not better for trends gender person who has to turn to sex work just because he or she cannot make a living because of the situation she is in. and we have seen particularly for trans gender people that employment and we are in this labor context i want to highlight a couple things. research study on people who are trans gender or otherwise gender variant. with our colleagues at the national center for trans gender equality and we find transgendered people suffer unemployment at twice the rate of the general population and african-american transgendered people are unemployed at four times the rate of the general

population's though there is an acuteness and it is not to compare who is more unemployed or less unemployed but there's an acute experience happening in this country for people who put them at a severe disadvantage in every area of their lives. health, family, employment. i will touch briefly on a couple of things you act about. in one area of the hate crimes reminding people -- james berg -- the interconnectedness of our lives. two people who in their lives probably never would have matched and because of their deaths are honored together. that was a big success. and a success although it played out in the media as a big lgbt success the first prosecution under that law was in response to an attack on a disabled man. the first conviction under that law was a race-based crime.

sometimes we play out in the media is it benefits lgbt people we need to look at the interconnectedness of our lives and our struggle and we will talk about that in the q&a. two last things. we have with the lgbt community in fighting against intolerance been incredibly fortunate to partner with labor. we are struggled back together for a long time and that our organization, we partner with labor on the local and state level and the national level and when we do, when we do, we are more successful whether it is fighting a ballot measure or passing legislation or compelling a public spokesperson to say something they never said before. i very much appreciate that and i want to bring out one thing to close my remarks. while we have to get such a long

way to go and to fight together and stand up, lgbt people absolutely stand with you in wisconsin and we will continue to, there are some successes and it struck me. i wanted to bring this poster to highlight this time. it was produced by the department of labor. each summer in recent years they have produced a poster for pride that goes up in elevators and hallways and sometimes they're torn down and put back up again. i thought was appropriate to bring this. this was this year's lgbt pride poster featuring jerry rust and. the quote is to be afraid and behave as if the truth were not true. in closing out want to say let us not be afraid to get there. [applause]

>> we're talking about in tolerance. good transition into the next issue which is one that i know very well because my whole career i have been covering the efforts and struggle of the latino community to be recognized to have political power that they deserve. when i started working in television there were forty million hispanics in 1981. a double-edged sword to celebrate the 30th anniversary with the same company. anyway there were fourteen million hispanics. now there are fifty million. we are largest minority. i would say there is no more divisive issue in this country than immigration. that is what politicians want to stay away from. no one wants to turn it into a political issue because it will divide the country more than it

is now. we have isabel castillo here. there is one issue related to immigration that is a sidebar if you can call it that, of comprehensive immigration reform and that is the dream act. the dream act is legislation as many of you know that has been presented several times in congress and has never been approved. is a very basic human thing. it is to allow those young people who are here, undocumented who were brought here as children at 5 years old by their parents against their will. they did not choose to come here. they grew up in this country. they studied in this country. this is the only country that they know. some don't even speak spanish and have never been to the country where they were born. basically this legislation would

allow them to access legal residency and more importantly to be able to access higher education. isabel is going to talk about that. she is an activist with the dream act. i want to describe isabel first. what it is like to. in this country, there are two sides to this. some say that is too bad. it is their parents' fault and they have to pay for what their parents did because their parents broke the law and they should not be here and giving them a legal citizenship would be giving a price to someone who broke the law. there are two sides to the story. but very few people understand what it is like to live as a dreamer in this country. >> good morning. my name is isabel castillo. thank you to afl-cio for this great opportunity and it is such

an honor to be here. i am originally from mexico but i was brought here at the age of 6. i did not choose to be brought here. i came along with mommy and daddy and i have been here since i was 6 years old. started first grade in the public-school system. went all the way through twelfth grade and that is when i realized i was different from my peers. i am undocumented. everyone was talking about going to college and whether you got accepted and i knew i wanted to go to college. my parents worked in a poultry plant for many years. our value education and become someone in life. they said you don't want to work in a poultry plant. you wake up at 4:00 in the morning. do well in school. i have at 4.0 gpa in high school and went to speak to my guidance counselor and said i want to go to college but i don't think he

had worked with anyone in my situation. he had an undocumented students in front of him and didn't know how to help me. it was a very hard time for me because i was ready to go to college. i qualified for so many scholarships but because i lack this nine digits social security number i could ply for grand prix brazil loans, college. i couldn't even apply to go to college. after high school and worked as a waitress from seven days a week until 9:00 in the morning until 10:00 p.m. and it was hard and eventually i found out a local university accepted undocumented students. i was very happy and grateful that god heard my prayer is. i went to eastern mennonite university and graduated in 3 years. i was a bachelor in social and now i am here with a degree i

cannot use. you probably think i look 16 but i am 26 years old. it is very hard. it has been four years since i graduated from the university and i can't use my degree. i feel like i am an american in every sense of the word. does not on paper. it is very unfortunate because it was not our fault. i don't blame my parents because how many of you have children? would you do anything for your children? that is what my parents did and thousands of parents did. they come here for better opportunities to seek the american dream and i will never blame my parents and i am thankful they brought me here and this is not unique. there are thousands of undocumented youth across the country faced with this reality. people pursuing ph.d. degrees but cannot use them because of our broken immigration system. that is why we are working hard to try to have the dream act or

comprehensive immigration reform. fortunately it passed the house last year but it failed in the senate by five votes. the dream act has been in congress for ten years and like dr. king said, we cannot wait any longer. this is our home. we are americans. we just want to contribute and give back to our communities. the dream act were to pass it would raise revenue by more than $2.3 billion. and more than the one$.4 billion. we need the dream act. we need some type of comprehensive immigration reform for our parents or brothers and sisters. it is difficult because you grow up here and this is your home and to be rejected by the only country that you know and to live and fear each day that you will be deported to a country you probably don't even remember. a lot of dreamers don't even speak their native language.

it is hard to see families being broken apart and taken away from your mom or dad. receiving calls from my sister saying she is going to the grocery store to get milk for her baby at is terrified a police officer is right behind her. always living in fear. we say we are not documented and not apologetic and we will stand up. [applause] we are going to fight for what is right and i know it is a hard journey. we know that the dream act won't happen this year or next year but we are going to continue to mobilize our community and strengthen our base and when we have that opportunity hopefully we want everyone to work with our immigrant community. it is a struggle we are in together.

>> thank you. [applause] young immigrants who happen to be here illegally or those who are here legally have to struggle the personal being at the bottom of the scale when it comes to employment. latinos have the highest high school dropout rate in the country but all young people are suffering. kurston cook will talk about that. it really should worry all of us because we are talking about a sector of our community who is going to forge the future of our country. when it comes to minorities this will be -- this country will be majority minority majority in a few years. if we don't have this sector of our country educated and

prepared for the future, then it is not only the future of the community but the country that will be in their hands. you can imagine what a bleak future we see if we do not help these young people to education themselves to get the best possible. these are the leaders of the future. talk to us a little bit about some of the conflict that none people face today in every way. >> thank you again for having me. glad to be here with everybody. young people face an enormous amount of hurdles in this economy today but probably more than ever in american history. we are the largest generation and the most educated and the most indebted generation in american history. recently college that has exceeded credit card debt. not only do we have to fight for the opportunity to go to college

and a broken educational system but once we get there we are financially burdened by the educational process that leaves us in economic indentured servitude in an economy with no jobs. unemployment is at 18%. youth unemployment is 21%. in the black community it is 31%. teen youth unemployment which is spoken of a lot which is a huge issue. 25% for the last three years. the opportunity for young people to gain employment experience before they go to college or enter the workforce is not there. in this economy you have to have an education and you have to have work experience and we are not providing the opportunity to gain work experience and we are economically segregating them from the opportunity to gain higher education. not mentioning the fact that young people don't have a lobby.

we don't have a lot of people fighting for us. a lot of times we have to fight and pick up our own issues and push them forward. the dreamers are great example of that. to be undocumented and unafraid is just as powerful as i am a man and to have this political courage in this climate is something to be cherished and something that speaks to the american spirit and something we should embrace. young people at the same time are going to be representing a huge amount of the electorate. at 2016 we will equal one third of the voting population. the laws we face will disproportionately affect young people, low income young people of color so the opportunity to participate in our government will not be there. the new voter id bill which allows the university of wisconsin student id to vote requires three main things.

photo id, expiration date and signature. the current student id that wisconsin has one of the three priority is. people are specifically designed legislation to disenfranchised young people, low income individuals and people of color because they know that this is the future of this country and the future of this country is inherently more progressive. we don't have the same kind of universal divisions on these cultural war topics whether it is gay marriage or interracial dating or immigration reform. so people are looking to take our voices out of the political process and take us out of the economic process. so the american dream so many people have realized is could become our american fantasy because we are not going to have the jobs we need to provide for our families alone start a

family. most young people are holding off buying a home, starting a business and getting married because they can't keep up. the system is specifically designed to disenfranchise us. we become the majority of this country, those obstacles are overwhelming. >> you mentioned this would be fine to disenfranchise us. why and who? >> the system is designed for the very wealthy to continue to be very wealthy and those at the bottom southern. organizations like alec were people vote to increase legislation to disenfranchise the growing population, i think the voting laws are looking to take away people's rights specifically because this country is shifting. it is shifting in a unique and profound way. dr. king spoke of the dream we

have yet to realize. here's a generation where we have a unique opportunity to cement and make it a reality. not just a dream but something we live every day and can build on for the future. i know the opposition to a lot of these bills are very conscious of that. look at the attack on labor unions, the attack on a working-class and middle-class. the attack and public-sector workers is an attack on black communities and brown communities. the attack on tel grants keeping the next generation of individuals uneducated and without economic means to influence change to forever be second-class citizens in america in the american economy. the afl-cio is deeply conscious of this and working with youth organizations and getting ready -- we have launched our young worker program to stand out and be a voice for young people and we really want to push the

agenda forward so that education is a right. health care is a right. when we talk about austerity that is an attack on the american dream and attack on the working core. we talk about budget cuts it is an attack on the working poor. when the elected officials they want to make sure these programs are here for our children we are not in the room when they make these decisions. we need to be there. our voice needs to be heard. we need to talk about a progressive tax system and education system that works for everybody. as something we can have. we protect and continue to advance the rights of working people in this country to ensure that this promise of the nation is for everybody and not a select few. >> thank you very much, kurston. [applause] >> since i am sitting here i thought i would say something about the topics listening.

i am more interested now in how we get done what we need to get done. i understand the problem. we all understand it and we have described it. eloquently. if martin were hear what would he say you are supposed to be doing to get something done? even though he is not here we know what we should be doing. we have a window of opportunity right now. nationally in politics between now and november of 2012. it is a window of opportunity and it will close and i will tell you why. you have a window of opportunity in your state depending on your political calendar. i don't know what it is in any state but nationally we have 2012. you ask why people want to disenfranchise young voters. we saw in 2000, i held hearings in the 2000 election. this and franchiser of of

latinos and african-americans and elderly people in florida. why was that done? we know why. so they're going to lose. we have to ask why are these people doing these things? they are doing it because they want to get power. they want certain people to win and certain people to lose. there are other things they shouldn't do stand. capitalism requires inequality. you learn that in econ i. question is who's going to be unequal. what you do about your situation determines who is going to be unequal. as long as you have capitalism you're going to have inequality. the other part of it is the windows. right now is the time to put pressure on political leaders to get something done. i heard some people say, i was criticizing the administration a

few months ago before everyone else started criticizing them for not doing what they should do. i wish obama well and i said the usual thing, i wish him well and he is loved by everybody. but we need to have here. people who have done some things since, waiver, people all around the country who are protesting and doing things. some of them think they should be quiet because they want the president to be reelected and if they say anything they might undermine his prospects. they keep making demands. the time to make demands is now. not after the election. when it is over it is over. when the president is reelected he will be a flame duck. someone said the other day when he is the lame-duck he will be able to do more for us. i have been in washington and

every administration one way or the other since nixon, both parties. i have never seen a situation where a lame-duck can get more done. that is just nonsense. so you have a window right now. people who are trying to cut deals, people trying to use leverage or trying to protest, people trying to do all those things need to be doing it now. that is when you have people's attention. after that they may tell you listen, if you will just wait until i can get over this, then members of congress and all kinds of political leaders. they may mean well. so let's figure out what to do to put pressure on. what is it that you do? protest. we learned that. protests is an essential ingredient of politics. a dozen years ago they had a congressional hearing to decide if i may radical.

