would have even worse repercussions for mitt romney is the fact that he leads new hampshire essentially a weakened candidate with essential rationale for his candidacy unraveling before our eyes. his campaign has headquarters in manchester, now has a for lease signed on the door. president obama's campaign is staying put firmly rooted in new hampshire while the republican candidates have been dishing out to the republican nomination obama campaign staff and volunteers and some of them are here in this room over there on the other side of the room and they have been focused on weighing the groundwork for victory in november. making sure president obama has a resources and grass-roots support to win in new hampshire by organizing neighborhood by neighborhood and block by block. ..

>> we had three open up till yesterday, for opened yesterday. we have 20 paid staff. we have had 500 meetings, 3211 meetings, tens of thousands of phone calls. we have hit the ground running. leading up to today, and from now until november. i only groundwork in new hampshire is part of a broader national effort to build the largest most dynamic grassroots presidential campaign in the history of american politics. we are running the campaign from the ground up, door-to-door in key states across the country.

our staff and our volunteers are connecting with real americans every single day and talking to them about the need for all the change we been able to deliver together under the president's leadership and with their support. we know what that change looks like. it change like tapping the affordable air act or restore health care as a basic cornerstone of middle-class security in america. and guarantee that insurance companies cannot drop your deny you coverage because you have a preexisting condition. someone, who lives with the existing condition, like the 45% of americans who live with a preexisting condition every single day, i can't tell you the appreciation and the value that that has brought to my life. knowing that on the day i was diagnosed i was one job loss away from being uninsured or uninsurable. and that problem was solved for me by president obama because that can't happen to me anymore. nor to the millions of women who face that fear every single day.

that's incredibly important. that's what the role of government is for. government can make sure that the private sector, the private sector can help give opportunities for health security to all americans, and following through on the president's promise like when he promised to end the war in iraq and bring home all of our servicemen and women who were there which just happened a few weeks ago. it's ensuring that wall street plays by the same rules as main street and ensure that millions of american families have consumer protection watchdog looking out for them and fighting back against predatory behavior in the financial sector. it's wiping to discriminate don't ask, don't tell policy off the books so that all americans can serve the country they love and not lie about who they are. it's breaking our dependency on middle east oil, nearly doubling fuel efficiency standards under president obama and saving americans money at the pump. it's making the bold decision to rescue the american auto industry would you save more than one american jobs.

mitt romney in any one of the republican candidates had their way, they would've simply let let detroit go bankrupt. we have had for the first time since 2004, we now have all three american automobile manufacturers operating at a profit. that is a big deal and it's really important. it's, if left to the republican candidates we wouldn't have had an american automobile industry to talk about or to be proud of. that's what changes look like with president obama in the white house. we know that the twin to election will be about which candidates can get our economy back on track and restore the securities that so many working and middle-class families have seen the road over the past two decades. it's going to be an incredibly stark and dramatic contrast. that's why our campaign is focused on the clear choice at the american people will face in november. whether we'll continue to move forward as a nation or if we will return to the same failed policies of the past that nearly caused a second great depression. the republican candidates for

president have laid out the economic vision, and it's one that looks backwards. we've seen them argue amongst themselves on the campaign trail over which of them can repeal wall street reform fast enough, or who is the most committed to ending medicare as we know it. we see continued support by the gop to do with policies that would gut social security to slash funding for education and extend more giveaways for the wealthiest americans and big corporations while asking working and middle-class families to foot the bill. under president obama's leadership we have made critical progress on the road to economic recovery. we have increase manufacturing job growth for the second straight year. the most since 1987. prior to the obama administration, the last year the country saw a manufacturing job growth was in 1997. the president has been fighting for the middle-class and those still struggling to make it to the middle class since day one of his presidency. 95% of americans have received a tax break under president obama

and his cut taxes to small businesses 17 different times. just last month as republicans in congress threat to let the payroll tax for the middle-class expire and cost taxes to go up on 169 hard-working americans, the president said enough. enough with the partisan games and enough with trying to score a political point at the expense of working and middle-class families across this country. president obama stared down congressional republicans, and he won. as a result, millions of folks who are still struggle to make ends meet didn't see their taxes go up this month. it's clear that with 22 straight months a private sector job growth, we are beginning to turn the corner. we are making slow but steady progress. but as the president has been added to the american people, we can and we must do more. president obama's message are working folks in new hampshire and across the country is that we must continue to rebuild and work toward rebuilding our economy i making sure the hard taken in windows their fair

share and that responsibility is rewarded so that america's working families can reclaim the security that they lost. that's the president's vision for keeping america moving forward, and continuing on the path of growth and progress. and over the course of the next 10 months, this is the message that we will be amplified to voters across the country. the american people have a serious choice to make in november. mistakes -- the stakes are very high. as a mom with three beautiful young children who are might not one party, i know that i will be rolling up my sleeves and working so hard to make sure that i can do my best to of american voters choose president obama and send him back to the white house. because if they don't, that will reverberate on our children, on my children, for decades. the result of the wrong decision will impact their lives, and as their mom there is no one that i'm going to more fiercely protect and my kids and the kids

of my constituents. i know you feel the same way. and our campaign will be working tirelessly to make sure that voters know that if they choose to reelect president obama to a second term, the will continue to have a true advocate in the white house who will stop at nothing to it every single american the chance to go as far as the hard work and dedication will take them. that's how we will place our trail to victory and send a present back to the white house. thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to speak to you this morning. and thank you for this tradition. it's very, very important. thank you. [applause] [applause] be happy to take any questions. only easy once though. all the softballs. jump to the front of the line. >> i was looking at some of the

exit polls last night where mitt romney, where he was week was first-time voters and young voters, and also some -- how to go about getting those voters over to president obama? >> younger voters, especially, are deeply concerned about making sure that they embark on the next page of their life. these are our young people are at the beginning of their adulthood. they know that they need to be able to make sure that higher education is affordable for them, that they're not going to be drowning in the death of their student loans for their lifetime. and that they have an opportunity to get a good job to pay a decent wage after the education and experience. and i think making sure that they know that president obama has gone to bat for them, making sure that we increase the amount of a pell grant that is of able to them, and make pell grants available to so many more young people, to make the dream of an

affordable higher education possible for them. making sure that they know that he is gone to bat to ensure that we can create good jobs for middle-class and working families, and that our tax policy is designed to help people who are not just already doing well. i mean, there's nothing wrong with doing well. it certainly is a goal that we all aspire to. and we want and america for everybody to do well, but we shouldn't have our tax policy, we shouldn't have our government's policy exclusively focused on helping people who are already doing well do better. in america, we should target our tax policy, we should target policy in america toward people who want to be lifted up, who just need a little bit of assistance. we need to fight hard like president obama has been for the middle-class and working families, and that's why he

passed legislation that could 17 different tax cuts in place for small business owners and gave 95% of americans a tax break. what the republicans have been fighting for is to extend the tax breaks were passed in 2001 and to thus a three under president bush unpaid for that exploded the deficit for the wealthiest most fortunate of americans, millionaires and billionaires, to extend those. that's what they've been fighting for. it's a dramatic contrast and i think it will be a clear choice. >> yes, all the way in the back. [inaudible] i think it's a lack of civility. what can be done to bring that faith back? >> well, as someone who spent 19 years as a member of a legislative body, i really agree with you, that we need to make sure that we tone things down there particularly in light of

the tucson tragedy from a year ago where my very good friend, gabby giffords, who is doing really well by the way, and i know everybody -- [applause] tremendous progress. but the discourse in america, the discourse in congress in particular to answer your question, very specifically, has really changed. and i'll tell you, i hesitate to place the blame, but i have noticed it takes a very precipitous turn towards edginess and a lack of civility with the growth of the tea party movement. after the 2010 election when you have a tea party is not a whole lot of their supporters to the united states house of representatives, and yet town hall meetings that they tried to take over and you saw some other conduct at the town hall meetings, you know come in the time that i've been in my state

legislature and in congress i've never seen a time that was more divisive, or where discourse was less civil. it's one thing, i've always had people come to my townhall meetings, for example, and say that they don't agree with the on something. and that's fine. and you know, that's what those town hall meetings are about, they are for civil discourse and give-and-take. and i learned something when i hear from a constituent who doesn't share my view, and hopefully they do also because we are listing to each other and there's a back and forth. with the tea party has done is they have taken it to a different level, and so when they come and disagree with you, you're not just wrong. you are the enemy. i mean, that's really a place that politics in america shouldn't go. when they disagree with you on an issue, you're not just wrong, you're a liar. rather than just have a difference of opinion, accusations like that get hurled, and it brings the entire

discourse down to a level that i think none of us want to see remain there. i have done my part but i want to that president obama, as you have seen, and he has tried so hard to get the republicans to work with him, to bring them to the table, to try to get them to compromise and find common ground, but when you have someone like mitch mcconnell for example, the minority leader of the night state senate, said at the outset of this congress that his number one goal is not turning the economy around, not creating jobs, but to defeat barack obama. well then, how are we going to reach compromise if that's the goal that drives them in all their decisions? because that's it. we won't. because if that is their golden anything that they do to compromise, gives president obama a win, a success, and makes it less likely in their mind that they would begin but,

unfortunately, i think what has driven the republicans in congress is their interest in only one job, barack obama. when democrats have been fighting for america's jobs. and that's the difference. that's going to be the choice that people have to make. [applause] >> thank you for your question. yes? >> my home state of south carolina and i lived there my entire life. one of the things that a lot of people don't know, a large percentage of people who voted for president obama -- [inaudible] we are socially conservative, liberals. [laughter] what we have noted is a special on the republican side, a number of candidates have come off with the intention of those in south

carolina are looking for a handout, looking for certain kinds of what reagan put out in his welfare plan. what i would like to see the president to come and i would ask, does he have a particular message or a particular tone he can send -- [inaudible] >> he absolutely does. i think he has demonstrated that for the last three years since he became president. remember, when president obama took office at the beginning, at the beginning of 2009, he inherited the largest set of problems probably since fdr, at once, of any president.