i am. protest is an essential ingredient of politics. also explanation to those who don't understand, justice and freedom go together. what does it mean? and love. i love you even though you are my enemy. but i am going to protest until you do -- if you are my friend, i wrote a chapter on the history of civil rights commission called among friends. it was about how the commission thought wind jfk became president since he was a liberal and a democrat everything was going to be fine and they got their butts kicked for political reasons. not because he was against them on the issues. they didn't put enough pressure on and lyndon johnson sent make me do it. that is what you do. you make people do stuff. there are a lot of demands and the squeaky wheel does get the oil. we have a window of opportunity,

folks. right now, do all the stuff we need to have done and i would hope that we would think about how we do that. >> very glad you brought this up. [applause] whether it is the labor movement or any professional organization getting together and having a conference. always talk about the problems that we face year after year after year after year and we rarely talk about -- glad you brought this up. with that i will go to each one of the panel members and say what can you do to do something about it? we know what you are facing. but what is your plan of action? what do you think can be done? let's start with you. >> our plan of action and my personal plan of action is to reclaim our moral outrage and

right to indignation. if you look at the civil rights movement there was one critique of the civil-rights movement. people became stagnant with the many victories. the voting rights act of 1964. brown versus board of education. they stopped taking it to the street and stopped organizing sit ins and letting their voices be heard. you heard reverend jackson say it this morning. it is time to stand up and do something instead of talking about it. when barack obama got elected we worked so hard and said now he is an office and and things are going to be great. they went home and said we have to get up. you can't just sit back and let the government do for you. we have to speak out. we have to make our voices heard. not just now or just after elections but right now. the time is now. that is what i will do and where our firefighters are going to continue. that is what the middle-class

is. >> a few things. we have really been encouraging groups around the country who are working on behalf of the lgbt community to look around. when a local coalition on tax policy. join a local coalition fighting for emigration rights. what we want to make sure people are doing our understanding the connections between the issues. for a variety of reasons for the last number of years some of us who consider ourselves progressive have become separated from each other. is time to come together and highlight these issues and the injustices that occur. i will tell you a story about last winter. the same day the dream act did not pass, don't ask don't tell was overturned. for many of us in the lgbt community it was a bittersweet day. we too had fought for the

overturn of the desk don't tell and injustice and from our organization for racial and economic blends it was not only for those who want their country or their patriotism because for many it is the only way to get education or skills in this country. to join the military even when they would rather not. even when they would rather not. that was an economic and racial justice piece of legislation. we were very upset that the dream act didn't pass. we put our organization press releases on both. that has to happen because these issues are absolutely connected. the more we do that, there are ways we do that on the local legal state and national level, the second is when we do have opportunities and the opportunities are few in congress right now but we have been working with a coalition of organizations to look at every

federal agency and where discrimination exists against lgbt people particular lidos perfecting for lgbt people and trans gender people and looking at how we can change those policies or regulation these are policies that have to do with housing. a number of years ago a lesbian couple and their kids would show up to apply for section 8 housing and get turned away. they cannot be turned away now because of policies we have gotten changed. that affect lgbt people but it also affects a broader range of people. the more we talk about these connections and the way we actually experience our lives i think that is the way we will mobilize people. to your point the time is not a year and a half from now. we have to do that now. >> thank you. that brings me to this transition where i would like to make a comment. i'm a daughter of an undocumented immigrant and if they were to command of the

fourteenth amendment's they would lose out on having someone i think -- my sister and i have contributed in some way to society. i am not the one who is supposed to be giving the answers. this is a topic i am very passionate about. let me move to another. what can be done? what can we do? as the community, the latino community to make sure congress not only approves the dream act but comprehensive immigration reform. by not approving comprehensive immigration reform we're seeing serious consequences. state surge taking it into their own hands and precisely in the state where martin luther king fahd for over a decade in alabama, we have 1856. the strongest anti-immigrant law in the country that is supposed to go into effect september 1st.

it goes as far as not allowing children of their parents are undocumented so this is a very drastic measure. what can we do as a community? >> dr. berry said now is the time. we need to be the squeaky wheel. especially the undocumented youth. we need to come out and declare ourselves undocumented and unafraid and hitting the streets, protest. direct action. that is especially the national immigrant youth alliance. we believe in direct action. we don't make the call letters but when we were in the senator reid's office we decided to conduct a peaceful sit in. we got a dream back in the senate calendar. we need to continue to mobilize,

stand up and not be afraid anymore. it is a community program. a lot of communities came out in opposition of that and started making noises. that is when they tried to calm us down by passing this memo the recently passed that they are going to review some cases that are in these proceedings but we need to continue that momentum and we need to continue to be seen and heard. mobilizing our communities and i cannot vote but have many friends that to the vote and we can mobilize our communities and they can vote. >> thank you. kurston, what can young people do and what should young people do? there's a lot of focus on the importance of the young vote in elections. however, when young people feel disenfranchised they are not motivated and become very apathetic when it comes to

elections. when people stay away from polls whether it is hispanic or african-american they feel disenfranchised because they are disappointed. they are confused. it is not punishing anyone but ourselves. if we don't vote, we are not taken into consideration. what can young people do from here to november of 2012? >> it is important. young people are apathetic. it is just the opposite. i think young people are fantastically idealistic and that is absolutely what this country needed. i think we need hope, not the hope that was drilled into us in 2008 but actual hope to understand that elections are about winning on one thing. governance is about winning everything. we need to be in the business of winning every day. we can't place defense anymore. expanding the rights of workers, voters, young people,

immigrants. we need to understand what we do for young people. young people need to understand that they are uniquely powerful. we see young people across the middle east topple governments and dictators that have been in power for decades. you don't have wisconsin without the young people who decided we are going to sit in a in this capital and start this movement. you won't have young people pushing the dream act unless they go out on the edge and say we are undocumented or unafraid. i think young people will be engaged and a lot of young people have opportunities to bring it to this convenience today are deeply committed with engaging young people and making sure they -- a lot of information and work going on about how do we address these voting attacks and specifically at afl-cio we are pushing america wants to work. we are under the philosophy of we won't be building

infrastructure for elections but consistent mobilization, advocacy and organizing so there's plenty of opportunity for young people to get involved. all we have to do is look. we encourage that engagement and if people are smart they will empower young people and listen to young people and give them a little bit of an opportunity to run with something because i guarantee you not those who want to work, enormous advocacy for the change this country so deeply needs. >> definitely. i don't want to go to the next thing without asking something i have and wanting to ask all afternoon. if you could make a parallel or you think there is a parallel between the struggle of the hispanic community for immigration reform and civil-rights of the 60s. >> i think there are analogies just as i think there are analogies between the civil-rights movement of the 50s and 60s and most movements of social reform.

the only real difference is people are oppressed but in different ways. not everybody's oppression is exactly the same. latinos are pressed by colonialism. i won't give the whole history of the conquest and all the rest of it. but you could argue that if arizona and new mexico and all those places where they were and should have been we wouldn't be having these problems. it would be a different problem. the oppression flows from different reasons. language, the history of colonialism and the like but it is still oppression and the way you deal with oppression is the history of it from everything we know from the beginning of time through gandhi and martin luther king and the rest is what i said earlier.

you explain the people, you love them and protest against them. we did it here, the free south africa movement was a successful effort. we got sanctions and nelson is out of jail and south africa is south africa and the rest is history. but in any case it requires imagination and creativity about strategy and different things to keep public attention focused on your issues. but it is analogous. it is in the quality. it is an unjust principal being applied to people which they have to fight. they have to understand the history of their oppression. what people should not do. this happens sometimes and i relate to a lot of these movements and the lgbt movement and the women's movement. we have long arguments in the past about whether everybody's oppression was the same.

it is not. everybody isn't the same but the fundamental thing is we are all oppressed. protest, politics. once you get the vote, use it. figure out what to do with it. and not boycotting and saying you won't vote but being selective of how you use it and what you say about what you do. on occasion you have to fill the jail. you have to do that. you have to be willing to stop whatever is going on. you have to put some sand into the gears so people can't go on with business as usual. that takes a lot of courage and it takes a lot of people suffer because of it. but that is the history of social movements. it is the history of the labor movement. it is the history of how you get things done. it is unfortunate. sometimes students say why do we have to do all this? that is the history of how you get it done. >> people across the nation are

not able to be here today but they are watching by web cast. we are able to submit a couple questions for the panelists. we have one for mahlon mitchell from john talbot. the question is with the ease of nonunion on call workers giving corporations the ability to sidestep benefits in working wages. do we have a chance keeping collective bargaining rights in the new economy? >> i think we do. in order to keep collective bargaining we have to make sure we hold our politicians accountable whether they're democrats or republican. right now lot of bad politicians are in office by good people who don't vote. we have to be part of the process. we can keep collective bargaining and keep workers rights. we have to realize people die for us to have the right to give us what we have. it is our job to make sure we protect that right and be part of the process and get somebody

elected and hold them accountable whether they're democrat or republican. if they didn't do the job give somebody else. >> the other question is for kurston from john quinn. why do we need employment agents and temp agencies to get long-term employment? companies that use them are trying to get out of paying for health care. >> what is the question again? >> why do we need employment agents and ted agencies to get long-term employment? companies that use them are trying to get out of paying for healthcare. i guess what the question is trying to say companies and tim agencies to get a job in the first place. >> with the professor was saying was in capitalism there is inequity. when you work in an economy towards equilibrium, there is no value in providing greater service for workers.

the bottom line is about making profit. so we have to change the focus from profit driven organizations to ones that value people while still remaining -- maintaining a business model to be successful. no one has a problem with anyone being a billionaire. steve jobs did the i phone and the ipod. they are phenomenal and he is a billionaire. congratulations. he should be taxed for it. [applause] when people say we need -- collective bargaining should be taken away or medicare and social security taken away. they can be taken away when we allow them to be taken away. things only have power when we give them power. i would say that that system is broken. and choose not to be a part of it. you can choose to create social hundred for northship and make those changes.

the system of unpaid internships is inherently unfair and a system young people could put on a major product. we are not going to do this anymore. imagine in d.c. if every in turn stopped and walked out. no one would know where the copy toner is and two, this city runs on unpaid labor. let's be honest about that. the excuse of experience is not one that we should be tolerant of. >> a couple days ago, i read online the headline french millionaires or french rich are asking to be taxed so there are more social services and i was about to put on twitter we should learn -- won't be very popular. we have -- we can open up for questions now. is time to do that. i don't know if you have any

questions for this distinguished panel. take advantage of the fact they are here. we have a question here? [inaudible] >> i want to address the popular motion that -- [inaudible] very important that we focus on understanding every single community is affected -- [inaudible] -- every single person in the community is going

to -- [inaudible] -- we all have the right -- we need to stand up for one another. not just about immigration policy. [inaudible] we have seen it time and time again. nobody does it. [inaudible] we'll need to look inside ourselves.

>> thank you for your comments. it is what we were talking about. as long as politicians feel there are no political consequences to their actions they will continue doing that. if they realize if they don't support a specific issue there's going to be political consequences, they will get voted out of office or won't get voted into office then they will hear. anyone else have a question for our panelists? >> somebody in the back. >> there is a march on labor day. i want those on the panel to think about that. [inaudible] >> anybody want to address that? >> i love railways. marching is a great idea. it is time.

it will send a message. we have to be on the streets and make our voices known but there has got to the action to go along with the rally. rallies and marches are specific action after the rally, really you are losing and translation what you want to get done. rallies are great but there has got to the action. when we rallied in wisconsin we rallied and next thing, recalls. we rallied against them and if we have a specific action that comes along with that rally is a great idea. >> if he speaks i will be there. be of very thing, there have been many in every movement. the women's movement and the lgbt moments there are a lot of marches and rallies and something we talked about in the last couple years, something we did a long time ago which is the quality begins at home. particularly in this economic

climate and if marches are crafted well and have a message and actions and people really feel connected to what it is about they can be powerful. there are so many people who cannot afford to come to washington. if we can find ways to engage people at home, in their communities to stand up and speak out about their lives to local elected officials or state elected officials we have to focus on that just as much. >> congressman john lewis was here earlier. he said at some point his parents told him keep quiet, don't make any noise and he said i won't make the quiet and are one ignores and get in trouble. it is great to do that but with a message like martin luther king had. with a very clear message. >> i will say in the 80s we were told and scholars wrote about this including some of my colleagues that people shot with march. it was old hat and people should

do it. every forum i went to every discussion was about how it should be done or what ever. then the right march -- progressives stopped marching and the right began marching and they had marchedes and rallies and everything else and the people said why are they doing that if it is not effective? then there were marches around some of the issues and i remember a supreme court case in the 90s after a series of marches in washington around the pro-choice issue and in the opinion which upheld the principle once again, one of the justices who was in this and said that marches and they have all these marches coming to washington. this is in the opinion of the courts. the dissenter will name him but you might figure out who he is.

all these marches in washington. they should know we don't pay attention to marches. i thought that was so funny because of the didn't pay attention how did he know there were marches? >> that is hilarious. another question back here. [inaudible] >> you have an answer? >> my financial adviser which with a fancy name for broker has been saying this to me for months now. why don't people hire people? they have all this cash they're

sitting on and whatever these companies. she says pure and simple because they in fact, the more furor workers the greater profits they make and if they outsource everything to some other country where it is cheaper the greater profits they make. if they can extend workers, this is all happening, make people work harder, lager and be more, quote, productive. you will see things about how productive workers are. that means they have one person to do the job of three people and if they can do all that and have all that cash on hand you get a share of the value or sitting on stuff or to buy back your stock. is part of the fundamental economic principles that if you don't get fair wages and working conditions and policies that encourage that, capitalism, one of the rules is that it will go wherever inputs can be cheaper

and keep selling things to people if they can do that and make money and keep the money. unemployment to us is bad. to me it is bad. to see people unemployed and jobs and all the ramifications for the lives of human beings being out of work. the social and psychological and material ramifications of not having a job and not having any money to depend on. but if you have that capital and you are one of the people involved in these companies, then it is a good thing. they will only start to employ people when they exhaust all of these things that i just told you about. if you can't get greater profit margin anymore and used up as many people as you can use doing one thing and part of it is political, some people in corporations and my adviser told

me this, don't want politics to be away it is and they figure if they don't do anything to help the job situation maybe it will change to some of environment that they consider more beneficial to them. that is the way it is. >> interesting analysis but not very promising. >> then we call these corporations and business people and turn around and call them job creators. which to me makes no sense. the essence of creating jobs is if you can get one person to do the job of three people that is what they are going to do. the reality is the middle class of the job creators because when the middle class rises up. the rich and wealthy called this wealth. without jobs the rich and wealthy -- middle-class are not buying goods and services that create jobs. more money for the middle class, more goods and services bought and the rich will have to hire more people to make the goods and service which creates jobs

and the rich and wealthy make more money. >> the press has something to do about it. >> we need to provide color for those who are unemployed to come out. we don't see them. they cannot be invisible. wind you are invisible is not a problem people want to address. there are tens of millions of unemployed people in this country and they are our countrymen and it should be unacceptable and should be a failure of our democracy. we need to make sure their front and center and the images are there and people are held accountable to those individuals and can't write the law. that is part of changing the lexicon of the conversation to get more people employed and pushing what needs to be. >> we have run out of time unfortunately. it has been very interesting. we were talking about how they are so intertwined. we began this symposium talking

about jobs at ended up talking about jobs. definitely all related. we are running out of time but a final comment. i want to thank the afl-cio for inviting me to participate. this has been a learning experience. i love all the information i received from these distinguished panelists and are also feel that as a journalist i have a mission. as a hispanic journalist i believe since i started back in 1981 that i learned early on in my career i had a mission and my mission was going to have to go above and beyond informing people. i was going to have to do a little bit of social work because my audience was a little bit different and had different and additional needs to for rest

of the viewing audience. therefore, i have practiced what they call advocacy journalism. some people criticize advocacy journalism. a very famous journalist in california once said if i am being accused of doing advocacy journalism and that means speaking out for my community and the rest of my community and that is what i am. [applause] >> i think you can hear me, i hope. thank you so much for being here with us today. i think this has been a fabulous and wonderful day. this discussion about jobs and justice. have to tell you that when martin and i were talking about

this around april he said -- do this unveiling. we really wanted this space. i want a space to be able to have a substantive and serious discussion about economic justice and social justice and freedom. and i think today that we have absolutely done that with both of our fabulous panels. ..

>> in order to make it successful. we have heard today really from that coalition, that coalition is workers. the unemployed, the dreamer. they are the young people. we have the power in our hands to make a movement and make some noise. we talked about this, and i loved it, dr. berry, when you said it is about freedom, certainly justice and freedom go hand in hand. but it goes with love. so if we truly love, truly love, then it is our obligation to make sure that people are able to go back to work so they can feed their families that they love. if we truly love, we must ensure that our young people have a

brighter future ahead of them than they currently have right now. if we truly love, our gay and lesbian sisters and brothers in this country, must understand that we all are connected, because actually at the end of the day, we are of the human race. that's who we are, and that is why we fight, and that's why we will go forward. and today, we have a i believe accomplished what we needed to do, but we heard the word and now we must move forward with some action. i cannot let this opportunity pass, because social media, talking about an opportunity for us. and one of the things that we are going to be doing is starting on labor day the afl-cio in our community partners will dedicate a new effort to achieving dr. king's vision of economic justice with

an america wants to work campaign, to put our country back to work. so we need you in the room, we need the viewing audience, those who are on the webcast and c-span, we are urging you to join us in this demand of our leaders, to put america back to work. so, in fact, what you could do right now is if you have your cell phone, i he wanted to wringing but now you can turn them on and this is easy and will only take a few seconds. right now we would like you to text jobs the 235246. got that? jobs to 235246. to join the america wants to work action team. so that's a step, and certainly

we'll have this discussion about when we march, but let us remember that there was a march planned for saturday around jobs and justice. but who knows? maybe this was a blessing in disguise, because we got to make sure when we come back here in september or october that we are marching with a mighty force, but we have an action plan behind it. and it continues to be jobs. freedom, and justice. let me just and by thanking all of the afl-cio staff, and all of our department here they were just absolutely amazing in making this a very successful day. we thank you, and, of course, we thank all of you, the participants. let's make some noise. sisters and brothers. [applause]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> as the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches, a number of events to mark the occasion are planned this week. >> here's a speech by veterans affairs secretary eric shinseki the result address the american legion convention. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> thank you very much.

great, generous welcome. thank you for that kind introduction. for your own service to the nation and for your leadership of the american legion. let me acknowledge to members of congress with whom i've worked very closely, and who have been most supportive of veterans, of va and at this secretary. they both served in the house veterans affairs committee, and first is representative tim walz of minnesota, a guardsman. and the second is committee chairman jeff miller of florida whose leadership has been crucial and will continue to be crucial to va and its mission of serving veterans. so mr. chairman, congressman walz, good to see both of you again. thanks for your leadership and support. my greetings also the former chairman chet edwards for well-deserved recognition by all of you for his many years of service to veterans. at me also acknowledge members of the legions leadership, peter

with whom i worked most frequently in washington. carlene ashworth, national president of your auxiliary. two members from state directors conference, pete wheeler of georgia, and terry of utah, with whom i worked very closely, they are my counterparts at the state level, and if there any other state directors year, i acknowledge you as well. members of the legion family, fellow veterans, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, i'm pleased to be here in minneapolis, the legions 93rd annual national convention. last week at nearby fort snelling, i think some of you know this, we have a cemetery there. to american warriors were laid to rest. 31 year-old g. special warfare operator john fox, and 24 year-old special warfare

operator second class mix be hard. both of them nav navy seals. john and nick both perished when their helicopter went down in afghanistan earlier this month. 28 fellow operators, special operators also perished with them. this is particularly difficult time as all of you know for their families. and we pray for john and nick, and a 28 maids, and are reaching out to all of their loved ones at this time. the sacrifices of our young and their families continue unabated. and the risks they face daily our undiminished. when incidents of tragic performance strike, where snapback to realities, the realities they look with every day. they fight for us, and they are making a difference. and risk and sacrifice should not be theirs alone. we owe them the best this country can offer while they're fighting, and we owe them the

best this country can offer when they come home to join the ranks of our veterans. that is our moral obligation. and that's what i'm thankful to the president, president obama, for giving me this opportunity to serve veterans. i know he spoke to yesterday, and he's a tough act to follow. this is like the warm-up act coming after the main event. but thank you for the one reception you provided him. it is sometimes said that we honor the fallen by how we care for the living. the ones who made it home. now, that's the president obama and va, and, frankly, members of congress have been about for the last two and half years. and i can speak firsthand about the two members that i recognized. three members that i recognized. president obama handed me to priorities when he offered me disappointment two and half years ago. pretty strategic, pretty

straightforward. first, make things better for veterans, and then transform this great department of george, the department of veterans affairs, so that it better serves veterans throughout the 21st century. he provided not just strategic guidance. he also provided his personal, time and again, if you a thing about the budget process, time and again in the fork in the trailer we could've gone left or right, the president sided with va and veterans, and provided us resources. and so he has not just provide personal support, he's assure the availability of much-needed and scarce resources to address some long-standing issues. and then he allowed me as secretary, the freedom to make decisions and to act on behalf of veterans. with congressional support, president obama increased the va's 2010 budget to $115 million, a 16% increase over the congressionally

enhanced the budget that i inherited in 2009 when i arrived. the largest single year increase in over 30 years. this year the 2011 budget grew by 126 points $6 billion, and the present 2012 budget request for next year currently before the congress is for $132.2 billion. very few organizations, public, private, profit, nonprofit, military or civilian have had this kind of resourcing support over the past three budget cycles. and every bit of it has been needed to fix the long-standing issues in this department. so thanks to the president with clear direction, we have predictability in resourcing, and with unwavering leadership support. and that's up to us to deliver. veterans remain a very high priority with president obama, and i know that personally. i know that firsthand, and i can tell you that it goes deep with

them. that commitment will be reflected in the care and benefits va continue to provide the men and women who safeguard our nation in its darkest hours. these are tough economic times, and that's especially true for veterans. as of june this year, 1 million veterans remain unemployed. the jobless rate for a post-9/11 veterans is a 13.3%. an extra in the hard hit generation. and as troops return from iraq and afghanistan, an additional 1 million youngsters are expected to leave the uniform ranks over the next five years between 2011 and 2016. so three weeks ago the president again demonstrated his unwavering support of veterans and of business by announcing new aggressive initiatives to get veterans back to work. first, tax credits for any from hiring unemployed veterans. short-term hires, long-term

hires, imax credit of $9600 per veteran for firms the higher veterans with service connected disabilities who have been long-term unemployed. and second, the department of defense, department of veterans affairs was spearheaded governmentwide effort to reform the way members transition out of the military services. every member will receive the training, education and credentials needed to successfully transition to the civilian workforce or to pursue higher education. if we can spend nine weeks in boot camp getting youngsters ready to go operational, we can find the requisite time to fully and properly assure their successful transition back to their communities, either to go to work or to go to school. [applause] >> and finally, the president challenged the private sector, to hire or train 100,000

unemployed veterans or their spouses by the end of 2013. my personal opinion, that's a chip shot. va already employs over 100,000 veterans in our workforce, and they make up about 30% of our workforce here we're going to increase that to 40%. that's what we are working on. we are also working to expand opportunities for veteran owned businesses. two weeks ago new orleans we conducted our national veteran owned small business exposition. it was a training conference provided, providing an unprecedented opportunity for veteran owned small businesses, to build capacity to grow their businesses, and a direct connection with va's procurement decision-makers. over 4100 people attended. 1600 of them represented either a veteran owned or a service disabled veteran owned small business. additionally, we recently awarded seven of our 15 major contracts in va, major key for

information technology contracts, specifically the veteran owned and servers small businesses. and then we are required all 15 contract awardees to meet our subcontracting goals of having veteran owned or service disabled veteran owned businesses on their teams. we know historically veterans higher veterans, and so increasing the number of successful small business owners who are veterans increases our opportunity to assure that veterans will have job opportunities. va is also continuing its historic missions, thanks to the congress, of preparing the next generation of leaders by administering the education of over 518,000 veterans and family members under the new 9/11 g.i. bill. when you add these other educational assistance programs, that number of veterans and family members in school today is over 840,000 youngsters.

this fall, thanks to the congress, we are going to expand that g.i. bill program to provide vocational training and other non-degreed job skills for veterans who want to work, but to are not necessary interested in sitting in a college seat for four years. and so this'll be another tremendous opportunity for veterans to add value to their communities. the president's budget -- budgets have enabled us to attack three key priorities that i set for us back to and a half years ago. one is extending and increasing veterans access. i was told it's hard to get into va, and so we decided to do something about it. second priority was to end veterans homelessness. and the third was to eliminate this thing called the claims backlog. on access, through our we energize outreach programs we have increase the number of veterans enrolled in the health

care by 800,000 in the last two and a half years, a 10% uptick. we have qualified 89,000 veterans for benefits under new rules for presumption of service connection for conditions related to exposure to agent orange. we have made it easier for combat veterans to receive care for post-traumatic stress disorder, and have hired an additional 3500 mental health professionals since 2008. we have built more than 30 new community-based outpatient clinics, and we are building five new be in hospitals. we've also invested heavily in telehealth, connecting all of these access points so that we have a constellation of care out there for veterans. we've also improved our outreach to women veterans with women's programs coordinators at each major medical center. andover, over 1200 care providers have received advanced training in women's health care. homelessness, our progress in

the fight against homelessness has been significant. since 2008, ea has helped house over 29,000 homeless veterans and family members. and another 30,000 have been assisted by the homeless call center. we intend to reduce the number of homeless veterans to below 60,000 by june 2012, less than a year away come with the goal of ending this national embarrassment in 2015. va is in this fight with all of our capabilities. we don't talk about homelessness as though it's a one factor discussion. we are in it across the board. primary medical and dental care, mental health, substance abuse, education, case management, housing as well as jobs counseling. we are also conducting justice outreach to support the creation of veterans courts, which would remain and veterans, those that are facing minor charges, eddie grimes, substance abuse

offenses, the kinds of things you end up in jail for a few do it often enough, read man those veterans to us at va for treatment in blue of indoors ration. [applause] >> and we're working with state and federal prisons to afford veterans being released from prison and opportunity to break that cycle of incarceration, homelessness, incarceration which plagues many of them. there are 1310 federal and state penitentiaries, and we're into 950 of them linking up with those veterans. we are committed to ending veterans homelessness by 2015, and we are after it. and ending veterans homelessness is not just rescuing the individual on the street. our image usually if someone wrapped in blankets and clothes sleeping unheeding great. and that is true. that is a very visible part of the homeless issue, but it's

much broader than that. we are after it, we will end in 2015. claims backlog. in 2009 you asked me to fix the backlog and disability claims, and i've committed to ending it in 2015. by putting in place a system that processes all claims within 125 days, not an average, 125 days. but within 125 days. less would be better. [applause] >> and at a 98% accuracy level. that's the challenging part. you can go fast and do it ugly, or you can do it right, go slow, that's not good enough. we will go fast and get it at 90% accuracy. of the things you asked me to take on, this one is the most challenging. it's taking us longer to get momentum, we have a host of promising options today and we expect them to begin paying off

in 2012 as we begin fully automating the disability claims process. the reason i'm fairly confident that we've got a good handle on this is our success in automated the new g.i. bill program, as you know, we started that as a stubby pencil drew. as we are getting the first 173,000 youngsters into college classrooms in the fall of 2009, we were doing a parallel effort to build automation tools that we needed. didn't have, frankly. so here today we went from 173,000, the fall 2009, over 518,000 going to school, automated, processing, going to school under that program. so that gives us a measure of confidence. [applause] >> now, attitude. two years ago many of you told me that some nva had an attitude problem. and i agreed with you.