i think, the economy, because of republican policies that brought us to economic disaster was declining, was dropping like a rock. we were bleeding seven and 50,000 jobs a month when he took office, a month. when we had that number so often that we end up glossing over it, and treat it like it is something so for me, i don't ever want to be that familiar with that statistic ever again. and we no longer have to because now you fast forward three years later and we have had under president obama's leadership 22 straight months of job growth in the private sector. we have created nearly 3 million jobs, and that's because of his policy. because he came in and pass the recovery act, which injected badly needed resources into our economy, made sure that we arrested the decline. we stayed or created more than 2 million jobs and had an opportunity start to begin to turn things around.

then he stared down, you know, in the face of a politically unpopular t.a.r.p. program. he made sure that we rescue the american automobile industry. while mitt romney and the rest of the republicans said no, let's let detroit go bankrupt, let's not think about the 1.4 million jobs that are in the pipeline for the american automobile industry, the 20,000 jobs that are related to the automobile industry here in new hampshire, let's let them go bankrupt. that's mitt romney's expatriate i guess you can't blame him. he was the ceo, that's what he did, bankrupting companies and assaulting them and let the chips fall where they may wear his mo. for president obama didn't do that. and we now have a profitable american automobile industry, and i can't industry that would all be proud. he made sure that when we passed tax breaks that they were not just tax breaks for the wealthy. that we didn't just focus on trickle-down economics which had been disproven countless times.

we focus our taxcutting policy on the middle class go on working families, the payroll tax cut extension and making sure that small business owners had that tax break, that could give them an opportunity to make investments in their capital needs for the business, and create jobs and add to the people who worked with them. so 22 straight months of private sector job growth, now we've begun to turn things around. that's a dramatic contrast between where we were and where we are now, and we know that we will have a choice in november between moving in the direction the president obama has been taking us, and having a policy focused on making sure that everybody in america, and not just the wealthy, have an opportunity to be successful. and i think in south carolina come in new hampshire, that message and that agenda resonates with everyone. and i'll tell you, i represent a

pretty wealthy district, a district that is middle to upper middle class. and i had people tell me all the time, debbie, you know, if i, if my tax rate changes i probably won't have to sell my second home. if my tax rate changes, debbie, i probably won't have to dine out at nice restaurants fewer times than i already do. but i know what will happen, debbie, if we make sure that our tax policy in america is balanced and that everybody is paying their fair share. we will have the best education system in the world, and make sure that our kids can gradually prepared for the path that they choose in life and be able to compete globally which is where we are competing now. i know that we are going to make sure that our business community is the most competitive globally, because we'll have people who have been able to make sure that the tax policy in the united states allows them to create jobs, allows them to beef

up their infrastructure, and allows them, allows us as americans to outcompete and out-innovate, and now build the rest of the world. that's president obama's goal and the direction is taking us. i don't know about you but i don't want to go back to the failed republican policy of the past. thanks. [applause] >> yes? >> could you tell us what you see from new hampshire, -- [inaudible] a remarkable difference in the economic climate of the two places. it seems like washington, d.c. has really thrived over the last four years of obama administration, but the rest of the country is still struggling, economically. there's a lot of sections in the country where the federal dollars just don't seem to make it very far beyond the beltway.

is the obama administration over of the disconnect between, you know, federal dollars that don't make it beyond the washington metropolitan area and the struggle for the rest of the country? >> well, i would have to differ with you because i've driven down 89 and 93 plenty of times, and seen those big signs that say, this road project, thanks to the american recovery and reinvestment act, and the opportunity to widen those roads into the kinds of renovation sort nations infrastructure are the direct results of the recovery act and the investment that president obama was bold enough to make to jump start this economy and start to get things turned around and take us from instead of bleeding jobs, adding jobs. i mean, i have seen personally the investment and the resources that have been generated by president obama's leadership directly benefiting folks in new hampshire. ask the teachers were able to remain on the job and didn't have to get laid off, or the

first responders here have benefited from that. or the small business owners who benefited from the tax breaks that president obama insisted on that should and just only go to corporations, and the businesses that were already doing quite well. so i would have to differ with you that the policies decision and the resources that president obama has said we know we need to get this economy turned around, have not reached concord or nashua or newberry. so anyway, thank you so much for the opportunity to be here. thank you for your commitment. on to victory. [applause] it on half of the thatcher and the new england council of what you, you for coming. we have a wonderful fleece vest coming to you.

come back for the primary thank you very much. >> thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

>> live coverage here on c-span2 will continue at 10 a.m. issue. former senator sam nunn and other top officials with the nuclear threat initiative talked about the launch of the groups country by country index of nuclear better safety including ranking. live coverage begins at 10 a.m. eastern. all the republican presidential candidates have moved on to south carolina after mitt romney's win in new hampshire last night. at this hour newt gingrich is at a town hall meeting. rick perry is on a campaign event in lexington. later ron paul will be in west columbia. t. spence road to the white house political coverage will continue in south carolina. the primary is in a week and a half with florida's primary 10 days later. you can follow the road to the white house at our website, c-span.org campaign 2012. cev of the candidate appearances and join the conversation on facebook and twitter. and now former attorney general

alberto gonzales on what it's like to advise the president if he's the only lawyer in u.s. history to serve as both white house counsel and attorney general. mr. gonzalez recently spoke about his experiences at the bush white house, the judicial confirmation process and his thoughts on some current legal issues to a luncheon hosted by the birmingham, alabama, federalist society. this event is about 45 minutes. >> today, opera themselves will be speaking to us about all manner of topics but i think the general umbrella here is advising the president, and i hope he comes loaded for bear. i know he will be happy to answer questions afterwards. thank you very much. judge gonzalez, thank you so much. [applause] thank you, and good afternoon. i'm often asked what's it like?

what's it like to go to work everyday in the white house? what's it like to walk into the oval office and give the president of united states advice on terrorism policy? what's it like to be in the situation room in 2003 and witness the president give general tommy franks the orders commence operation iraqi freedom? what's it like to be on the south lawn on the evening of september 11, 2001, and greet the president when marine one plans on that historic day? what's it like? you know, for a lawyer, for an american citizen, for the son of a poor construction worker, it's a privilege, it's a duty, it's a source of pride and excitement. people come from all over the world to see the white house,

the most recognizable 18 acres in the world. and the first time they step into the west wing. it takes your breath away because history is made there every day. i served during a notable period in our nation's history. following the 9/11 attacks, the lawyers worked side-by-side with policymakers in washington, and we tried our best to defend this country in a manner consistent with the constitution. advising the president of the united states is more difficult than advising a normal client. resident bush looked to me for legal advice but i wasn't his lawyer. i represent the white house and the office of the presidency, not the individual. for example, in a criminal investigation, president bush had to hire private counsel because i could not represent him in his personal capacity. if the president gave the

evidence relating to a crime or criminal investigation, i would be required to report it to the department of justice. the president and i are morning people and we did our best work in quiet conversations early in the morning in the oval office. before many of the other people in the white house had come to work, before the president's scheduled meetings for the day. we spoke often about the scope of his commander-in-chief power at a time of war. exercising executive power in a system of checks and balances fuels a constant struggle between executive, legislative and judicial branches of our government to define the limits of the president's constitutional authority at a time of armed conflict. and i use the term limit in tension because i want to emphasize that even at time of war in a time of crisis, there are legal and constitutional constraints on the president that has to be respected and has to be defended.

determining the limits, that is a subject of great debate today. most often it's in the political arena and not in the courts but in reality i have observed that the limits of the president's authority is often a function of its political popularity, and his courage to do what he believes is necessary, irrespective of public opinion. however we choose to define these limits i think boundaries are desirable, even necessary in our system of government. it's true that american sleep easier when they believe they are safer because of the actions of the president, but even more important to americans knowing that the presidential action that keeps them safe is within the limits of the constitution. the measures taken in response to 9/11 attacks controversial? yes. was a tough? they had to be. did they save american lives? without question. which is why many of those

policies continue today under the current administration. the world has changed so much in just the past 10 years. now more than ever americans yearn for leadership. we want men and women who value courage and commitment over popularity, who are focused -- who are not focused on the next election, rather the next generation. leaders who say this is who i am and this is where i stand. in less than a year americans will choose the next occupant in the white house for the next four years. and during the 2008 presidential campaign, we heard a lot about the promise for change. in truth, every election represents an opportunity for change, and the beginning, the next chapter in the american story. a prominent newspaper in d.c. correctly acknowledged that talking about change is not new. people talk about change even before there was an america. this is why the framers of the constitution came to this land.

but we continue to talk about change, to want change. why is that? it is because our nature as americans is to strive for something more, for ourselves and for those who we love. every time i cast a vote, it is a reflection of hope. an act which is making my dreams come true. a poor single mom, an unemployed father to get his job back at the factory, a college student votes for her future. our lives are about these kind of choices. and the person we choose to work in the oval office will have to work with congress to resolve a staggering array of challenges. how do we stop iran from becoming a nuclear power? what should we do to get more americans back to work? how do we sustain the hard-fought gains in afghanistan

and iraq, and continue the momentum of the arab spring? how will we resolve our deficit problem? what role should we played in the with europe's debt crisis? will we as a country of immigrants find the courage to pass comprehensive federal immigration legislation that sustains our economy, and complement our national secure to objective? when and how will our military be deployed and used around the world? the president will also to make another set of important decisions that gets far too little attention from the public and media, the appointment of federal judges. many of the decisions i just spoke of, when they are ultimately made, are going to be challenged in our courts. and whether you like it or not, the judiciary will have its say of where the elected branches can move forward with policy. i'm reminded of a dinner speech i gave to a very, very conservative group in d.c.