[laughter] sometimes you guys are hard. okay. [laughter] and i agreed with you. so since last december, with input and recommendations from a variety of panels, workgroups and the senior leaders and other stakeholders, we have settled on five core values that we believe underscore the moral obligations that are inherent in the eight and special. these are integrity, commitment, advocacy, respect and excellence. those five words. integrity, commitment, advocacy, respect and excellence. and now if you take the first letter of each of those words is does the acronym i care. and i know there's at least one person in this audience wondering whether this was a cute marketing device where you start with i.c.a.r.e. and you backed away into a set of eyes. didn't happen that way. maybe 10 in the rations of differing members from all levels within the a, leaders, members of the workforce, vs

those, and they wrestled hard. had to settle on these five words. start at may with 100 ideas. as you know, 100 guys don't make any sense. we thought it had to be less than seven if it was going to be fruitful, as a how to get to the right five, six or seven. we settled on five. and that came out of the process. what a tough argument to a lot of debate, a lot of heated opinions but we have agreed on this fight. and yes, when she gets a five, some bright person our range to this so that it spelled the acronym i.c.a.r.e. it's helpful for us to remember those values. it's an eight for memory. but it also incurs a promise. i.c.a.r.e. in gaza promise. this is the way it works. integrity, because i care, i will act with high moral principle, adhere to the highest professional standards and maintain the trust and confidence of all with whom i engage.

commitment, because i care, i will work diligently to serve veterans and other beneficiaries, the driven by an earnest belief in deities mission and fulfill my individual and organizational responsibilities. advocacy. because i care, i will be truly pattern centric by identifying only considering and a properly advancing the interests of veterans and other beneficiaries. respect, because i care i will treat all those i serve and with whom i work with dignity showing respect to gain respect, to earn respect. excellence. because i care, i will strive for the highest quality and continuous improvement, be thoughtful and decisive in leadership, be accountable for my actions, willing to admit my mistakes, and then rigorous and correcting them. you will begin to see these core body is demonstrably at work in

our daily business. it's an education process, and we are leadership, workforce, having as education discussions now. it's not a one day event. it's not a one week initiative are a one month priority, or this years good idea. this is a routine continuous education process where members of the workforce and leadership will revisit why these guys are the ones we settled on and what it means in serving veterans. every new employee will go to the same training program. you do have my assurance that va has embraced these promises, and that's what they are, promises with serious dispatch. now, with your help and support we thank you and have good years for veterans. there's much more to be done, but we do have momentum in key areas and clear directions for the future. we will not fail to honor the dedication and selflessness of men and women, the men and women we serve. warriors like army ranger joe,

who was a very wonder when an iraqi grenade shattered his right leg, extensively damaged the entire right side of his body, severing the nerve and an artery in his right arm. doctors didn't expect him to walk without support ever again. let alone fulfill his wish of returning to the ranger regiment as a squad leader. then again, most of us don't fully appreciate iron will. and in his words, i just don't like people telling me i can't do something. he had been serving with the rangers since may 2002. when he was injured, and 2005, three years later he was on his fifth combat deployment. after multiple surgeries, slowly regained the use of his right arm and enduring unimaginable pain in that right leg that was so severely damaged, he made the

call, courageous call, to have his right leg and be dated below the knee, opting for greater mobility and fast recovery with a prosthetic leg. in march 2007, the leg was removed. five months later, he was running. six months later he rejoined the ranger operations company in fort benning, that's the transition unit would have to go in and show the right stuff before you get an assignment to the regiment, if that's what's going to happen. 10 months after surgery, he completed an army pt test of a five-mile run and a 12-mile road march with a 40-pound pack. in march 2008, 1 year after surgery, he became the only and beauty ever to assume combat duties in the ranger regiment as a squad leader. he has since deployed -- [applause] he would be a great recruit for the legion. he has since deployed for more

times. he's been promoted to platoon sergeant. each received a bronze star for having save a comrade who was severely wounded. he is a member of the 9/11 generation that the president spoke to you about yesterday. more than 5 million americans have served in the military during this past decade. 3 million of them joined after 9/11 knowing full well that they would probably be going to combat. there are congressman's are extraordinary. we all know that. unseating the taliban, pushing out al qaeda, capturing saddam hussein. delivering justice to osama bin laden and training in iraq and afghanistan forces so our kids can come home. ..

>> the 9/11 generation is defined just as every generation before it. every generation of america's veterans has been defined by the virtues of selfless service, sacrifice and devotion to duty. these men and up with who serve -- women who serve and have served are the flesh and blood of american exceptionalism, and that's a term you hear used a lot. my definition of it are those who have served and who serve today. the living, breathing embodiment of our national values and our

special place in the world resides with all of you. we are blessed to have them just as we were blessed to have you in your time. god bless our men and women in uniform, god bless all of our veterans, and may god continue to bless this wonderful country of ours. thank you all very much. [applause] ♪ [applause] [background sounds] >> at this time i want to present a diamond lapel pin to the secretary of the va. we call him mr. secretary, i called him general when i was in

there, but that's okay. here's our newest member of the american legion. [applause] >> as we commemorate the ten-year anniversary since the 9/11 attacks, this morning we're live with a look at aviation security since the attacks. tsa chief john pistole is at the center for strategic and international studies to talk about it. live coverage here on c-span2. [inaudible conversations] [background sounds]

[background sounds] >> well, good morning, everyone. my name is rick nelson, i'm director of the homeland security and counterterrorism program here at the center for strategic international studies. i thank you all for braving the first day of school and the bad weather and this very hectic week that we have of events in front of us. we are absolutely honored and thrilled here to have tsa administerrer john pistole to speak. as, you know, tsa, obviously, since 9/11 and its creation has been the center and the focal point of a lot of discussions about what the appropriate role is for homeland security, in particular transportation security. we know tsa many times, we relate tsa to only individual the american public has as just the individual who does the screening at the airport. and, unfortunately, that's not all that tsa does, and tsa's

portfolio is much broader and much more deeper than that in itself. and the advances that tsa has made over the years despite the criticisms and the media sometimes wanting to focus on where they went wrong, the advances tsa has made since its inception are actually quite remarkable. one of the things going forward in this 21st century threat that we're facing, we're going to see this increase of transnational threats and these threats that are going to cross our borders and metastasize themselves inside the united states is this continued struggle between what the right balance is between privacy and security. and tsa in many ways is at the forefront of that debate. every day their individual officers who are in the field have to deal with that balance between privacy and security. and it's extremely difficult, and it's only going to get more difficult going forward. when you have an organization with a charter like that, you don't get a lot of pats on the back when you do a patdown the

right way. nobody says nice job to the tsa screener, they only get criticized when something goes wrong. to manage an organization like that when that's what your charter is, you don't get a lot of praise when you do it right, requires a significant level of leadership and management skill, and that's where administrator john pistole comes in and why we're honored to have him here. he's been a lifelong, in government service nearly 30 years, most of those 26 at the fbi, that's where he was at 9/11. he brings the type of leadership, the type of integrity to an organization, um, that, an organization like tsa. so today i'd like to introduce administrator pistole. he's going to give ant 20 to -- about 20 to 30 minutes of remarks, and then we're going to go to questions and answers. when the microphone comes around, please, stand, state your name and affiliation, and we look forward to hearing administrator pistole's remarks. sir, thank you for attending.

>> well, good morning. thank you, ozzy, for that introduction. it's a privilege to be here this morning with csis. i appreciate the opportunity to focus on some of the issues that we are dealing with today, but also use this time to reflect, to look back on where we were on 9/11 and where we have come in the past decade, what we're doing today, and then as we look forward to the next ten years. so that's how my comments will be focused this morning. we, obviously, have had the opportunity especially in this last week and this week as we come up to the tenth anniversary on sunday to see a lot of coverage about where people were, what was going on, how lives were changed, how lives were lost. a number of you, i'm sure, watched some of those over the weekend. and as we look forward to how we can do the best possible job of making sure that a tragedy such

as 9/11 doesn't happen again, we have to be very mindful of where we have come from, and that context, i think, is critically important. so i'd like to this morning dedicate these comments to the victims of 9/11, um, to the heros who knowing the dangers that they faced, the hundreds of firefighters, law enforcement officers, first responders particularly went into the trade center towers to rescue those who were at peril. and i'd just ask that we'd take a moment of silence in remembrance of them. thank you. so we talk about the events of 9/11, and it's easy the lose sight of what happened. but as we see some of these memorials, some of the tributes and things it brings it all

back. and just as it was one of those defining events for a certain generation similar to pearl harbor of another generation or the jfk assassination, whatever that defining event has been in your generation, it's easier to think of what you were doing, where you were and how you responded to that. and i'm sure that you've had that opportunity, and as you think about this coming sunday and the tenth anniversary, again, i think the context is important for where we have been, where we're trying to get to. i was an fbi agent, as ozzy mentioned, on 9/11. i was assigned to our inspection division out of fbi headquarters but was actually in new york, new york state, actually in syracuse, to do an inspection of the office there. and i'd just completed an outside interview with a local media outlet there and had arrived at a local judge's office, his chambers there to interview him on how that fbi

office in syracuse was doing. when i got to the judge's office, the tvs were on, and there was talk and coverage of the north tower being in flames and people trying to figure out what had happened. it was shortly thereafter that we realized something was terribly wrong, and so i excused myself and went back to the fbi office there. and it was there, moments after i arrived there, that i watched along with many of you either on tv along with millions to see the second plane hit the south tower there. and just the sense of it being surreal, that this can't be happening and that -- but yet it was happening. i think the real impact was when the first tower collapsed, and the sense that -- well, two things, really, came to mind. this changes everything and what is next. and, of course, the what is next part played out over the next

minutes as we learned about the plane hitting the pentagon and, of course, in shanksville, the crash there. from an fbi perspective, the question was, what else is out there? of course, the entire u.s. intelligence, law enforcement community, what can we do immediately to stop anything further? are there just four planes? are there other attacks that are planned and haven't been carried out? so all those things. and so when we look at what happened there, obviously, today's topic is aviation security, we look at the state of aviation security on 9/11, and i've actually seen some commentators wax nostalgically for the days prior to 9/11 when you could walk out to meet your friends or loved ones at the gate or whatever it may be. and, of course, no or very limited lines and things like that. and that was, clearly, a different era. if you think to where, what type

of security we had then, it was, basically, a walk-through metal detector to pick up devices, knives, guns that were primarily used for hijackings, particularly to cuba is what the reasons they were initiated decades ago. and then the basic x-ray for your carry-on bag. so streamlined process. as we know from the photograph from the portland, maine, airport on 9/11 at 5:45 that morning when mohamed atta walked through the portland security with their box cutters and were able to get on the flight to go to boston where they joined up with three other hijackers on american airlines flight 11, the airport security at that time was limited, it was basic, and it was insufficient. the response to the attacks, obviously, was for a number of

things to happen, but in regards to tsa on invest 19th, congress passed a bill and the president signed a bill creating the transportation security administration, at that time part of the department of transportation. and so when we look at what the mandate was to the entire u.s. defense community, intelligence, law enforcement, security apparatus, the president's mandate was don't let this happen again. and so over the course of the next year, tsa ramped up from zero to nearly 50,000 employees. it is one of the greatest mass hirings, if you will, in u.s. history in terms of a response to an event such as 9/11. and what has happened since then is a refinement in some respects, an expansion in other respects of where aviation security has focused. as ozzy mentioned, obviously, tsa other responsibilities

primarily as a force multiplier to state and local agencies and amtrak, for example. so i won't comment on that at this point, but be glad to take your questions on that. that's where we were on 9/11. since then, obviously, much has changed, and the president's mandate at that time and continuing, obviously, in this administration is to not let that happen again. it's held true. the challenge has become, as terrorists have evolved, how have we involved, and have we been able to stay at least a step ahead of them in terms of their ingenuity, their creativity, their ability to adapt and divine, conceal and deploy improvised devices whether as we saw on richard reid or the liquids plot out of u.k. in august of '06 or as we

saw on christmas day and, of course, the human cargo plot last year, last october where the terrorists see what layers of security we have put in place and then modify their approach to try to insure that they can get past our security. of course, the latest intelligence now is about surgically-implanted devices that suicide bombers would have so they would not be -- so we would not be able to detect the small devices such as on christmas day, 2009. we believe we had been successful in pushing them to further extremes in terms of their concealment and their capabilities, mindful that we need to insure that we don't allow a repeat of a prior attack. so let's just look at some of the things that we have done collectively since 9/11 when it comes to aviation security. if i asked each of you to write down some of those things, a number of things that i'm sure

come to mind. most notably would be the checkpoint. the checkpoint that you must go through at one of the u.s.' 450 airports or, of course, around the world. nearly 275 last points of departure that fly directly to the u.s. there's a certain protocols regimen that you have to go through which have become symbolic of the government's response to 9/11. and with 1.8 million people every day traveling domestically, 12.5 million a week, 50 million plus a month or 625 million people every year and going up this year, you can see the challenge that the men and women of tsa have to insure they provide the most effective security in the most efficient way, providing the best customer service, if you will, but not at the expense of security. the bottom line is we have to make sure we're doing everything we can while respecting privacy

and civil liberties. a lot of debate about that as to insuring that another 9/11 doesn't happen. so think of the checkpoint and think of what happens there now instead of just a walk-through metal detector. that's still available, but there's also advanced imaging technology, and i'm very pleased that we, that technology has developed, and we are modifying at least half of those scanners to what we call automatic target recognition that just gives a generic outline of a person. and so in the next 30 days or so we should have half of all of those machines, 450 or so, around the country modified so it just gives that generic outline of a person, and so it does not do that more revealing individual image. contrary to what has been in the press quite a bit, at least the things i saw and were, of course, parodied on shows, not nearly as revealing as what was

depicted often times. but the fact of the matter is there are privacy issues there that we are trying to be attuned to while making sure we provide the best detection capability and so an abdulmutallab who is, perhaps, inspired by some terrorist group and has gone on the internet, learned how to devise a device similar to that that is nonmetallic, that that type of device will be picked up by the advanced imaging technology. that's one of the noticeable changes. obviously, we have an explosive trace detection capability. so some of you have traveled, you may have your hands swabbed whether you're in line or if you alarm somehow, just have your hands swabbed for explosive trace detection. that's something we, of course, did not have. we have advanced x-ray technology for the bags and a number of different iterations of that. but the bottom line is as passengers pack more of their

personal items in their carry-on bags so they don't have to pay a checked bag fee -- i'm sure none of you have done that here -- but as people do that, it makes detection, frankly, more difficult for the security officers who are looking at the screen. and if any of you have not had an opportunity or have done that, i would just -- to see what these items look like, i would just ask that you be patient with those security officers who are looking because it is very challenging to look for an organic mass and an initiator. so the two things that we're looking for in terms of an improvised explosive device, and there's many things that look like either an initiator or an organic mass. so the challenge is how do we resolve those issues, those anomalies, if you will, in a timely way that provides, again, the most effective security but in the most efficient way. so we have the advanced technology x-ray. we have bottle liquid scanners.

we are working on technology to get to the point where we can allow liquids to come back on planes, but we're not there. we've been working closely with the european union in terms of -- and the european parliament's mandates to allow liquids back on planes by april 2013. the technology's not there yet, but we're working on that and also some other risk-based security initiatives which i'll talk about in just a few minutes. and so that's what's happening at the checkpoint. what is not, what you do not see, hopefully -- because unless you're down in the cargo area -- is the inline baggage systems that we have worked with industry to develop a high-speed process for screening of explosives, screening of checked bags for explosives. obviously, pre-9/11 that didn't happen. now, pan-am 103 did change the procedures for matching the

person to the bag on international flights, but it did not require, no legislation was enacted to require that those bags then be screened for explosives. so that's been a major development and a change, again, you probably don't see, you shouldn't see in most instances. but we have millions of bags that we screen every day, um, and both from the checked bags and the carry-on bags to look for those explosives that could be catastrophic to the aircraft. so that's something else that is out there. and, also, behavior detection officers. they didn't exist on 9/11. the question is, be if they'd been in portland, maine, or boston or dulles or newark, would they have picked up on these individuals? hopefully so, but that's something we'll never know. the idea is to give us yet another opportunity in a layered defense to identify, deter and disrupt terrorists who are bent on causing destruction.

so how do we best go about doing that? it is through those layers of defenses that we have. that's all on the physical side of things. where we are making significant progress is also on the technology intelligence side of things, and secure flight is, of course, our system that just requires the name, date of birth and gender of all travelers, all those 1.8 million people every day and allows us to, again, do some definitive checking against the terrorist watch list. of course, terrorist watch lists prior to 9/11 were limited at best, and the idea of being able to check with any confidence or any level of accuracy was quite limited, frankly, prior to last year, about now, last october actually, full rollout of secure flight. previously, airlines maintained lists, and so we would not know, for example, if there were a

half dozen selectees or even some no-flies who were wanting to travel. if they were on different airlines, we would not know that information perhaps until the last minute, if at all. so the advent of secure flight was just recognized by the 9/11 commission as being one of the good technology developments, and we use that from an intelligence-based perspective to say we want to be a counterterrorism, risk of-based, intelligence-driven organization that is informed by intelligence from the community, and this is one of those key enablers that allows us to do that. the other part i'll just touch on briefly is in cargo. and, again, going back to pan-am 103, and we see what can happen with cargo that is not thoroughly screened. we see what happened with the yemen cargo plot from last october when there is some screening, but because of the ability for terrorists, al-qaeda in the arabian peninsula in particular to design and conceal those in such

a way that even upon inspection they look like normal computer printers. and so that is a challenge. but when we look at cargo, i don't think, um, people realize that there is, there are million of pounds of cargo that fly in u.s. passenger planes every day. over nine and a half million pounds of cargo go on u.s. passenger planes. so all that cargo is also screened for explosives and, um, and that's done through a partnership with the private sector. but the bottom line is tsa has that responsibility. again, that's something you don't see, but it's another layer of security that we're trying to ensure that you and your loved ones are safe, even if it's cargo, checked bags or anything else a person may have on them. now, that nine and a half million pounds, that's just a little more than 10% of all the cargo that is screened and uplifted in the u.s. every day both domestic and overseas locations.

so it's not an insignificant amount, and it is something that is required for us to give the high level of confidence that we are doing everything we can with the best training, techniques and tactics enabled by the best technology to provide that highest level of security, recognizing that as we move forward this is no guarantees in this business. so let me transition from where we were on 9/11 to what we've been doing the last ten years to the way forward and whether it's the next ten days, weeks, months or years, there's a lot of work that is being done to try to provide that most effective security in the most efficient way. and the one part of that is recognizing that in order to give a 100% guarantee of safety and security for each and every passenger flight and cargo flight would require a paradigm shift of what we're doing now to even more stringent security

measures both with passengers and with cargo which would, frankly, inhibit the free movement of goods and people with the best security in significant ways. and we saw that after the yemen cargo plot. we had meetings, i met with the head of the world customs organization, the head of the universal postal union who, of course, is affected anytime cargo is. the international cargo association and the maritime association to work with them to find a business-based model that would provide the most effective security without unduly restricting the global supply chain. because that's what's happened when we put an immediate cargo ban hold on anything coming out of yemen. the ripple effect, the impact of that was significant. and so in working with industry, we have been heartened by industry's own risk mitigation, risk management strategies,

particularly here in the u.s., to buy down that risk of somebody putting something in cargo that could cause catastrophic failure, um, and they're doing that without government regulation. so they are taking their own risk mitigation, risk management steps, again, recognizing that they are not in the risk elimination business just as we are not in the risk elimination business. ..

>> trying to find evidence of what brought down that crash and killed 231 people. it wasn't until later that we realized that it was not because of catastrophic failure, it was because of individual on board who got control, copilot and put the aircraft down. that was a stark reminder when i took over this job that no amount of physical screen will detect what's in a person's head. and so it made little sense to me that we should require high let's who are literally in charge of the aircraft to go through screening win, if they had a prohibited item on them, whether it's a small life are whatever it may be, that is not -- that's what's in their mind. so that's one example. we are working with industry,

both the airlines, the airports, and the travel associations to have a known trusted traveler expansion of our customs border protection does with her global entry century, and nexis networks, where people pay a fee, go through an application process, have a background done. so we have a higher level of confidence who those people are because we know more about them. again not a guarantee but we know more about them. that's critical because under this risk-based security initiative the whole idea is to focus on those that we know the least about, or most about because they're on a terrorist watch list. and then be able to focus our limited resources on those individuals, and then to enable us to do that, we need to do something else in terms of more intelligence screening on the front end, and then we can expedite those who we know a lot

about. there's a number of you in the audience who have a security clearance, secret, top secret. the question is, we know a lot about you. you're interested position. should you have to go to the same type of screening as someone without? that's an example. again, nothing deposit in terms of the risk but it does give an opportune all other layers of security in place to try to make some advances in that regard. working with the airlines as i mentioned, we are hoping next month to do, improve concepts in a lease for airports with frequent fliers at higher elite levels, starting off anyway, who are willing to share information about themselves through their airline, say yes, i am willing to share, i am a frequent flyer, and as we look at travel history, and things later on we will be able to make even more

informed judgments as to what risk this person opposes. if you've been flying for 20, 25, 30 years and you're at this level, for all those years army part of those years, it's possible you're a terrorist, but it's not likely. and so as we can again use more intelligence to shape and inform our judgments and decisions, i think we can make a better process of a get most effective security in the most efficient way. we are also looking at ways that we can streamline the screening of children, recognizing that children are not terrorists but, unfortunately, we know that people do use them to do bad things. and we have several examples of children 10 and under from around the world, not involving aviation that were mindful that terrorists exploit vital norms, to try to process or. unnumbered getaways are looking at this risk-based security initiative, the bottom line

again to use more intelligence on the front and insecure flight enablers in many ways to embed information on the boarding pass in conjunction with the airline, and to allow the folks in that way. so there's also been talk about a checkpoint of the future. international air travel association, has been a strong proponent of that. i also a proponent of that. the technology again is not there but the idea that you can just walk through without divesting anything, walk through security scanners which we picked up explosives or anything else that may cause catastrophic goes in aircraft, that's a great idea, and working, something that has been explored, again, technology is not there to do that. so all these opportunities we have to try to shift the paradigm from the one size fits all construct to try to tailor the security screening,

involving intelligence, involving security screening, involving random and unpredictable, because we will always maintained that. there will be no guarantees in this risk-based security initiative. i simply refuse to allow terrorists to gained the system to say okay, if i build this legend, travel of whatever it is, that i am guaranteed x. by guided screen. will always maintained that random and unpredictable aspect of it to ensure that we are doing the best possible job. so with that, let me thank you for your time and attention this morning. look forward to questions and comments. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you very much for those comments. we're going to do the question and answer period now, but before, i was remiss. i think what his greatest achievements, especially considering today's political climate was the fact that he was confirmed by unanimous consent in the senate.

so tsa, and to get that after all the controversies and everything is again a testament to the kind of leader that tsa currently has. so with that let's go to questions and answers. please wait for the mic opposed to comrade because we do have media and they're trying to capture these. state your name, your affiliation if you have one, and the question. no statements. the gentleman in the redshirt right over here. >> thank you. john brown, fox news channel. with respect to the christmas day underwear bomber, is it accurate to say that we were lucky that the explosives didn't ignite because his pants were damp? and more broadly, is it fair to say that we get lucky more than, lucky that more of these plots don't succeed? thank you. >> there are a number of unknowns of course. i think we were fortunate on christmas day. the question i would look back at is, is what have our layers of security done, force, if you

will, terrorist to adopt different means of concealment. as to whether there was something either design, construction, or the fact that he had been traveling for 17, 18 hours, didn't have something to do with it, there are a lot of unknowns. the bottom line is, if it had detonated as intended, it would have likely cause catastrophic failure to the aircraft. >> thank you. the gentleman over here. >> thanks. i'm tony fromm institute for defense analyses. along the lines of risk-based approaches to security, you made a vision, all of which were from flights from other countries do. would not a risk-based system emphasize far more about far more resources on flights than it does on domestic flights?

>> part of our challenge obviously is how we assure with highest level of confidence that our international partners are doing the requisite screening to our levels, and so we work very closely with both our counterparts but also with the security services, the law enforcement intelligence community agencies, and the governments, and the airlines and airport authority and those last point of departure, particularly to ensure that they are doing that requisite risk-based security. and then as we informed their information sharing, additional information such as the information, the yemen cargo plot and so forth, we look at those opportunities. the risk-based security initiative that we are working on is designed to start here domestically, to make sure that we can get it right here, and then what we been in dialogue with a number of foreign

governments and private industry who are very much interested in how this works, and then for us expanding that to those flights that would be impacted internationally. but we are focusing first domestically. >> thank you for that question. the gentleman over here in the blue suit, please. >> hi, good morning. you talk a little bit about cargo. the question is, is all cargo on inbound international passenger carrying aircraft now being screened, recognizing that screening, more than extra but other techniques available. thank you. >> right now 100% of all the high-risk cargo is being screened in bounty the u.s. we don't define that publicly because we don't again want to provide a roadmap to the tear say okay, if we can just get out of that high-risk category. but it really falls within to

construct. one is known shippers and known shipments. and so if there is an existing relationship with the shipper, and that has been existing for a certain amount of time, and we know the products they ship, whether its fortune 500 copies or whomever, that's one aspect. the other if it's not in that category, is it a known shipments. and so let's just use the yemen cargo plot as an example. the fact that the young woman dropped off to computer printers with clothes and books and was being a prospect $500 to send those two packages by different aircraft to chicago that doesn't make much sense from an intelligence risk-based security perspective so that type of information advance cargo information is very, very helpful in defining who the known shipper or known shipper. again without going into too much detail, that's the general concept. >> who do we have next?

>> good morning. just a private citizen. question on the risk-based security, it seems like you kind of our talk about profiling without releasing the work. our go to socialize the american people to accept that? and second part if i may, are we taking any of the israeli airlines lessons learned and practices into our own practice? >> well, first let me say, you're not just an american citizen. you are who we are working for. it's the men and women of tsa to keep you and your loved ones safe. and so what we're trying to do is, frankly, under promise and over deliver in terms of how we can do this in an iterative process pics i mentioned the pilots, to me that's common sense.

we also have worked with the world war ii veterans who come in to d.c. to see the world war ii memorial on charter flights, and to work with them to do more identity-based screening as opposed to typical physical screen. there's a chance that one of these elderly gentleman, who the youngest is in his late '80s, is a terrorist. but it's not likely. so how can we just implore more common sense in the policies that we use. the socialization and acceptance by the american people is critical from the standpoint of making it viable. so if our groups who are trusted, are known, are such a small group that won't make much difference to the 1.8 many people traveling every day, so what we're working with with, get to the airlines and some outreach is to say, it's all voluntary, if you don't want to share any information about yourself, that's why. just go to the normal screen protocol. but if you like the possibility,

the probability of expedited physical screen and you're willing to share information about yourself, then we're interested in that, and how we can use that in a constructive way to do the best possible security the most efficient way. >> next question. right here in the back, left hand side. >> thank you. mr. pistole, what is your vision, you know, vis-à-vis the future of this process, you know that, in this country many people are quite upset about the extensive process that goes on. and what do you foresee that we would evolve into with respect to, you know, in game in terms of going through the process of screening? >> could you state you and your affiliation?