shortly after i think white house counsel. i was just this guy from texas. they did know i was. you know, here i was from austin, and when discussing the u.s. supreme court i told that audience that the role of the courts were to interpret the constitution, and the judges tell us what the constitution requires and allows. well, i was booed. it was a vicious. and i went back to the white house and i was puzzled over the reaction. evidently the audio stand understand that while i believe in the constitution means what it says, and that to go outside the words and try to discern involvement of societal norms and international trends, places too much power in the hands of unelected, unaccountable judges, i also know, and i knew back then, the reality that judges can and do affect policy in the way that they decide cases. this is why the presidential

elections are consequential. other than singing young men and women into battle, no decision by president is more important than who he or she in the future places on the u.s. supreme court. they represent the president's most lasting legacy. in april 2005 i invited d.c. circuit judge don roberts to my office on the fifth floor of the department of justice to argue a case. i've been attorney general for 15 months but it was early evening and jed roberts and i sat down alone in my office, and bush had been reelected a few months earlier, and we anticipated, finally, after four years in office, the president would get the opportunity to appoint a justice to the u.s. supreme court. judge roberts was on our so-called short list, developed after multiple conversations that i had with the president. and as white house counsel i fed him and recommended to the present, and 2001 to much like i

recommend a judge prior to the president. however, before i could become to recommending judge roberts for a lifetime appointment on the court, i wanted to question him again. about his ideology and judicial philosophy. and we talked about an hour. we explored his use on stare decisis and the beta when it would be appropriate for a judge to override resident. we discuss whether and how personal views apply to the judge should play a role in judging. i asked him to explain how he would interpret the constitution and laws passed by congress can have to the constitution allocate power between the three branches. we debated the appropriate ways that a judge should give to legislative history in signing statements. and whether it was ever appropriate to consider decisions by foreign courts. i was impressed with john's intellect and quiet confidence and easy-going manner. attributes that i knew would serve him well in tough confirmation hearings and months

later i was proud to stand before the justices of the supreme court in that majestic courtroom, and with a presidential commission as our nation's new chief justice of the united states. each president places a different emphasis on judicial appointments, and every white house approaches these nominations in their own way. during the presidential transition in 2000, president-elect bush and i agree on the importance of judicial important. this is important stuff for our country. it was important for president bush, and we agreed that recommendation on district and appellate court judges would be made by the white house, judicial reflection to me which i chaired with white house counsel. but the supreme court recommendation would be made by a smaller group that included the vice president, chief of staff, a senior advisor, karl rove, and the attorney general. and in making my recommendations let me tell you what i looked at

when i made recommendations for john roberts or sampling of to go on the supreme court. first i looked at qualifications, was this a person of professional excellence and high achievement? was this person capable of handling the job by virtue of their education, skills and experience? how would the nominee be rated by the bar association? is this someone that i would be proud to have standing by the president at a rose garden or east room announcement? second, i look at character, courage and discipline. does this person have the character to stand up to the unimaginable scrutiny of the nomination process, and the difficult questioning any confirmation hearing? does he or she had the courage to do the right thing in applying the law no matter how unpopular or contrary to the nominee's personal biases or does the nominee have the discipline to apply a consistent set of principles in deciding cases over a period of 10, 20,

30 years, and not be seduced by the sovereign called him the legal elites in bar and academia? third, i looked at and from ability. did we have 50 votes? if the president's party controls the senate? who was the senate judiciary chairman? was the president trying to fill a seat considered a swing vote? for example, was justice o connor or kennedy seat when appointed by conservative or liberal president might tip the balance of the court? was this a nominee who executive branch experience, and was the author of executive branch memos? with this nomination produce an institutional fight between the senate and the white house over these documents? and was the president strong enough to win this fight? and was this nominee worth the fight? of course i look at him to tangibles. president bush cared about gender and racial diversity in

our courts. for example, he wanted to fill the o. con a vacancy in 2005 with a woman. that's the harriet miers nomination. i look a summit old enough to have the wisdom and maturity that comes through life experiences but young enough to be on the court for 30 to 40 years and impact jurisprudence of this country. and for the same reason of longevity. i took into consideration the health of the nominee. fifth, and this is most important, although i am talking about it last, was the judicial philosophy of the potential nominee. my views about judicial philosophy are a matter of public record. judges should apply the law, not impose their own policy preferences. when courts apply and active philosophy that affects the law to suit their policy preferences, they reduce the credibility of the authority of the judiciary. in so doing they undermined the rule of law that strengthens our

democracy. but in contrast, a judge humbly understands the role of the court and our system of government decide cases based upon totally neutral principles. he or she generally differs the judgment of the political branches, and respects precedent, the collective wisdom of those who have gone before. in so doing, that judge strengthens respect judiciary, uphold the rule of law, and permits the people through their elected representatives to make choices about the issues of the day. whether by appointment or by election, it's not easy to anticipate how a person will decide cases once they are a judge. as white house counsel i interviewed hundreds of men and women interested in serving on the federal bench, including judges beaudry, kugler, foster and others in november when i became attorney general, my interest in judiciary became

more personal because it was my lawyers making the arguments in the court and defending the law passed by congress. in summary, what we look for a, the general philosophy was restrained in her judges. and i played a judge who understand the importance of these principles is going to take the right approach in every case. this was the type of judge i tried to be, and i tried to the president appointed i believe most of you here in this room agree this is a type of judge we need in our judiciary. let me close by saying a few thoughts and then i'm happy to take some questions. hypertalk about the many challenges this country faces. but let's remember that no matter how bad we think things are in our lives, in our business, no matter how frustrated we become in our elected officials, america still the greatest country on the face of the earth. and i fear that too many of us forget a privileged we are just to be citizens of the united

states. as attorney general had the opportunity to visit many countries, and i know there are many great things beyond our shores. but if i had to choose one country as my home i would choose a country that provides all of its people with opportunity. i would choose a country whose people are generous and strong, willing to sacrifice to preserve freedom at home and abroad. i would choose the united states. do we have problems your? i just told you many of them that exist. but name a country that doesn't have their own set of problems. do we have poverty? now, we do. button in the country that provides more around the world that feeds the hungry. do we have racism your? unfortunately yes. i'd name a country more tolerant to cultures and religion. name one country who has sacrificed more of its sons and daughters to protect others and to preserve freedom. this past thursday i spoke a

different themselves lost family members in afghanistan and iraq. fathers spoke in tears about their sons as children, and the way they died as heroes. america remains the beacon of democracy, for freedom and safety. i am the son of a mexican carper guncotton. are here by father did not go this will be on the second grade and yet i became the attorney general of the tiny. we live in a country where dreams do come true. and for that reason, and many others, america is worth fighting for, and she is worth dying for. noted physicist albert einstein once said there only two ways to live your life. one is as if though nothing is america, the other is as if everything is a miracle. i choose the latter. my mother and father networking in a west texas you as young migrant workers. i look back on the days when i was a boy and i played in the field next to the lot where my father and uncle built a small two-bedroom house that i grew up

in with my seven brothers and sisters. we have no hot running water the entire time i visit him, no telephone until i was a junior in high school. my mother would wake me up before dawn so i could eat breakfast of eggs with my father, as she prepared a modest lunch of dean's for him and place in a brown lunch that. i guess a picture my father walking down the street to catch a ride because we couldn't afford a car. i would run outside and wave goodbye. several years ago when i was working in the white house, my mother came to visit me in washington and we toured the monuments and museums like all the other tourists at but i also took her to the oval office. this shy little woman about four feet nothing, i wanted to take her in and see the president in the oval office. i've wanted to show her what i had accomplished because of her sacrifices and the sacrifices of my father. and it -- and at dawn on the last ever visit shows up making

breakfast for me. only i wasn't going to construction site where a hardheaded i had my suit on and i was reporting to work at the white house to advise the president of the united states. think of the wonder that filled her heart. she never dreamed of this miracle that i would take her from the cotton fields to the oval office. you have honored me by your invitation to be with you today. i believe in god -- god's goodness that everyday i see his grace in my life, and in my country. in your work and in your home i pray that god shows you the miracle that he has provided. may he bless this community and may he continue to place again -- may he continue to bless the united states of america. thank you very much. [applause] >> as i said, if there are questions then please feel free to ask them. c-span has asked us if you will, please walked to the microphone

for your question so it would be picked up. >> are you -- [inaudible] been absolutely. but earlier this year, with respect -- [inaudible] the administration would continue to enforce the law but would no longer defended. could you comment on the executive branch ability to engage constitutional interpretation and ultimately decide to enforce laws or not enforce laws? not as concerned with the underlying policy as -- [inaudible] we will no longer defended this law and constitutional concerns about its? >> of course every administration takes position that they have the authority to

make that decision. we begin with the presumption that the laws passed by congress are, in fact, constitutional. if there's a basis which that law can be given a, then the department of justice will defend that law. at the end of the day, let's be candid, we have to realize that while the attorney general runs the department of justice and makes most of these decisions in consultation with the solicitor general, he reports to the president of the united states. and the tramp eight -- and the president of the deny state takes a few on it. i have to disagree on some issue with general holder. i always remind myself he works for president obama. and oftentimes the decisions that are reflected, are made at a particular department, reflects the decisions, the wishes of the president of the united states. and that's just the way it is.