>> dan gibbons, georgetown. >> thank you. >> the whole idea is again, use the needle in haystack analogy. we are looking at one in a billion or whatever it may be, for example, december of '01, we've had nearly 6 billion people travel in the u.s. that tsa has granted obviously we didn't start screaming until ' '02. and there've been no shoe bombs, and simply from the probability standpoint that's something that we're interested in, and looking at. what does intelligence tell us, even though the e.u. has that many people traveling, 27 countries the e.u. traveling in the same timeframe. so choosing intelligence in an informed way. instead i think will always be evolving. so i don't think it's reasonable for anybody to say to your plan, for your plan, five year plan, 10 year plan and say this is exactly what we look at. we are always evolving, again

hopefully ahead of the terrorists as they evolve. but the general approach is to provide more intelligence screening on the front and to expedite the physical screening in as many opportunities as we can. so we reduce the size of the haystack, but then you we're looking for is smaller than what we started with under our previous one size fits all concept. >> mark, in the front row. >> thank you. to go back to the trusted traveler screen, i was wondering if you have a sense yet of what that expedited screening is? and i know this going to and unpredictability. but you get a specific tangible benefit. you go to a kiosk, you don't have to wait in the line. can we expect made we don't have to take off our shoes, made will get to carry a bottle of water

on, what your thoughts about the average traveler will get rex thank you. >> what we're doing in the proof of concept and four airports starting next month is really three things. one, a dedicated lane for them so you don't stand in the regular link. two, you do get to keep your shoes on, and three, you keep your laptop and your briefcase are carrying case. so let's are the three tangible benefits that we are looking at, again, you may end up, maybe that nine times. one k. or take a flyer, and the last nine times you may have gone through that dedicated lane, the 10th time you may end up going through regular screening simply random and unpredictable. >> right here in the middle. black dress. >> hi. kaitlyn with bea systems. can you please comment as to whether there are possible budget effects would affect tsa,

especially when it comes to personnel? >> well, we are very mindful, again, we work for the taxpayers and there's a lot of focus on how at a government agency can be more efficient. so the bottom line is that we don't have a diminution of security, because of budget cuts, so i asked administer have to look at a 60,000 person organization and say how can we achieve efficiencies in a way that does not adversely affect security. so for the last six months or so we been going through a series of reviews, internal reviews and exercises to identify some of those areas that we can be more efficient while not negatively impacting security. >> i'm going to jump in here with one question. we talk a lot about, i mean obviously tsa is on the front lines interacting with the general population on a daily basis throughout the entire transportation system and there's a lot to ask of tsa, but

put you on the spot and see what can tsa, what do you need from the american people? what can they do to help improve transportation security system? >> well, at the risk of misquoting a president in a different way, but president jefferson who talked about an informed electorate is the best defense of democracy. for us, a well-informed traveler is the best defense against the terrorists, because someone who knows how to prepare for security screen, so it's about partnership, but they will be up to two things that don't seem right, the holcomb "if you see something, say something" campaign is particularly for those who are frequent travelers to recognize when somebody is not being what they should be, or whatever. and so it's that partnership that it would say is critical for us.

and then frankly be patient with us as we roll out some of these risk-based initiatives that will need time to make sure that we get it right and we may need to recalibrate and go back into things. we are doing a behavior assessment, and ss are program at boston logan now, and some of you may have been through that, just a brief interview. but i just asked for patience and cooperation as again, the bottom line is to make sure another 9/11 doesn't happen or something else with a come up with a creative scheme that just hasn't been identified. >> thank you. another question from the audience. in the front row. >> paul ryan, in your opening remarks give mentioned amtrak as oh, by the way. if you think about the european terrorist bombings over the last several years, they all seem to be train or subway oriented. if you go to union station d.c.

policeman walking around dogs. if you get on the train in new london, connecticut, you buy your ticket and you get on the train, there's no inspection, nothing obvious. are we taking enough actions, our is the train transportation system kind of a soft underbelly where we are not paying enough attention to? >> a couple points. i didn't mean to give -- be glad to talk in detail about it. but clearly terrorists see subways, passenger trains, some freight trains around the world as vulnerable because the open architecture you described. that being said, one of the things in tsa that we do is recognize we can't be all things are people, all places at all times, cycle route can we leverage our resources and a smart efficient way to augment or enhance whether it is the amtrak police or the metropolitan transit authority's of the major systems around the

country. you just look at the ridership. i mean, 8 million plus every day around the country on subways in things. so vastly greater numbers. again, that's where i think the random and unpredictable comes in. amtrak has been a great job in terms of having uniform patrols, canine, random bag searches, things that begin are designed to throw off terrorists. we know in debriefings of terrorists who have cooperated three things that they focus on as a deterrent our uniform officers, k-9s and cctv. the last one being only if they plan on not being a suicide bomber. the madrid bombs in afford to let the packages and got out. the 77 bombers in london in '05, one of them as we're walking down into the cube look at the cctv because, frankly, he didn't care. in 10 minutes he would be dead. so those are things we have the protection and response team,

vikings are designed to just that, provide that unpredictable posture. but recognizing that there are challenges that are significant every day, and that is through that partnership with the american people, the metro transit chief in boston who has created on the "see something, say something," took a 10-foot backpack if you uploaded out by different, different stops her and said something like, it won't always be this obvious. such as the idea, or a huge package like a fedex, ups package, bigger than this table, again, won't be this obvious. so what can we do in terms of being informed and responsive, not just be informed, be responsive to address these challenges. >> good question. thanks.

next question over in the back, please. >> hi, good morning. thank you for sharing all this enhanced security measures that tsa has implemented. but answers as to why, whether we really are safer. i travel regularly and to be perfectly honest i get make which to regulate. sides wondered how do we know terrorists are doing the same? >> the bottom line is yes, i think close to consensus is, and i strongly believe that it we are safer today than we were, but we recognize again it's not a perfect system. it's not 100% guarantee, both the government accountability office, dhs, inspector general's office at her own tsa office of inspection does covert red team testing to try to get things through a checkpoint. and have had successes. a number of successes, and that

coupled with the intelligence we know about how terrorists are trying to conceal devices such as abdulmutallab on christmas day. that presented challenges that we say let's make sure that we're looking at those items that can be catastrophic and damaging to air traffic that's what i mentioned the organic mass and the initiator of an ied. those are the two key things that we are looking for because you got to have something that some type of an explosive, whether it is liquid, hopefully you say you're taking liquids on, you've got a 16-ounce or a pint or liter bottle, so they're taking to the hopefully smaller size. but part of it is simply how do we best position our resources to identify those threats which may be catastrophic. >> though he a law-enforcement officer in the back after this. [laughter] >> any other questions? anyone else? all right, going once, going twice.

okay. administrator person, i want to thank you once again. i know this is a very busy week for you. and we really appreciate time, appreciate your leadership at the tsa, and thank you very much for coming to csis. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> we'll bring you events

related to the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

>> while congress returns this week from their summer break, the senate will gavel and this afternoon at 2 p.m. eastern. general speeches and till about five. and senators are expected to take a consideration of the judicial nomination of bernice donald to be a judge in the u.s. district court of appeals.

>> and this afternoon the head of the present republicans will >> in 1844, henry clay ran for president of the united states and lost, but he change political history. he's one of the 14 men featured in c-span's new weekly series the contender's. this week live from ashland, henry clay's kentucky home friday at eight eastern. >> up next counterterrorism and mental health scholars from dartmouth, stanford and university of illinois discuss ways to combat threats of violent extremism and radicalization. the panel as part of a forum on lessons learned after september 11.

the event was held by the homeland security department and its national consortium for the study of terrorism and responses to terrorism. this is just over an hour. >> we are going to make every effort to pretty much stay right on schedule, and very happy to introduce our next panelists. the moderator for this band is gary ackerman, whose the research director at the s.t.a.r.t. said on countering violent extremism. gary? >> good morning, everyone. thank you again for joining us today. now that we just heard about radicalization, or rather the fact that we shouldn't come in the previous panel, this panel follows on from that in looking at how do we counter the threat of terrorism of radicalization, and it's obviously some standard or traditional way, better intelligence gathering and

sharing, more proactive law enforcement, et cetera, et cetera but there's other avenues that a lot of people don't immediately think about and that's what we're going to touch on some of those today. one of the issues that we will look at is can you deter terrorists? can influence their behavior in significant way short of actually detained or otherwise eliminate the threat? and more importantly, can we do this without shooting ourselves in the foot and making the terrorism problem worse? which i think is something we always bear in mind. one way of thinking about the terrorist is what some of the academics have referred to the term by denial. deterrence, preventing terrorism by either making it too difficult for an attack to succeed, and as a broader strategic level, convincing potential attackers or terrorists that the violence they are not going to achieve the goals that they desire. and this is often by increasing our ability to recover in any

attacks. so it's not going to get the terrorist the goals they decide. how can we make american society more resilient to terrorist attacks? and not only in terms of physical resilience but often in terms of psychological, social, economic terrorism. and either, how can we make our communities and individuals more resilient to terrorist messaging. so this is completing the circle and sending us back to the radicalization. these are all issues we're going to look at in the panel now. i'd like to introduce you now to our esteemed panelists. if the previous panel was that a team of radicalization, this is a the 18th of countering terrorism and resilience right here. so i'm very pleased, on my left, on the far left, my love, to introduce doctor martha crenshaw who's a senior fellow at the center for international

security cooperation at stanford university, as well as a professor of physical science at stanford. she's also professor of government emeritus where she spent several decades teaching the world, one or two decades, teaching the world. martha starr at the age of five. [laughter] before the game or feat in my mouth, but she spent several years educating the world, many generations of students and educating the world about terrorism. so martha, people in the terrorism field know that martha has done so much in terms of so much of the field. i could go on for an hour about your many accountants but i would just say that she's a very treasured member of s.t.a.r.t., as is the entire panel, and martha's also a world country and member of the global agenda council for 2010-2011.

explains tears in which is collection of martha's published works since 1972, was published. so welcome, martha. next will look at doctor steven weine is a psychiatrist, researcher, writer, teacher in the department of psychiatry at the university of illinois and chicago. his work focuses on the personal social cultural and historic dimensions of migration. and his books include when history is a nightmare, the lives and memories. as well as testimony and catastrophe. stephen has a lot of experience with engaging one on one in addressing, stephen has a lot of experience indian with one on one.

last but by no means least, the speaker is dr. fran norris to the committee psychologist and a research professor in the department of psychiatry at dartmouth medical school. she's also a fairly with the department of veterans affairs national ptsd, post traumatic stress disorder, and is also the director of the national center for disaster mental health research. fran is a former deputy editor of the journal of traumatic stress and his present editor of the ptsd. she received the robert s. award for outstanding contribution to the field of traumatic stress studies, and fran is one of the foremost international experts on response to terrorist events and resilience and other disasters. so please join me in really welcoming our very esteemed panel. [applause] >> this panel, why similar to

the previous bet and that we are going to start by asking our panelists what do we know about resilience and countering terrorism that we didn't know 10 years ago. and more importantly, what have we learned, if any, and what lessons have we not learned over the past 10 years. so i will start with martha. >> thank you, gary. when i was asked to think about this question i try to limit herself back in the summer -- i tried to put myself back in september 2001 and what were we thinking. as all of you know i studied terrorism for a long time, so i had followed al qaeda closely, worked a lot with government analysts who are also following al qaeda very closely. and i think 10 years now later, how different, what do we really know about how to respond to terrorism. i don't want to talk about what went wrong, why we should were surprise, but really what we've learned. and look back on that summer, and i remember there was a

crescendo of warning all summer. i'm sure many of you remember that all is well. there was one foiled attack after another. and we knew something was coming. it was surely something was coming. we just didn't know where or when or how. and we underestimated the adversary, because we knew that their intentions were hostile and we knew that they wished to attack the continental united states. it's not that we didn't know that. we did know that but i think what we underestimate was something that gary mentioned earlier this morning. the level of determination, and the level of capability of the adversary. and it wasn't a capability in terms of high-tech capability. is a capability of coordination, planning, advanced preparation, the effort it went to to train people as commercial pilots, the imagination, unfortunately of diabolical imagination of people like khalid sheikh mohammed and the use of others who thought of these ideas. we really did not see that coming.

and in many ways in the years that followed the 10 years that followed, i think we've probably slipped in the other direction of overestimating the power of al qaeda. the previous panel, i think that, maybe important point, the reason that al qaeda is moving toward this idea of sort of what we used to call resistance which was something i grew up in the far right circles in the united states years ago, is the sign of weakness. but over these years, over these 10 years we've been lucky in many ways that we've not been hit again. we sort of went to the other side of the coin about the adversary was much more powerful than it really was. one thing we learned is it's very difficult to develop this kind of realistic appraisal of the adversary in order to craft a response. in terms of the way we are responding to terrorism, what changed, what happened, i think some of the lessons are that we really did not realize how costly counterterrorism could

be. costly in every way. costly in terms of the financial burden, costly in terms of the effect on people's daily lives, civil liberties, privacy. costly in terms of governmental reorganization, and costly in terms of unintended consequences of our policies which are always very difficult to foresee. we all remember this now. we leapt into the war on terrorism out of the shock that we felt because of the destructiveness of the attacks, the surprise that were caught offguard by them. and we really again leapt into an enormous commitment to counterterrorism which really was new. now, the idea of using force against terrorism and using threats of force against terrorism, just deterrence, was not new in the summer 2001. the clinton administration had begun as cleaning the use of force in afghanistan and elsewhere already. but as you remember, whether or

not the drones should and could be armed, and second, if they were armed, who would control the drones, the cia or the military? and this debate had an effect hampered a move towards increased use of force. so i see the current policy in terms of the obama administration's new reliance on drones and special forces, it's really a continuation of something that began over 10 years ago. the very strong continuity. but we really underestimated the kind of at what we're going to make, and they think that one lesson i would take from this is that we don't want to be caught offguard again in terms of preparing our response and thinking through what we should do, should something equally or more devastating happened here and god forbid, we all hope all of our strategies of prevention will work, but if the other side gets lucky again, then we need all of our powers of resilience and we need all of our powers of separation. i think, for example, the

reorganization of the government that followed 911, the 911 commission report and other efforts was not as carefully and as wisely thought of as it might've been. some have been affected by this i'm sure in very real ways in your careers, but we did a massive overhaul of the government without really thinking through how it would work, why it would work, out of sort of a feeling that we have to do something. so what i would hope looking to the future is, first of all that all of our efforts that have been successful, but second that we are very carefully prepared as to what we should do, is something very bad happens. now one of the policies of the u.s. government that is still in effect is that we would respond to an incident of nuclear terrorism, even acquisition of nuclear materials by a nonstate actor by threatening retaliation with overwhelming force. this is the official american policy, at least rhetorical policy. and i'm not sure that we know

exactly what we mean by that and what we would do. the interest in deterring terrorism emerged after 9/11. there's been some discussions among those of us who analyze terrorism before 9/11 but the interesting part of the government grew after 9/11. and the first evidence i knew of it was the government asked the national academies to hold, to create a committee to study whether or not terrorism should be deterred. and i had the pleasure of serving on the committee, along with others, including none other than thomas schelling himself. so that was an interesting experience. we concluded that clear you could not deter terrorism very easily. this did not stop the u.s. government from pressing ahead with the idea that it could be deterred, and so this has now become over this 10 year period a very hot topic as to whether you can deter them through threats of force, whether we can

and have deterred them by being better prepared to do with terrorism, through policies of resilience, societal resilience, and i think a major problem remaining is we don't know. we don't really know why we've not been attacked again. we don't know whether it's because they don't have the capability, whether we have defended ourselves better. and i'm not sure we really know how the public would respond, were there another disastrous terrorist event. and i myself would like to think that they will not be panic, that we're better prepared than we were before, but this is something that concerns us. and we really don't know whether advertising to the adversary that we are prepared, we have good security, we have, we are resilient, whether that discourages or encourages them. because we still really do not know enough about how they think. >> thank you very much. stevan?