>> your comments about judicial philosophy concerning certainly the federal society, how do you -- [inaudible] the role of the judiciary any constitute a republican, do you think law schools are promoting, correct understanding of the role of the judiciary, or do you speak i don't know whether or not i'm qualified to say categorically that law schools have been a good job, not in a good job. in terms of presenting both sides. i suspect depending on, by

professor, you have differences in terms of what students are taught. quite frankly i think it's important for students to be exposed to both sides, both sides of the argument, to understand. what i talk to students about, about my experience india with the supreme court, for example, i tell them it's not enough to be right on the law. you may have the best argument but can you count up to five votes from the accord? because you are paid by a client to win the case in court, and you can represent to the client that you've got the best legal argument. the present support you. but unless you can count to five votes, you know, that's what the client will care most about. ultimately, is winning that case. of course, one of the hardest things for me as counsel to the president, walking into the oval office and telling the president of the nice days, mr. president, we didn't do well, the court has disagreed. that's hard to do because what

the client expects is to win those cases. in the supreme court. i think that more needed to be done in terms of education. i had a professor asked me just the other day, do you think it is still relevant today to teach constitutional law, talk about original intent of the and constitution? were just astounded by that question. unit, to me that was an alarming signal about the state of legal education in this country. of course, it's important. absolutely it's important. but i emphasize, i wouldn't stop there. to me, go to the original founders intent and look at the words of the constitution, but you have to understand that there are many people in the judiciary who don't agree with that philosophy. and if you're a lawyer, presenting cases before a court you need to understand the. you need to understand, tried to get an understanding and feel

about what does this judge we believe in, how does this judge approach cases? because that's going to make a big difference in your success or failure arguing before the supreme court. >> you mentioned one of the considerations, determine whether this person -- [inaudible] raided by the different associations. i wonder if you could comment on that a bit more. that's a bit of a controversial point. what goes into the race and what are your views? >> personally, i had a great deal suspicion about ratings by american bar association and other bar association. but as counsel to the president wanted things i would about was could i get this certain person confirmed?

the rating of the aba would be important if it's positive, that could mean all the difference in the world. so that's, when i say that i look at that, i try to anticipate where the aba would rate someone. it's because for some senators it could mean the difference in a positive or negative vote. but i do have some concerns about the ratings of the american bar association, and for that reason, that i came and what year it was, 2002, 2003, we made the decision that would not have the aba involved in rating someone before the nomination process, which was a change of long-standing practice. but we have to be realistic. again, in terms again so if confirmed to the federal bench, that rating by the aba and other bar association's could make a big difference and that's why we look at whether or not, how is the aba going to rate this person. it would necessarily how i felt about that person or whether or not i felt that person should or should that be a judge, but

would it make a difference in the confirmation somewhat that might be viewed as controversial. >> you mentioned that passing them what happened on 9/11, can you sort of fill in holes for us on what really happened behind the scenes in the white house that day, and what happened in the immediate aftermath in terms of your participation and decisions you are faced with making and the kind of advice you are having to get to the present? >> we all have a story from that day. everyone knows what they're doing on 9/11. i flew in from dulles about 7:30 a.m. this was the same airport the terrorists have hijacked american 77 that crashed into the pentagon. and i often wondered, did my path crossed with any of the terrorist that morning because they were in the terminal that

morning at dulles. but i land in norfolk, virginia, because i was giving a speech to government ethics group, and is about 9:00 and i got to the hotel, the white house had contacted me. the first tower had been hit. didn't know what to think about it. gave my speech but when it was over the second have been it. we knew we had a major problem. rush me to the airport. by the time i got there they had grounded all aircraft. so here i was stuck in norfolk. my deputy tim flanigan was down in the situation and, we are trying to occasion which communicate with each other by cell phone, with him in a situation. my lawyers have been a bike with an white bike with an white house and i'm stuck. i try to get back. i need a navy officer at airport, they take me to the base commander and tell him who i am. he says will try to get you back. of course, they are transitioning at the highest alert days and here's is this washington person in the way. they set me off in a room somewhere and i was with one of my list to find at about they

gave me a navy helicopter. and one story that i tell is that as, where you want me to take you guys to get as close as you can to the white house. they said we will land you on the south lawn. i said, i said nobody but the president of the united states lands on the south lawn. plus i would if we got too close to the white house -- [laughter] that that might be a problem. so we agreed it would take me to andrews, and they flew me to introduce and when i landed at andrews, there was a white house stand there. committee underground bunker or dick cheney was out and other senior officials. about this time that's when had this secure videoconference with the president. he was frustrated. he was now ready to come home. we waited, we waited for the president all my lovers have relocated to commercial buildings in downtown d.c. tim flanigan and i were the only lawyers in the white house from my staff. and, finally, about 7:00, i ran

into karen hughes, communications director, and we went down to the oval office and waited for the president to land on the south lawn. and afterwards we went back into his private study, me, karen, condi rice and chief of staff with the president. we worked on his speech to the nation that night. we talked about what happened that day. we all had a different story from that day. went home about 1:00 in the morning. my car was impounded at dulles because the tears had parked their car at the same law. mike bibby to know. flew back to the office at 6:00. and from then on i was beating all the time that i was either meeting with lawyers or the policymakers in the situation room talking about policy that i we get feedback to the lord, back and forth, back and forth. that weekend we had all hands on deck meeting at camp david. and that's when we started talking about things like okay, we can, not only can we not connect the dots, we can't

collect the dots. we can gather information. that was the genesis for the patriot act. john ashcroft said start tracking the patriot act. we look at things like okay, was north korea involved? was iraq involved in this attack? we talked about the congressional authorization for military force. so all these things started bubbling up very, very quickly. i remember, a couple days, probably the day after 9/11 i was in meeting in the oval office, and everyone kept talking about we have to do this, we are at war. the lawyer in me said we have to be careful about what we call this. so after the meeting everyone left the oval office and went to the present. and i said mr. president, we need to be careful about saying we are at war because saying we are at war means will trigger a balance of international treaty obligation. we will trigger a bunch of domestic statutes. it may affect private contracts, performance obligation on the private contractors if we are at a state of war. he looked at me and he said you

boys call it whatever you want to, but we are at war. but i got the message very, very quick. that was a very important fundamental decision. and decided this was not a criminal act. this was an act of war. it would pull all the levers of executive power, economic, military, intelligence, everything we could to defend this country. and i don't, it's hard for me now to member what my life was like in the white house because afterwards all of my personal intention was terrorism, terrorism related issues. working with john ashcroft, and the rest of the stuff, like judges, which is very important of course, you know, i had to hand off sort of to the other lawyers on my team. and let me just say this about my team. the president, not surprising, is going to get the best bars in america, and the team that i had with president bush was unbelievable. i think i have 12 or 14 lawyers,

a dozen or so had worked on the sprinkler. major firms. these are all superstars. it was just such a joy as a lawyer to be able to work with that kind of talent. and to be able to go to the white house on these tremendous issues come of such great consequence, it really reminded me of why i wanted to be a lawyer in the first place, to live a life, to do something where you would really make a fundamental difference in the lives of others. and, unfortunately, we were given that opportunity by what happened on 9/11. ..

>> as i said to one of my partners, i quit trying to predict a long time ago how the court will come out on a case. it is so unpredictable. so many variables and factors go into a decision by a supreme court justice on a particular case. i don't mean to dodge the question but i haven't studied the issue closely enough. i will have to said down and read the briefs and talk to

lawyers. >> just a couple moments left in this event. you can see it in its entire the honor website c-span.org. now to the national press club in washington for the release of the first country by country index of nuclear materials. the report was put together by the nuclear threat initiative and the economist intelligence unit. you will hear from nuclear threat initiative cochair sam -- sam nunn. live coverage on c-span2. >> country by country assessment of the status of nuclear material security conditions around the world. this has not been produced before. takes a broader approach in designing nuclear material security. it is comprehensive and will the public. it will get copies. it will be a broad outline of it

and take your questions and answers. it is dialogue and deliberation that to help the beginning of to define the long term path an in-depth comprehensive nuclear security around the world which will lead leo is into a -- representing the intelligence community. in addition to shore, the project has maintained an international perspective

analysis. and survey. leadership around the world include the international panel of highly respected nuclear material security experts. the nuclear and non-nuclear weapons state, countries and materials and developed as well as developing nations. we try to make the expert panel representative of the world but we wanted to get experts. that was one requirement and we did. we start with a real threat of nuclear terrorism. is clear the elements of a perfect storm are gathering. there's a large supply of plutonium and uranium. what we call weapons usable nuclear materials and that is the term you will see and hear referenced many times. that respect around many sites in 32 countries and some of that, too much of it is fully secure. there is greater know how to build a bomb widely available.

to build a weapon if they can it is not a piece of cake, we don't want to pretend it is. it is far from impossible. nuclear material security is the number one chance we have to prevent nuclear terrorism. to get weapons usable nuclear materials, terrorists must have in order to build a weapon. they will go where the material is most vulnerable. we have a global challenge and we're in a race between cooperation and catastrophe. ted purdy revealing comment made a couple years ago by mohammad, former director general of the atomic energy agency as he noted quoting him, a large percentage of the materials reported as lost or stolen are never

recovered. and perhaps even more alarming, e added a large percentage of material that are recovered have not been previously reported as missing. end quote. if terrorists succeeded in blowing up a large city somewhere in the world the result would be catastrophic. the human toll of hundreds of thousands dead and injured and disruptions to global commerce and global confidence, long-term environmental and public health consequences and in probable new limits of civil liberties worldwide. so what can we do to prevent it? we believe we are giving an important part of that answer here today. we hope this index will help individual countries as well as the international community to set priorities and determine what steps must be taken to better secure the materials that could be used to build a bomb. we start by taking the broad view of security. working with the independent

group of international experts i have alluded to we identified key factors which fundamentally affects the state's nuclear material security conditions. then we assess their relative importance. these factors in broad terms and a number of details under each one of them but in broad terms we asked the questions how much weapons usable material does a state have? and in how many locations? what kind of requirements or protection are in place? what international commitments related to material security has the state made? what is the ability of that state to fulfills these international commitments? finally could given country's factors -- corruption and governmental instability undermine security commitments at its practice. we do not expect every country or every expert to agree with

all of the assessment in this index. we don't expect everyone to agree with our set of priorities. we welcome debate on these essential questions. we also welcome constructive suggestions for improvements and we all acknowledge that improvements can be made. here are some of the highlights of what we found in very general, brief term is. first the good news. we see clear signs that governments are becoming more engaged on this issue. there are number of international initiatives. most of them are set forth here in the index. initiatives that can be credited for galvanizing actions by governments around the globe. in 19 countries and taiwan will eliminate their stocks of weapons usable nuclear materials. i want to give president obama and his team credit for issuing

head of state level for the 2010 nuclear security summit. it will make these achievements possible. and the heads of state level. i want to start by noting that progress is being made and certainly many of you follow progress in the form of the soviet union where remarkable amounts of cooperative activities taking place in the united states and russia, kazakhstan, ukraine and other countries that are helping to establish for some 20 years. there's not a shared consensus about what security measures mount up most. the lack of shared priorities undercuts the ability of government to take urgent and effective action and is a disincentive to governments

taking action. the assurance and accountability and action is what we are calling for. assurance, accountability and action throughout the world. government leaders should determine and must determine robust ways of doing the following -- one, create a global dialogue and build consensus for a new security framework for the protection of nuclear, nuclear materials that are weapons usable. two, state accountable for their progress. and three, build a practice of transparency that includes declarations and peer reviews. i want to make it clear that some information must be predicted like specific security practices at individual sites. we do not go into that depth nor should we in public documents. but there's a lot of information that should be shared with the public and certainly other

governments have to have confidence and lead by sharing information will that confidence be possible. and also sharing information can help inspire actions by other countries. we briefed government about the index and we believe the number of them. and fellow families here beagle's some questions consistently come up. our governments cooperating with you? the answer is a qualified yes. we offer briefings to 32 countries with weapons usable nuclear material. 28 took cellphone. more than half of those countries also validated, collected by leo by his intelligence unit to make sure it was accurate. we kept south korea fully inform the. more government will be engaged in this process.

second question we asked frequently is why did you ranked 144 countries that had weapons usable materials. countries without weapons usable nuclear materials must avoid becoming save havens, staging ground or transit points or illicit nuclear activities. every country can and must do more to help protect these materials. third, do you expect or can the index held nuclear security summit at large? in terms of their process and liberation. yes, we hope that the index will help shake discussions at the march summit and more importantly help guide the international community and individual countries as they were set up priorities beyond the summit. but the follow-through is even more important. this is up to the governments of

the world and they will make that decision. let me add one more thought before we move on. i want to be clear that this index is not, although we do rate countries, no doubt about that but it is not about congratulating some countries and chastising others. instead it should be used as a tool for initiating discussion, analysis and debate as well as helping to build a consensus as i mentioned on the priorities and imperatives. bottom line, if the world succeed in preventing catastrophic nuclear terrorism, all countries can and must do more to strengthen security around the world's most dangerous material. we believe this is a powerful tool. is up to governments to decide that and act on it. the index challenges governments worldwide to respond to the

threat. as citizens and leaders and leaders the we need to ask this question. if we rid have a catastrophic nuclear attack in moscow or new york or to leave, or any other city in the world, the day after what steps will we wish we had taken to prevent it? secure weapons using nuclear material is the most critical step and we hope the index can make a significant contribution towards this imperative goal. in closing i would like to thank the funders who supported this project, the john t. and catherine macarthur foundation, and the pettersson foundation. and of course i must thank warren buffett, who makes anti i and our work possible. i would now like to introduce leo abruzzese from the economist intelligence unit to give more information on how they constructed the index.

and the vice president of ncr nuclear material security program will give you more information about our approach and the index results and he will be followed by deepti choubey leaders to the senior director of bias security act and the i -- nti and talk about findings and recommendations. thank you for your index and look forward to your questions. >> thank you very much. thank you, senator. my name is leo abruzzese with the economist intelligence unit. if you are not familiar with the company at work for i thought i would take a moment to explain what we do and how we came to participate in the project. we are the research arm of the economist group which was the publisher of the economist magazine. most of you are familiar with the magazine. we are a sister organization to the magazine but we do different kind of work. we are research based and mostly

work on behalf of governments, corporations or non-governmental organizations mostly doing public policy research and other economic project. also in fields like environmental science and security. we have done a bit of work and indices and made a specialty of ours and we have done project like this for the world bank, and a number of fortune 500s. with that background, nti approached us and told us of their plans to put together a nuclear material security index and asked us if we would essentially advise on the project. we will be technical consultant to help them build an index that was credible. we like to mention on these projects this being washington we have a lot of processes doing studies in washington and more than a few have a certain bias. ideological biases and we work on projects like this, we have

three goals in mind which we insist on. they are independent or transparent and credible. if there are any results established ahead of time we won't participate. we were happy to find out and 11 one domestic gather data as objectively as we could and let the conclusions fall where they may which is what we have been doing the past year. is not obvious you want to build an index to measure nuclear security but we do that for a couple reasons. this provides the framework for looking at the subject. you can look at anything in a number of different ways and we try to be as objective as possible by building an index and looking at indicators and categories in a structured way. it allows you to have a system you can repeat over time. we have done this with nti 11 for the first time being released in 2012 but should we

want to do this year from now or two years from now or five years from now? we have a way of going about this that we can repeat so there's a structure and level of organization to this and a good element of objectivity. it makes it easy for countries to see where they have done well and where they haven't. we are catching scores and ratings summit is easy for the country for example to see its progress overtime. when we build these indices in the past we have seen countries that perhaps didn't do well in one particular area actually change laws or regulations so they were scored better a second time around. that is another element of an index that weighs very well on this process. how do you go about producing an index like this? especially on a topic like nuclear material security. this is a subject that almost by definition has a heavy element of secrecy to. the senator pointed out we don't want to go into areas of

security at specific facilities. that would move against the whole goal of trying to provide security but at the same time countries can be transparent. the international community is a short they're playing by the rules so in building an index we gather indicators. indicators are questions we try to answer and answer in an organized fashion. we chose 18 of them. they are credible and use our judgment and nti of course but we also assemble an international panel. people who worked in this field for decades and this panel came from a wide group of countries. we had u.s. members of the panel also members from russia, china and tunisia and kazakhstan and other countries. this process was informed by people around world and does have as the senator suggested a strong international flavor to

it. gathering this data is not easy. a lot of this data is generously less than transparent. a colleague of mine spent six months with a large team of researchers pouring through thousands of documents looking for whatever information we could find on how much nuclear material these countries had. that is not obvious. you cannot easily put a number on most of these countries. what regulations do they have in place. the regulations are easy to find and almost impossible to find. as the senator pointed out because so much of this information is hard to find we gave countries and opportunity to look at what we gathered and tell us whether they thought was good or whether it was a bit off. in some cases countries were generous with their time. they tweaked some of the findings that we had. we have a source that said

canada has less than 1500 kilograms of highly enriched uranium. was true but when we checked with canada we found out it was less than 500 kilograms which is quite a bit less. this is a way of making sure we had information which is accurate as it could possibly be. finally, on this process, we put this into what we call the model. and index. as the senator pointed out this is something you can test. you can change assumptions in this model. for those who have a technical bent, if you are stakeholder or university, this is something you can actually use and play with. you can change assumptions. it is something you can use as a drill down feature. we hope you will find this interesting. we found it a challenging project. we are happy with the results. we are open for feedback.

we hope we will do this again and each time we do these -- they get better the second or third time around. deepti choubey will tell you more about the history of the project. >> thank you. i would like to discuss very briefly the project's overall approach and then to provide index results. let me begin by reiterating that despite progress, important gaps remain in our ability to set priorities and measure progress on nuclear material security. to address this we developed the first ever comprehensive framework for nuclear material security that those two things. provides the basis for dialogue and priorities and is a framework against which progress can be measured. let me quickly summarize the

five categories including some of the indicators of the categories as well as why they are important. the first category of indicators include the quantity, number of quantities and number of sites with weapons usable nuclear materials including the quantity themselves. number of sites and whether or not the quantities increase or decrease in a particular country. this is important because it affects the overall potential in a particular country. the second category are the security and control measures. this includes specific physical protection measures, accounting practices and whether or not security personnel are screened. these actions directly affect security of materials of a given subject. the third category is what we called global norms and includes the relevant international legal agreements, voluntary commitments and the level of transparency shown by a country

on material quantity and material security practices. all of these measures affect the international confidence in the way that a country takes security obligations. the fourth category is domestic commitment and capacity. this is about the national level implementation of actions. for example whether a country has independent regulatory agencies that oversee security practices in this area. national level implementation is required for effective security programs. the fifth and final category or what we call societal factors include levels of corruption in a country as well as political stability among other things. these measures provide an important backdrop to specific security practices that may be in place. taken together these five categories comprise what we call a country's nuclear material security conditions. a brief word about the scope of this project.