>> okay, france spent i think before going to think about millions as one part of the process of counterterrorism that continues, we have to first understand what the consequences might be. after the september 11 terrorist attacks there was a great deal of concern and uncertainty about what the potential psychological consequences of terrorism were. although there had been a considerable amount of research on recovering from natural disasters, researchers and practitioners alike just were completely uncertain about the extent to which any of that knowledge would now apply. largely with one or two important exceptions, we learned that the consequences of human caused disasters are not all

that different from the consequences of major natural disasters that caused extensive damage. just, for example, with one colleague and i compared what happened among new yorkers in new york city after 9/11, the what happened in a village in the mountains of mexico after mudslides. and you might think that these are totally different context and populations, and yet what we saw in terms of the prevalence of problems in the patterns of recovery were far more alike than different. so i think it's important to keep in mind that we had a history of knowledge to draw upon in understanding terrorism and its effects. now, there probably are for kind of key things i would point to as things that we have observed and learned after 9/11, with

this regard. first of all, we observed in real time that most people behaved appropriately and pro-socially in the aftermath of the events. they did what they could to protect themselves and to help others. disaster sociologists far before my time, and decades, for several decades, have been talking about that we need to get beyond this youth of panic and everyone is out behaving anti-socially, and just try to make the argued over and over and over again that that is a rarity, by far the exception rather than the rule and how people behave. second, studies after 9/11, document the psychological stress was very high and very common initially. i think it's really important that we recognize that symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, of depression, anxiety

or anything normal after major events like this. and they should be expected, and we should be prepared to address them. now, to say they are expected doesn't mean they don't matter. it just means that we can do, we can respond in ways that help to normalize it but often help to reduce the distress and discomfort and dysfunction that many people experience. third, i would say, now people might argue with me, some people would argue with me about this, but you won't. that we learned that a couple of mental health programs can play an important role in facilitating resilience and recovery by providing education about common reaction and effective coping strategies. the response to 9/11 was as unprecedented as the event. i mean, to this day i remain kind of profoundly moved by what i observed in terms of how the

various agencies within the federal government, including fema, samsung, va, and many others work together with state governments and local governments to do the best job they could. of responding to the need of the population. it really was an unprecedented and come and we learned a lot. both by what worked and what did work but in terms of how to respond in this way. and for the i would say that we learned that there is, that is important minority of people who are less resilient and do need more intensive or ongoing intervention. it's always a little dangerous, probably talking somewhere between 10-20% of the population will experience ongoing problems after something like that. i think we've learned a lot over the last figures out who those people are likely to be and how to identify them. i do want to say that, one of

the things i think are restarted here is a theme today is it's almost like this pendulum notion that we tend to swing back and forth in how we conceptualize problems. and in my field, we i think it had a good job in what was once too great a focus, kidnapping so concerned about resilience. at the same time we don't want to go so far over to that side that we forget that we all have a breaking point. there's not a one of us in this room that is exposed to something dramatic enough, personal enough, and grading of loss would experience kind of profound despair. there were some consequences of terrorism's since i've been making these analyses that we do know a lot, decades of work on natural disasters. there certainly were a couple of

things about 9/11 that were puzzling to the field as a whole, and i would say that the primary one of those was the role of exposure. we very much have these notions that showed over and over again, that the people who are most affected by those our most sacred suited exposed to anything that makes so much sense, you probably wouldn't even think about it twice. and certainly that's true but what we saw after 9/11 was that this relationship was a lot less clear, that there were many people who work only quite marginally exposed and even quite distant from the event who were highly distressed by it. and that led to increased attention in the role of ongoing appraisals of risk and threat as elements of understanding the long-term consequences of these events. now, moving beyond individual resilience i would probably say the greatest shift in the field as a whole was this increased

attention to community resilience, when this is a term that when it was first starting to be bounced around no one even knew what it meant, that it's kind of catchy and i guess that's another thing. and people start talking about it before there was really i think very in depth about what does this mean. but i was a over the past few years that is now starting to occur and this is an area that is so much evolving. i think we are learning that our understanding as community resilience rests heavily on the pre-existing capacities of communities, including their economic development, social capital, their information and communication resources, and their local community confidence that is the ability for local people and the engagement of local people in working together and making decisions and acting. >> thank you very much, fran. >> thanks to both carries for

putting this great event together. so, 10 years ago we were not so focused on resilience. as fran says. and it would have been impossible to imagine the statement the president obama, who said in his administration said on several recent occasions, that strong and resilient individuals, families and communities are the best defense against terrorists ideologies. so, we are learning from work we are doing that in diaspora communities in the u.s., such as somalia american community in minnesota, there's been meetings where people have been exposed to stories of atrocities and people have tried to encourage youth to go and enlist and fight, and some have left home. but we've also learned stories where parents are uncles or

brothers have said to kids who come from such meetings hey, that's a load of crap, go home, focus on your schoolwork. and kids have listened to that. so these are important stories because they are stories of protective capacities that live in families and in communities. and we need to learn from those, but we also need to pay attention to the vulnerabilities and risks which are very real and diaspora communities in the u.s. and are evolving, and we know that the risks are recruitment israel, and that recruiters become more clever and find new ways to capitalize on the weaknesses of diaspora youth. now, over the past 10 years, as fran was saying there's been an explosion of interest in resilience, in the clinical and community and the family science field. concerning broad range of adversity, health and social adversities. so the question i ask is, what

does this new knowledge of resilience tell us about deterring terrorism? i want to make seven points about that. so one, it tells us that young people especially can be resilient to some risks but not to others. of course, we know this. this fits with the fact that many of those who were recruited as terrorist activities were high achievers, they were not mentally ill, they were not criminals. they were not deviants. so, how can still their parents and teachers help to protect them, these high achieving people? number two, it tells us that resilience is not entirely individual, and on the other hand is not entirely social. it's an interactive combination between those things. so this means that we have to look beyond individual levels factors, which were to a certain extent a lot of the focus of the last panel i think, but we have to think about family factors,

about community factors, about media, about institutional factors if we want to think about deterring terrorism. three, it tells us, this knowledge, that when youth are exposed to young people are supposed to socioeconomic adversity, to sociocultural transition, that their family is the strongest buffers that they have against the associated risks. and so the role of families in terrorism prevention was evidenced in the snapshot idg earlier, but you can also see in other media reports of parenthood turned their kids in, who have informed law enforcement about things. this is an important fact in resource we need to think about. how can we better help these families, but more important, not just ordinary families, families were already struggling because they are new immigrants, because they are poor, because there ethnic racial or religious minority, how can we help them

to do this? okay, number four, it tells us that diaspora communities, resilience is as much shaped by the homeland or by your experience in a refugee camp as it is by your experience, say, your new country, the u.s. so in diaspora communities will we might want to call higher resilience, doesn't necessary mean greater affiliation with american institutions and values. for example, i hear from young somalis that we are supposed to be the generation that fixed somalia, that makes it better. but you can see how that could go, that could break in either direction. so, if we want such an attitude to be more aligned with american values institutions, then we might have to help the people in the diaspora to create opportunities for doing that, such as making peaceful ways to help your homeland and help your

community. five, it tells us what we can do what is called preventative intervention. preventive intervention are services that help to lessen use a negative actions to effectively enhancing protective resources in families and communities and institutions. now, and this has been done and replicated scientifically across many different kinds of public health and social adversities. this is certainly good news, but i think it's also very challenging for those of us in this room, because it calls for shift from the traditional way we approached thinking about terrorism. and i think this shift requires moving away from a heavy focus on risk factors, especially individual risk factors, to an equal focus on what we might call protective factors. it also means integrating two very different bodies of

knowledge. one, the whole body of knowledge we have about the security issues, and body of knowledge about what i would call psychosocial issues or family and community issues. and three, it really means working collaboratively with families and communities to design programs of policies that are going to work in real-world settings. now, .6, it tells us the body of knowledge that interventions to aim is to reduce the vulnerability of the population. so these interventions don't only aim to say increased fan and committees cooperation with law enforcement are as important as that is, but they also aim to try to change basic fan and team unity processes such that it will reduce young men entry into violent extremism. so for example, it could help parents to be better aware of recruitment, to be better informed, to a different strategies for talking with

their kids, to know how to keep their passports safe. number seven, this body of knowledge tells us that effective preventive intermission strategies are usually locally tailored, there are multipronged, they are sustainable, and they involve more than just information sharing. so enhancing resilience to terrorist recruitment is possible is going to have to involve more than a briefing, more than a town hall meeting, as important as those things are. so in conclusion, you know, many of us would agree that prioritizing resilience is necessary, but i think realizing that we should do that only puts us on the starting line. and if we really want to go the distance, and find ways to help families and communities, then our challenge is to find ways to convert with existing knowledge about resilience into the counterterrorism field and into actually implementable

strategies. i think that ordinary parents and community advocates that i know, who want to protect their children, they know they can do it alone, and they know they need our help. thank you. >> thank you very much, stevan. thank you to all the panelist. before we open it up to the audience i like to sort of those one or two questions. the first of is a very broad question but i think it's something that keeps coming up and it is relevant every day. and this is the issue of, although some people have said that tears threat is overblown, even if it's not overblown, it's the issue of what john and others have referred to as an autoimmune affect which is basically that in responding to the threat of terrorism, we end up doing more harm to ourselves economically, to our civil society, to our value system, and the terrorists ever hope to do on their own. at the other end of the spectrum there's an incentive for us to take proactive measures against

terrorism. any politician, you know, potentially lose the next election if he said we're not going to prepare for terrorism, it's not much of an issue but i don't see any with senator my question to the panel, and i'd like to from each of you, how do we know when we are investing too much in preparing, for preventing terrorism, or how do we know we are investing too little and what types? how do we get that right? i think we will, whoever wants to go first. >> i'm going to answer the first part of your question perhaps a little more than the second part because one of the i think greatest advantage of the community resilience perspective on preparedness is that most of the efforts that would build community resilience to terrorism also builds resilience to a host of other kinds of

social problems. not just including other kinds of disasters, what your actual more common, but other kinds of problems. and you look across the literature, at least what we think are the factors that influence resilience, you find the same factors coming up, almost regardless of what kind of factors. i mean come it never hurts to build strong communities, regardless of what that reason might be. >> soda and shoots it is in terms of community resistance, not yours, but there can't be too much because whatever you invest will benefit the committee as a whole. ..

>> so institutions, there's also a lot of strengths there but there's enough vulnerabilities that makes it very easy for recruiters to do their job, if that's what they want to do. now, some of us would say these are vulnerabilities that should be addressed anyway. i think that's kind of what fran is saying. but i guess we have to be clear

about what our aims are. and we have to be careful about overly securitizing addressing social issues such as the social integration of immigrants in ways that might not either address the social concerns or the security concerns. and so you come down to which kind of government agencies should be doing what? as being an important issue. and i would say it shouldn't be all the security agencies. there are basic needs that need to be addressed from education, social, health care, employment, housing that in some ways that you could all trace to creating some broad vulnerability. but we have to be very careful. i think it calls for some very careful balancing between the

social approaches. >> there's a lot of critics who have said that the whole terrorism issue and responses to terrorism has been abused by other agencies but not really in a prosocial way because an example i know is that a local fire department would never get new equipment but if they want a grant, this is to fight terrorism, they'll suddenly get their new equipment so they said, look, we know it's connected to terrorism but we need ladders and those hoses and to hire those firearm and if we label it terrorism in order to get some money, why not? terrorism is another vehicle that society can use for various purposes, i've given a prosocial example but there's antisocial example that people given too. my idea is sort of how do we -- how do we distinguish with what's really going to have pardon the pun more bang for the buck so to speak?

and what should be relabeled as something else? >> yeah. >> i think we got to try to do the research in communities to understand that. it's to understand the causal links, the causal networks. so if you ask people, say, in the somali american community in minnesota, they would say the problem is the lack of resources. that parents -- i mean, that youth didn't have anywhere to go after school and that we need to create more programs like that, i would like to see as many programs like that as fire trucks. that would be a good thing. i don't see that's happened. i don't see how anyone has figured out -- how to use that, build those programs. but i think we should be doing the research that helps inform, what are the most important in

communities, productive resources in communities that are going to catalyze others? it's hard not to believe that after-school activities for young people is one such positive way to go. it's hard to believe an effective counterterrorism approach that didn't in some way take account of that for youths. but we need to still -- we need to be looking closely at communities and talking with parents and advocates. so this is an example -- not just -- i agree with the other comment of talking with former terrorists but we got to talk with the parents and community advocates who are on the front lines trying to keep their kids safe all the time and listen to them about what their needs are and try to be responsive to them. government can't do everything. but we can work with them and with local ngos to try to help make what they do stronger.