the scope of this inaugural index is weapons usable nuclear materials, specifically highly enriched uranium separated plutonium and mixed oxide fuel. it does not include low enriched uranium as used in nuclear power industry or radiological material such as used in hospitals or industry. finally countries of less than one kilogram of weapons usable material floridian no nuclear weapons usable materials were evaluated against the subset of the categories in order to assess their contribution to the global nuclear material security agenda, key actions would include joining relevant treaties and take action like criminalizing weapons usable material so as not to become a transit point or staging ground. i know this chart may be difficult to read but shown here as well as on pages 14, and 15

of the report are the overall scores and rankings for the 42 countries of greater than one kilogram of weapons usable materials. pages 16 to 18 are showing scores and ranking for countries with less than one kilogram or no weapons usable nuclear materials. let me briefly review these columns. on park far left is the column that should be overall ranking and scores for these countries. the five columns on the right show the scores and rankings of individual categories starting with quantities of sights and global norms or quantities and sights and security and control measures, global wars, domestic commitment capacity and the fifth is societal factor. these categories contribute to the overall score based on their relative priorities as determined by nti 11 in

conjunction with the international panel of experts. we will not take the time here to comment on the individual rankings. what we would like to do is call your attention to a couple examples and help you better understand the index. australia is the top ranked country. ranked sixth or higher in every category benefiting from small quantities of nuclear materials, strong societal factors and high scores in other categories as well. for the other top ranked countries as well, consistently high scores in all categories was the key theme. for comparison the united kingdom also scores well across-the-board but its overall rate is lowered to tenth overall by its large quantities of weapons usable nuclear materials that are legacy of the cold war and the fact that the quantity of these materials are increasing particularly in the civilian sector. if the quantities of nuclear material and the number of sites

were not included as an example the united kingdom would rank fourth overall. there's a similar situation for the united states. the united states is ranked thirteenth overall but quantity of the sites were not considered it would rank second overall indicating that it has high scores in all the other categories. a distinction between the united states and the united kingdom as an example is primarily due to the scores and global norms categories where the united states is yet to ratify two important treaties. four countries have particularly low levels of transparency. specifically israel, north korea, india and china on materials and material security. this most directly affects force in what we call the global norms category. for example if india were as transparent as the united kingdom its rank in the global

morris category would move to 26 to 6 overall. opprobrium levels of transparency are critical because independent of specific security posture on the ground and affect the international confidence in country's nuclear security. finally for the lowest ranked countries the index shows these countries with the exception of material site category generally have low scores in most if not all of the indicator categories and providing these countries many opportunities for nuclear material security conditions. at this point let me transition to my colleague, deepti choubey, present findings and recommendations. >> thank you, page stoutland. let me share with your selection of key findings and recommendations from this effort. encouraging the, one of our key findings his government has

become far more aware of the threat and the need for urgent action to combat it. there are more troubling findings. for instance although there is agreement about the importance of nuclear material security there is no global consensus about what priority should be for achievement security. ..

>> because of very high levels of corruption. those countries, several has scored poorly on the prospect of political instability over the next two years. the combination of those two factors significantly increases

the risk that nuclear materials might be stolen with help from corrupt insiders or in the midst of government distraction or political chaos. finally, the index also revealed that the stocks of useable materials will continue in a few countries. stocks in japan and united kingdom are increasing because of civilian use whereas total use is due to military programs and although there are no legal barriers to the production of new highly enriched uranium or plutonium, the production of these materials for weapons purposes is certainly against the global norm where all other states are abiding by a moratorium. there are, however, a few other states that produce plutonium but because of the use of the plutonium as fuel in civilian reactors their continue material inventories are largely static. despite some positive developments these findings underscore the need for urgent

action. because no state can address this threat alone, all states have a responsibility to work both individually and cooperatively. specifically, governments must work together to build and create the conditions for a system for tracking, protecting and managing these deadly materials. done right, such a system could assure that all of us is that each state is fulfilling its security obligations. in parallel there are also steps that countries must take by themselves and without delay. so let us first turn to how to create the foundation of a global nuclear material security system. how would we go about doing this? foremost, we must begin a dialog that leads to a much-needed global consensus on priorities. the nuclear security summit process has the potential for being the right and possibly only forum for this discussion. and our hope is that leaders at the next summit commit to an ongoing process to come to agreement about what actions matter most.

additionally, there should be a sustainable and effective way for benchmarking progress and holding states accountable to their obligations. our hope is that the nti index is a starting point in framing the breadth of the problem and it can be built on and improved as government provide assurances through more information. to that end states must enact greater transparency practices which would then in turn foster greater international confidence. and we're recommending three specific actions for governments. first, they should publish and provide access to their nuclear materials regulations. 13 out of the 32 states with weapons useable materials publish both their regulations and an annual report. governments can and should do far better than this. the second, they should declare their nuclear material inventories. again, there's no legal requirement for states to declare how much material they have for civilian or military

purpose, however, nine states voluntarily declare their civilian plutonium holdings and the plutonium in the production history for the u.k. and u.s. military programs have been made public. more nuclear weapon states should do the same. and then finally they should invite regular peer reviews which is a service provided by the iaea of facilities that actually contain weapons useable material. in parallel with these collective efforts there are also several actions that states can take individually to improve their stewardship of weapons useable material. for instance, all states should stop increasing their stocks of materials particularly for military purposes. and overtime those stocks should be reduced to the lowest possible levels commensurate with civilian energy and scientific needs but one of the best ways to objectively to measure progress is to eliminate completely weapons useable materials in as many states as possible. over the past two decades, 19

countries plus taiwan have eliminated their materials and currently 14 of the 32 states with weapons useable materials have less than 100 kilograms and many but not all of those states could be good candidates for eliminating their stocks in the next few years. we should all look to the outcome of the 2012 nuclear summit to see what states cleans out their materials. we also know that two of the most important steps governments should take to strengthen their defenses against the insider threat is to decrease levels of corruption and ensure political stability. the proscriptions for these issues are beyond the scope of this project but we do emphasize steps for strengthened security and controlled measure including physical protection, control accounting and personnel measures at facilities and during transport of nuclear materials. these steps are the first defense against the insider threat. but today, there is no agreed global baseline defining minimum

security and control measures which should be in place at all sites with heu and plutonium. states should also routinely test their security arrangements particularly if there are challenging societal factors that could undermine security. in the interest of time, i will not review each of our recommendations which are detailed in our report and focus on the last one and that is to target assistance to states that need help. the good news is that the index has helped to easily identify 18 states that have provided financial, regulatory or security assistance on a bilateral or multibilateral basis in the past two years. the index also identifies states that may be in need of assistance. our hope is that the index can be used as a resource to match those who need help with those who can provide assistance and vice versa. because no matter whether a state is ranked at the top or at the bottom of the list, all states can do more to improve. thank you and i'll now hand it

over back to paige who will briefly walk you through what our website officers. >> thank you. very briefly, let me just highlight a few features on the website. the website is www.ntiindex.org. on the website, you will find electronic versions of the entire report. you will find downloadable versions of the model, the x -- excel spreadsheet. you will find the most frequently used features on the website itself. there are the overall rankings and scores as shown on the projector. the next slide will show an example of a country profile. there are specific pages that detail how each country did on all of the indicators themselves. and then finally there is a function where the user can

change the relative priorities to let the user engage with the index to see how the scores and rankings change as a function of the relative priorities of the specific categories and indicators. so please explore the website for access to all of these features. and at this point, i think we're going to take questions and answers. >> okay. thank you, leo and page and deepti and now we'll have questions and answers and be glad to have questions from the media. back on the back left. if you want to direct to a particular individual, do so. and if not, we will feel it among ourselves here. >> perhaps you could say why you think the clump the countries that lies at the bottom of list of 32 -- why do they lie there? and in your analysis -- >> why are the countries are at the bottom? >> yes. i know from the objective standards why they're there.

what are the common characteristics which said repair? maybe you could talk about that a little bit. and i'm curious to know whether any of the countries that lie at the bottom of the list are among those countries that sought to get briefed by you or whether they have ignored the results of your work or the fact that the work was in progress? thanks very much. >> well, if you wrote down your suspicions, i suspect they would all be correct. and there is certainly a relationship between those at the bottom and generally speaking and those that did not accept the briefings or have anywhere near full cooperation. i would say -- and i'll defer to my colleagues here, i will say that corruption has been mentioned, instability -- those are two factors. and lack of transparency. if i had to say what the three factors are and depending on which country they vary, but those would be the three that would be the most prominent.

page, you want to comment on that? >> yeah, let me just briefly field your final question first. in terms of countries that agreed to meet with us, actually 28 of the 32 did, including some that were ranked quite near the bottom. and so -- i mean, we were in a sense pleased to see that so many were willing to meet with us. but i will just second with what senator sam nunn said. there's a number of cross-cutting themes, certainly low transparency, not participating in a full range of what we called global norms be they legal agreements, political agreements and that's then coupled sometimes with very challenging levels of corruption and low political stability. so those things came together for those countries and resulted in them being ranked at the bottom of the index. >> yes. >> thank you, hi. i'm not quite sure, senator nunn whether it would be you or one

of the other he were ands. looking at all the data you collected, there have been scattered reports over the years that terrorists do have some type of access or could be holding material, not using it yet. is there anything that you found in this research that does help to clarify that, whether any terrorist organization does have something that could be very serious? >> there's been a series of recent articles talking about what happened over the last 20 years and there's a lot that's been done that's prevented weapons of mass destruction from spreading. i mean, we've had teams of u.s. and russian experts working together, military-to-military, lab to lab. we've had coordination between a number of countries in helping the former soviet union get control of their nuclear materials. that is where the largest stockpile was. kazakhstan has taken a lead in this regard. ukraine has taken a lead. kazakhstan, ukraine and belarus

gave up all their nuclear weapons which most people in the world don't know about. about 10% of their electricity in the country, 1 out of every 10 light bulbs comes from nuclear material that was formerly from weapons pointed at us, from russia, ukraine and the former soviet union. and it was converted to nuclear fuel and we bought it. that was part of the dismantling so a lot has been done. what's missing and whether there's material out there that no one knows about, it's always possible. i certainly would not discount it. i would say that i've always operated under the -- probability questionable but nevertheless assumption that terrorists that had nuclear material, if they had it, they would try to use it. and they would try to use it as soon as they could build a weapon. and, of course, building a weapon is not a piece of cake but the hardest -- the longest

pole in the tent is getting the material. our operating promise at nti has been and still is protecting the material is the number 1 way you prevent catastrophic terrorism. it is possible. there could be some out there we don't know about. there's certainly missing material, there's certainly inventories, but we -- with this index will help establish hopefully a dialog that would lead to some baseline about how much nuclear material there is, because if there's no inventory, if there's no baseline, it's hard to know when something's missing so that's part of this whole process. page, you want to add to that or deepti? david? >> senator -- >> wait for the mic, please. >> i have a couple of questions, i guess. one is a big-picture question which is president obama has promised global cleanup in four years and he's using a different criteria. he's promised to locked down