>> well, i think that the criteria that fran proposed -- that's a reasonable approach to say that would the measure have other beneficial effects? whether or not it helps with terrorism at least that as long as we do no harm it will actually be positive for somebody but that leaves to sort of a cynicism about counterterrorism that as gary mentioned that we're disguising them as counterterrorism because we can't get money any other way. and there's a real balance to be struck there as well. a second thing is related to something that gary also said this morning in demolishing this about terrorism. these are pretty rare events. and so you can't defend yourself everywhere from a myriad range of possibilities all of which are very rare as occurrences so on one hand our imaginations could come up with many, many different types of threats, any one of those would be rare.

and so really how much should we devote to protecting ourselves from 1,000 things that might happen but each of which should be very rare and might not occur and say 100 years we really have to think realistically about what it is that we're defending ourselves against. and second, we have to think well, that's the second and the third would be the harmful side. how many of our defensive counter-measures actually make us unmore vulnerable and i actually think of a very practical thing every time i go stand in line at airport security. i'm outside the sterile zone, we're all neatly grouped there in a combat little mass and it wouldn't even take an explosive to mow a lot of us down and i assure you i think of it in the security line. and i'll say i'm surprised it hasn't happened and i think a lot of people have said this as well. so sometimes in trying to have an effective counter-measure we have simply exposed ourselves in a new way.

and the second thing has to do -- or another aspect is our perception of the threat. so, for example, the threat that seems most sailient to us now is that kind of internal threat like people from the somali community or other communities, immigrant communities within countries. this is not the way we saw it after 9/11. this perception of the threat is being a mixed internal/external one only came to us in about 2005, 2006, maybe 2004 but particularly with the london bombings of 2005 we began to say, oh, people who are citizens of our own country could be the terrorists among us. and then we began to focus on communities resilience, counter-radicalization. but in 2001 and roughly in 2005, the threat was considered to be external in the mode of the 9/11 attacks. people coming from outside the

country trying to get in. and all of our defenses went to border protection in various ways and a lot of that was airport security. other forms of keeping the threat from coming into the country from the outside. now, where are we going to shift next? we're talking about a pendulum going back and forth. so we went for it. it's external, it's internal. my guess is that the next event, something is bound to happen somewhere. it might shift again of our perception where the threat might be coming from. we need to look ahead. we need to say are we always going to respond reactively to just to the last event and say that's likely to happen here rather than trying to see more of a pattern in what's going on and not just respond to a very salient one-time event. >> i'll touch on what martha was saying because it's actually one of the most important points. of really a long-standing

perspective in the disaster field has been the need to take an all-hazards approach. and so i don't think that means that you have cynicism about terrorism but that you recognize, okay, one approach is to have a detailed -- think about having a detailed plan where every community has had to lay out everything that might possibly happen to it and exactly what it's going to do. the alternative approach is to build the strings within communities that make them able have information and they trust information and that's actually a huge concern. huge concern about not only having information but trusting information and then once they have that information, to be able to use it to make good decisions and that's -- it's kind of easier to say than it is to do. but that's -- that's the resilience approach. the resilience approach is that you build those capacities

rather than to have some externally different externally driven command and control plan for how you would respond to every particular event. >> i'd like to now open it up to the audience. if you'd raise your hands, questions. over here. again, if you'd mind introducing yourself. >> i'm katherine power and i'm a presenter this afternoon and i'm from practical piece. and i can't help but note that gangs, crime, internal terrorism -- there are two responses, two kinds of responses, two schools of how to respond to these three threats to people's safety. and one is the sociallogically

sound approach and the other is the control approach that imagines that we could get all the guns off the street and we could find anybody who might be potentially be radicalized or potentially radicalize people and isolate those threats. so my question is, how do you imagine influencing policy with these ideas any more than the people who say the same things about gangs and crime have been able to influence policy? >> okay. we're all pointing at steven. you're in the hot seat here. [laughter] >> i think that one of the positive developments in that direction has been the community policing approach with respect to gang violence. so the different -- different approach to policing. how can police work in a more

proactive way and a more preventive way and a more cooperative way with communities to solve the basic problems of daily life so that when criminal problems come up, there's a better relationship to approach those. so i'm -- i recognize that as a kind of policy achievement. i don't think the jury's out yet on the total effectiveness of that. but i'm with those people who are trying to apply that to the issue of counterterrorism. i think that makes sense to me. and the question i would ask -- additive to that would be, how could we take that and enhance that? how could we make that even better? how could we dig deeper into the lives of kids, of parents, of communities, rural community policing approach? doing some kind of parenting education so that we get more bang for our buck?

but i think that -- >> we try to forget the bang. >> that's the kind of humor that we're trying to use. [laughter] >> but it also depends, i guess, as a researcher, you know, i believe it depends on research. we have to build the evidence the evidence doesn't exist right now to support such efforts. we have to build the evidence, to document that it's going to work. and to convince policymakers why they should spend their money on this. and that's something else. >> great. we have another question. >> i'm from the national institute of justice. my question is about recovery and resilience. i remember eight years ago, nine years ago talking with folks

from the national peace about the comparative deficit -- or the comparative advantage that israeli communities had in the face of terrorist incidents and the recovery from incidents and the resilience to incidents, i wonder whether -- whether that -- first, whether that's a bare benchmark or for our own capacity for recovery and resilience in comparison to jerusalem and tel-aviv communities -- do we, in fact -- did we, in fact, have a deficit in terms of our ability to recover quickly and to demonstrate resilience? and if that's a meaningful comparison, have -- how do we compare now to either those communities or to other places in the world that might have a better recovery and resilience

capacity? >> but that reminds me before we go on is that if you look at these -- >> comparative questions are fascinating because first of all, they could be studied with the right kinds of studies and the resources in ways that right now are answers to these questions are almost more anecdotal. from reading these studies and reading these studies, what might we conclude about the relative effects? there are those that would say that the israeli resilience has perhaps been overstated. that if you look deeper, you do find that there are many people who have quite a bit of ongoing -- kind of distress about these events and concerns and perceived threat about what is happening. but i would overall agree with you that on the community level,

we have a lot to learn from them, about how they have both conceptualized community resilience and worked to build it. whether or not we could compare ourselves to that standard when it comes to terrorist events is -- it's kind of an intriguing question and i don't know that i can answer exactly because basically i'm sort of glad that we haven't had so much experience that we compare favorably because basically what we see is that the more familiar an event, the better able we are to respond to it. it's why we seldom see a far-reaching social psychological impacts of the events, say, like minor floods, you know, they're kind of like everyday life for us. but where terrorism just really strikes us. so i probably talked in circles to your question without answering it, but i'm stop there

anywhere. >> i'm tim nugent with the fibs and the question about motivation. what motivates somebody to kind of assist law enforcement assists. with our experience with russians is with rampant construction. what would motivate somebody in kind of the communities that we might be concerned about? >> i'm sorry to motivate them to do what again, please? >> to assist intelligence and law enforcement -- >> okay. >> i'd like to just draw attention to this issue that emerges from research. you know, you have to look at the experience, prior experience, of some of these immigrant and refugee communities with the state that they come from, with men in uniform, with men who carry

guns. there's a lot of distrust. and they have to overcome that in order -- think of all the distrust they have to overcome in order to come and feel comfortable talking with law enforcement. what we also hear sometimes in these communities -- the communities where they have come from a totalitarian state. is that there's a belief also in the omnipotence of law enforcement in the state, like you should have known what was going on. and if you don't really know what's going on and you couldn't stop it, then what good are you so why should we bother talking to you? these are really deeply ingrained attitudes. i think like in minnesota, the fbi through town hall meetings has done -- gone a long ways towards trying to build bridges, build common understandings, overcome distrust and all that stuff. but this is, you know, a long project that has to be continued

and deepened and extended to other communities. and, you know, back to your question in a way, these things could be studied. they could be studied how town hall meetings or what kind of meetings makes what kinds of difference in attitudes and in the effectiveness and all that kind of stuff and we need that kind of evidence to build a knowledge base and also to teach us how to do it better. >> i'm newly arrived at the american red cross. i was with the science and technology director at dhs until just a couple weeks ago. i was asked by the red cross to start a new organization and do a startup group on the community resilience and i have a motivation question that sort of trends from the belief towards

action issues that were raised in the radicalization group earlier. so the question is this, if we know something about radicalization and the radicalization of groups and individuals, towards behaviors that have negative consequences for societies, many of which deal with the use of violence, have we learned anything out of that study that might be able to enable us to radicalize groups and individuals to do altruistic behavior? and i'm obviously interested in this as a member of red cross about how do we get individuals to think positively about the actions they can take to reform late their societies, to have an impact on their local communities, to build a resilience at the local level rather than think they have to take radical action that is negative in consequences, take up arms or whatever those other sides of that darker human behavioral motivation might be. can we translate what we know about what we've learned over the last 10 years of looking at

this problem from that perspective into how we might use it to build a stronger community and a stronger nation in the long run? >> i think we all might have something to say about this from slightly different perspectives. i mean, to answer your question, i'm not sure that's the direction i would go to get there because there's a long-standing body of research on prosocial behavior and collective action that i think directly applies. and it's one of the key issues we face in this field. i mean, at first people have to be convinced that the problem matters. and if they think it matters, then they have to be convinced that they actually have the ability to do something about it. and both of those are big problems in our area. one of the, i guess, first experiences i had when i started looking at community resilience was actually trying to get into neighborhoods to just talk with neighborhood people, you know, ordinary every day people about this problem. and this is when i was still in

atlanta. and most of them frequently kind of looked at us we were nuts. they were outlining all the various problems they were trying to deal with and say we don't care about terrorism, you know, come on? and it's realistic so how do we make that matter without scaring them? you know, without going to that scary place that we don't want to take people? and then even when you get there, you have to build that sense of efficacy and there's -- i think lots of ways we know how to build both individual and the efficacy that say there's a lot more research to be done on that. >> well, i would say, yes, there's been a lot of work on this in the social literature in what we were saying in the earlier panel and attitudes and mobilizing people to go do something and can we take any

lessons on adversaries and how you get people to mobilized to act and the advantage we have is that we're not asking them to go out and commit acts of violence. it's actually a whole lot easier to act in a prosocial way. but still it's extremely difficult and there's volumes of data out there about how you get individuals mobilized to go out and act for any cause. >> one more quick question and then i think we'll go. in the very back there. >> hello, my name is sarah chu and i'm a graduate assistant with s.t.a.r.t. and i have a brief question for dr. norris. you say everybody has a breaking point and i think that's correct. how do you respond to the possibility that a terrorist event could be related to ptsd on the part of the terrorist

actor? >> i don't know how to answer that exactly and i'm not really sure i can. in general, i can tell you that there has been some interesting research that i hope i don't -- it's always dangerous to cite specific research because i always get it mixed. but steven has been looking at the relationship between having experienced terrorism and developing hatred basically that could then, you know, perpetuate the kind of social and interpersonal violence and i think kind of broadly we see that there are relationships between, you know, trauma and aggression and so forth. beyond that, i don't have -- i'm sorry. i keep doing that. i don't have anything in particular to share on that but perhaps some of the people who

are doing this very direct one-on-one research with terrorists -- it might be interesting to collaborate and to see if we can understand sort of, i guess, mental health and well-being, you know, in their background. on the whole, i doubt if that's a big -- >> as we conclude, i would like to go to each panelist and ask questions, for one minute what you think all the burning issues we need to cover in responding to preparing for terrorism in the next five years. if you have to say this is what government, the community the society should focus on. we'll start with martha. >> well, since most of my interest is in international security and foreign policy, i'm going to be very interested to see what the effect will be of our new -- relatively new counterterrorism policy. be it special forces drones, largely covert intervention against terrorism. at the same time that we draw apparently out of iraq and draw

down in afghanistan, what affect is this going to have on al-qaeda. will it further weaken al-qaeda? will it revive al-qaeda? and what will happen in that dimension because i do think that the motivation behind the threat to the united states lies outside the country rather than within the country. >> thank you. i think that -- i'll make three points on this. one is i think that this focus on resilience on community and family resilience -- let's not forget families, has enormous promise and it's taken us 10 years to get here, but it's going to take a lot of work and many more years to deliver on that promise. so let's commit to doing that. how can we -- the one challenge is how can we build on existing knowledge? there's a huge existing body of

knowledge and experience and practical knowledge out there from dealing with community violence, other kinds of community violence, hiv, drugs, childhood maltreatment. let's bring together, you know, an expert panel of those prevention researchers with counterterrorism researchers. let's come up with a set of priorities and an agenda and move forward with that. i like what fran said earlier about that pillar of community resilience that's focused on a trusted source of information. as i said, in the communities where i am, people would say things like lack of resources, but then none of them seem to have the same story about what's going on. they don't have that expansive trusted source of information. why can't we build that for these communities? that role of government as communicator is something that could be done. and here i think there's some

good models in the military, the u.s. military has recently developed programs to promote the resilience of the military, including families, which include online components. why not do something like that. so i'll stop there. >> i would almost echo what stevan just said. i think our burning questions have a lot to do with knowing what to do and how to do it which actually also goes back to the question you were asking us. you know, how do we make communities stronger? how do we engage people in these activities? you know, how do we help people recover who don't recover on their own? all these things we know a little bit about, but we don't know enough about. and it's extremely difficult. this is an area of research which is just extremely

difficult to do by the standards that most of us, you know, hold for valid science because it involves whole communities. and it's difficult to control in ways that we think should be controlled and it's very expensive. if we think it's important, is there, in fact, the public commitment to really do prevention research, which is also always suffered behind things. >> thank you very much. i'd just like to leave everybody with a parting thought, while we have to calibrate our sponsors we have to make sure whatever successes we've had encountering terrorism, it doesn't make us complacent and there's a lot of work to do. i'll have a quote who said no one supposed evolution will every exempt us from our struggles. you forget the devil with a chuckle that i have been evolving, too. and so hopefully we'll remember that. so i'd like to -- please join