vulnerable materials in four years, but does the work on this index give any of you any insight into -- segetting close to that? is he going to make that goal? and a second question which is more a methological question, securing the bomb for nine years was very valuable because of the way it was very specific and pointed out quantities and locations and at least looked back over the last year at events like the events in south africa, for example, and you seem now to have decided on a different kind of analysis which doesn't have that kind of data in it and i just wonder why you feel this is -- why do you shift it to this kind of analysis as compared to the previous one? >> my answer on the second question, why we shifted this kind of analysis, matt bunn who helped us do the -- securing the bomb report was very much a part of our expert panel, so there's continuity in that sense. we felt we needed a deeper dive

and we needed to really let countries know what they could improve specifically country by country more than generically which was that general approach. also, that effort started with a focus primarily on the former soviet union, still problems there as you well know. but i think it's now much more of a global approach. third, i would say it's important for u.s. and russia to work together for about 15, 20 years under the nunn-lugar program. russia viewed themselves as a supplicant and that relationship was wearing thin and i thought for the last five, six years that we needed to move with a partnership with u.s.-russia as well as countries all over the globe in trying to address this problem so this is really trying to take a much broader partnership type approach and also i would say that we were inspired to start this index by

the nuclear security summit that president obama had with 40 heads of state, and that, of course, will be followed up on with our friends in south korea, an enormously important meeting in march and we felt this type index would better -- be a better tool for those countries attending that summit. finally, i would say we aren't addressing radioactive material in here. dirty bombs and so forth. we're using the index to look at weapons useable material, but the radioactive material needs to be protected. there's a lot of crossovers here. the steps that would be taken here to protect against weapons useable would also help on radioactive, that's not the focus of this index. but it needs to be part of what they talk about in south korea. so all of those reasons are reasons. let me ask page to add to it. >> just briefly, as the senator said, i think this report -- the index builds very nicely on the great work that matt bunn has done in part of securing the bomb. and i think when you see the full report and particularly the

website, you'll find all the specific details for all these countries that will actually, i think, in fact, be of a lot of interest and so there are a lot of specifics. we didn't have time to cover them here. >> what about obama's goal -- >> i applaud the goal. i wouldn't bet money that it will be completed in four years. but we made progress. there was two or three countries that we've been working on for a long time that after the last summit were willing and gave up their highly enriched uranium and moved it over to low enriched uranium so real progress has been made on that area. without a goal, you're not going to get very far. and i applaud the goal but i -- you know, i would not bet a whole lot of money you'll complete it. for one thing, you got countries that don't cooperate as we've seen in this index. and if you're setting the goal to secure all nuclear material, that would include north korea. it would include iran. it would include pakistan. it would include other countries

at this stage that are not cooperating. this may be hope, but it's my hope that this index will alert countries that have not cooperated in international community in terms of sharing and protecting material and best practices and so forth will understand they have threats themselves, that this is not simply doing a favor to the world. this is protecting your own security because countries that don't have good practices are also probably the most likely victims of material that would get in the hands of terrorists, whether it's a dirty bomb or whether it's weapons useable material. and i'm hoping those light bulbs will go off but i wouldn't bet money in the near term but in the long term i think there's hope here. back row, yes, ma'am. >> please forgive my voice. firstly, can you discuss a little bit about how you gave

weighting to different things corruption versus participation in international treaties. you decide one thing was a better indicator of what the -- on the ground security is likely to be? the second question, you urged that the upcoming summit is to settle on economic communities. can you share what you believe those priorities should be? and thirdly, can you share whether pakistan, india and iran were briefed on the index and what the reactions were? >> okay. let me start with leo on that and then we may want to shove off a couple of those other questions. >> sure, let me address the weightings question. you can start with the assumption, for example, that every indicator has an equal weight. we considered that approach but decided at the end of the day that probably some of them were more important than others. but rather than us making that

decision, we mentioned earlier is that we had an international panel. so we convened that panel about five or six months after we began the project. we showed them some of the initial results and we essentially had a long full-day brainstorming session where we talked with panel members. we really pushed people and what you've seen here is essentially the collective wisdom of about 15 or 20 people at nti especially from among the peer panel and also at eiu really asking people to judge on their experience. if you look at some of our panel members, some of them have experience on physical protection, others have worked in governments at nonprofit organizations. they're all experts on this. so this essentially -- rather than taking a mathematical approach to it, rather than simply saying they're all equal, we essentially put a large group of very bright people in a room and we just went round and round until we reached a rough consensus on this. so we're happy that's a good

approach. however, if you'd like to try another one, as they mentioned, this model is a tool. you can actually go into this, if you'd like, and change the weightings. it doesn't change what our conclusions are. our conclusions are what you've seen here. but for those of you that are so disposed to have a go at this and see how the ratings will change, you can do that. >> okay, deepti? >> in terms of global priorities, you know, this framework that we put forward particularly these five categories and the 18 indicators to a large extent that's what we're offering as the initial proposal of what we think matters. and, again, what we're hoping to spark a discussion along with other governments, are these the right things we should be asking governments to do better on. are there other things that we should add? and so we're looking forward to that conversation and the prioritization and you see how much weight we've recorded. we think all of those things are important but we're also mindful particularly out of the last security summit that you have

states that don't have materials, who are part of that process and kind of scratching their heads a little bit about what exactly do you want me to do? what's more important? is it more important to take care of physical protection at a facility that has materials or do you want me to sign this treaty or just kind of what's the relative order of that. and then in terms of pakistan, india and iran, again, we issued invitations to all of the 32 countries to be briefed. pakistan and india were briefed. and, you know, i think it was a very constructive conversation with them about what we were trying to do. all three of those countries also received the data validation. and what we know is that both governments, you know, considered, you know, the requests but they in the end chose not to answer our data validation request either in whole or in part. our hope is that we can work with these governments going forward in the next year as they see how the index can be a tool for providing assurances and building international confidence in the steps that

they are taking in their materials that they'll engage if they do it again in using the tool to that end. and with the iranians, we issued an invitation to their mission in new york several times, followed up, never received a response and even though we weren't able to brief them in person, they were also given the same opportunity to validate the data and again we did not receive a response from them. >> what about north korea? >> and then with the north koreans we issued the invitation. it was considered in pyongyang for briefing them and we offered to go to new york to do that and they chose not to take the briefing but they were also offered the opportunity to validate the data and again they chose not to do that. >> do you want to add anything to the question? >> only one final anecdote and that's the issue of prioritization. we have seen in our experience that by creating the framework, it creates a space for a very productive discussion. as leo mentioned we had a day-long discussion of these indicators and categories and there were very vigorous

discussions about the relative priorities of things that perhaps we all take for granted, the importance of international legal agreements. but -- so we think that this -- this framework is going to be very useful in terms of sparking this dialog amongst the international community. >> okay, back row, right under the camera. and let's see, next right here. >> my question is on russia. russia is not in a top five -- at least in the top in your index. it's actually ranked 24th in overall score column. are the major concerns that you have regarding russia? you mentioned several factors like corruption, instability, the lack of transparency. what are the major concerns? thank you. >> in general, i would say i think we have to put in perspective where russia was 20

years ago and where they are now. when you look at where they were 20 years ago, the chances were pretty high that there would be some type of nuclear instant, if not disaster coming out of the huge stockpiles of highly enriched plutonium and uranium weapons. the fact that it has not happened, i think we have to tip our hat to the leaders in the military, the laboratories and other in russia who were dedicated patriots during a period of huge economic hardship, where all sorts of temptations were put in front of them. so to put it in perspective where russia was 20 years ago and where they say now is a remarkable achievement. have they got a long way to go yet, yes, but they are making a lot of progress. now, one of the problems in russia -- you alluded to corruption, president medvedev have spoken to that subject. president putin has spoken to that subject several times so they themselves acknowledge that's one of the biggest problems russia has, not just in

terms of nuclear security but also in terms of economic confidence, investment and so forth from abroad. so i would hope they would make progress on that. but in addition, the military in russia has control of certain elements particularly the weapons. there are other agencies that have jurisdiction over things like research reactors, where small amounts are so there's a divided responsibility in russia that i think probably needs addressing. with that let me see if, page, you want to comment further. >> i'll give a bit more specific information. russia, in fact, scores very well in three of the categories. the security control measures, global norms and domestic commitments and capacity. its scores brought down, of course, by its large quantities of nuclear materials similarly to the united states, both as a legacy of the cold war and then as senator nunn pointed out by the levels of corruption which imply that russia needs to be extra vigilant as to all states

with any challenging societal factors on their specific security practices. >> okay. let's see. there was somebody in the second row, yeah, right here. mike? >> hi, there's been references to dialog in establishing priority at a minimum baseline. so is the ultimate goal to have a global standard for nuclear security? and is that useful? is that necessary? is that feasible? talk about that. thanks. >> i was on a panel of -- they call us -- i don't remember the exact name of the panel, but it was a panel of global people who were involved in nuclear security that was appointed by the director on the iaea a couple of years ago. we worked a long time and issued a report. this is one of those jobs that eventually should be done by an international group. they ought to be international norms.

there ought to be international standards. we're going to have to move toward international, i think, approach to the whole question of the fuel cycle. we started that with a fuel bank now which has been norsz in the iaea which moving forward and the iaea and there's a lot of that in the report and i refer that to you in the details because it's enormously important. the iaea or some other organization like the iaea is going to have to be put in charge and given the mandate, the legal authority and the resources. they don't have it now. this is not their mandate. what safeguarding means and we've explained this in the report and it's very important. people assume the word "safeguarding" means security. it doesn't necessarily mean security. the example i've used before and this is actually in the report to some extent alluded to if a safeguard inspector from iaea goes in a building and they are basically doing an accounting and they have cameras, their job is to make sure it's not

diverted to weapons. it has is not been diverted to weapons. it's not to see whether there are locks on the doors, whether there's holes in the ceiling, whether there's perimeter guards and whether the people are secure. so there would only be after the fact kind of action there. and the iaea is doing what their mandate says but their mandate is not broad enough, resources are not significant enough. and at some point, the international community has to come together and decide who's going to be responsible for this. this is an ngo operation now. and it's -- we're doing it because the governments are not doing it. but that doesn't mean that the government shouldn't do it in the future and perhaps that kind of discussion can be held in seoul, south korea, because that's -- that could be a beginning point of deciding what authority the iaea ought to have. but i know that the iaea does not have the counter-resources

they need to do a job on the security side. safeguarding is different from security. >> and, again, i'll just add a little bit to your question. you know, i think we do need a global standard eventually, you know, what we have right now, i think, are states who are, you know, looking for some guidance, again, on what matters most and i think if we had a global standard we'd be -- we'd be able to do a far better job of holding states accountable and we'd also be able to track progress. and so again, what we've done with this index is we're putting forward a framework that helps us really get our minds and our arms around the scope of this problem. the other thing i would just say is, you know, we included in our index two relevant treaties. and one of them is the convention on the physical production of nuclear materials and its 2005 amendment. that amendment is in enforced. if it was, it actually would require states to enact standards on protecting materials while they are in use or in storage and not just when

they're being transported. and we still need over 40 states to actually ratify that and so currently states aren't obligated to enact those standards and we clearly need to do a far better job of getting us there and i think that's one clear step we can take. >> okay. we'll take a couple more questions. charlie? >> if i could just comment on -- [inaudible] >> charlie curtis, charlie has been part of nti and part of our board now and ran our organization for a long time. >> and i asked for the mic because i chaired the world to the nuclear security which i think relevant to this last question. >> right. >> not to detract in any way from the comments about the need minimum standards. nti has not waited for that. it has catalyze the creation of a world institute nuclear

security to share best practices for the physical production and security of nuclear materials worldwide. its concluded just now its third year of operation. and it has over 700 members from 53 countries and so we're trying to improve the practices of physical protection and security while we await this more important international standard but you can't weight it because the physical protection concerns are so great. >> there's a large vacuum here and ngos are trying to fill it. we're not the only ones. but the wins organization is in vienna. it has an international board. as charlie said over 600 members. roger housley who used to head up british nuclear fuel security is in charge of it. roger was one of our members of our panel.

that is a volunteer organization. it is certainly not mandatory but we're hoping that it will grow and we're also hoping it will be able to help develop best practices. okay. i think we've got one more question here. >> yes. for leo, you mentioned that countries were given the opportunity as you need tweak some of the numbers. to what extent were you -- in your example sort of for canada were you able to verify the fact that they only had 50 instead of 150 kilograms of that kind of material, that kind of figure? >> for some of these, it's difficult to verify them precisely. what's important to understand we mainly went to regulators within the country so we're not necessarily going to people in political positions. you don't really know -- and it's almost impossible to know exactly what the quantities are, again, we took them initially from central sources. the central sources in some

cases were fairly good and other cases they gave ranges so we went to the individual countries to try to say, would you be willing, for example, to offer us more information one-on-one than you're normally providing to other people who collected the other information? and in a number of cases they were able to do that. now, were we able to verify it in every case? not in every instance but we asked them to justify it. we pushed them on the points as well. and if for some reason we were not satisfied with what we came back, we made the ultimate judgment on this. now, we felt by and large that we had very good levels of cooperation. people took this process seriously. and i would describe it as more of a technical process. we didn't feel this was a political exercise. we were dealing with technical people who said to us, your close on this. it's basically in the right direction but we can help you refine it. we really didn't find any situations where anyone tried to turn us around and this is wrong. we deserve a wonderful score and

with you gave us is poor one. it was more of a technical process. >> at some point here you're going to have certain categories and areas that are sensitive and will remain sensitive that countries will be reluctant to make public. but at least we ought to start -- at least get the discussion going about sharing that kind of information with an international organization like an iaea, like a wins organization, or even share it on a regional basis so there's regional confidence-building because if there's not confidence and the middle east is a good example of that, then you're going to see more and more pressures for proliferation. and as you get more and more pressures for proliferation, you got more and more countries going into enrichment, and you got more and more dangers of terrorist groups being able to buy material and the odds of an international disaster go up, up, up. so we got to make that spiral the other way around.

i don't see any other hands up. we thank you very much for coming. we appreciate it. and we'll be glad to continue to answer your questions. we'll have our staff available for any follow-up questions with the media. page and deepti and leo, thank you very much. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> later today we'll go live to the pentagon for a briefing with press secretary charge little and media operations spokesman captain john kirby. live coverage gets underway at 2:00 pm eastern. ten months ahead on the election a new survey shows president obama trailing new hampshire winner mitt romney in the swing state of florida. 46-43 percent among registered voters. later today president obama will deliver remarks at a campaign fundraiser in his hometown of chicago and we will carry that live here on c-span2 starting

about 6:50 eastern. chris matthews on the attempted political maneuverings in a second kennedy-nixon presidential debate. >> second debate here in washington, nbc studios, nixon gets control until he brings the level of the temperature of the room down to 40 degrees. it's a meat locker when kennedy is in there. my source on the story is the tv guy, wilson goes racing down to the basement, finds the guy in charge of the thermostat. there's a nixon guy standing guard on the thermostat and he says if you don't get out of the way of the thermostat and let me turn that up to 65 or 70 i'm calling the police. so they had another standoff there and they end up compromising on the temperature. so they get back up to where nixon -- the whole idea they didn't want nixon to sweat so that the nixon people had seen him sweat profusely in that debate and they said we're not going to let it happen. they all knew what was going on. this is about who's going to rule america by the way and this kind of stuff is going on.

>> this weekend abc news sam donaldson interviews chris matthews on his new book jack kennedy elusive hero on "after words" saturday night at 10:00 pm eastern on booktv. >> the attorney's national task force on children's exposure to violence is holding hearings across the country. they were in baltimore recently to hear from experts and the community. the task force plans to release its final recommendations at the end of this year. in this person, members look at how violence impacts the community and the impact of teens in an adult prison system. this is about an hour. >> thank you. would everybody be seated, please, so we can have our last panel discussion. [inaudible conversations]

>> thank you. the impact on people and communities of children's exposure to violence. that's what this panel will be focused on. this panel will explore the effects of cev on the bodies and minds of young people and on the social fabric they live within. panelists will discuss a wide range of questions about the impact of cev from brain development to juvenile justice system contact. this panel will also explore innovative and collaborative approaches to protecting and healing young people exposed to violence. the honorable patricia m. martin is president of the national council of juvenile and family court judges. she's a former lead judge in ncjv -- this is good for me

here. ncjvf's child victims act model courts project and promotes alternative court processes for children such as court-appointed special advocates. dr. steven berkowitz is a child and adolescent psychiatrist and an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at the university of pennsylvania, department of psychiatry. dr. berkowitz is director of the penn center for youth and family trauma response and recovery. dr. lauren is part of the family conference center. she has examined how childhood exposure to violence correlates to juvenile offending and how alternatives to detention that incorporates trauma healing for youthful wrongdoers reduce

recidivism. dr. adam rosenberg is executive director of the baltimore child abuse center. prior to directing the center, he served as the prosecutor in a domestic violence unit and the sex offense unit of the baltimore city state attorney's office. we will start with the honorable patricia martin. >> thank you so very much, mr. chair. ladies and gentlemen of the task force, i am honored and privileged to be here and have a conversation with you this afternoon. i have rewritten my oral testimony five times, i believe, today. [laughter] >> so i hope that my written testimony does provide some insight. what i'd like to do with your privilege is to address some of the questions that were posed earlier today. i do have the names of persons who ask the questions but rather than take that time and go remind you back of the conversation, i would like to this go through a couple things

that i think help address some of the issues that you raised this morning. i think that there was -- there was a question posed to how do we bring the creativity of individuals or families and formulate that and impact that some way to make a recommendation to the attorney general? i would submit to you that the creativity and caring adult is what you would like to pull together and somehow formulate, so in cook county, for instance, they'll tell the legislature down in springfield but i've changed the goals every for child in the child protection division in cook county and i'm the judge of the child protection division in cook county and just as way of background just through the council and family court judges i along with los angeles, new york, and chicago are the three largest child protection jurisdictions in our nation. over the last decade, the three

of those jurisdictions of themselves, have been able to reduce -- safely reduce our case loads from anywhere from 40 to 80%. and i would say safely because our recidivism rate has not increased. and we can talk about how that was actually done, but what i'd like to do is give you some of the information that we've learned over this last decade and this is not only cook county but i would suggest to you new york, l.a. and chicago. by the way, you've heard two judges' names today, both of us, judge sidney leaderman from miami and myself -- we are members of the national council, serve on the board of trustees and i currently serve as the president of that organization, so i would strongly suggest if you're looking for innovative courts, the national council is a laboratory where we take programs. we figure them out, we work through them. we come back at all sites, have our lead judges meetings where we share this information and we're heavily supported by ojjdt so a big thanks to them.

back to my point, creativity and caring adults. so at my benchmark that is designed for older youth and foster care, no child leaves the system without an aunt kitty. i'm a member of three children. our parents died more than 26 years ago and i'm the oldest. i was the only one out of school. my brother was in med school and my sister was still in undergraduate and i could not figure out how we were going to get up in the morning because my mother died and my father had been bed-ridden and my mother closed his practice years ago and the way we got up at home was, my mother would sing precious lord through the house and that's when we got up when she died -- i literally could not figure out how we were going to get up the next morning. long story short my aunt catherine who we called aunt kitty woke me up central time no matter where i was in the world, but she woke me up the day after my mother died till the day she died a year and a half ago. i am on old age pension on the other side of this life i would

suggest to you but i will tell you that was the one rock that got me and ultimately got my brother and sister to a point where we feel as if we're providing some benefit and some productive measures to our society in general so i would suggest to you -- i would make -- if it were my world, your recommendation would be that every child in foster care has to have a caring adult. i'm not suggesting a safe and appropriate placement. that's my legal standard. i don't care if it's a drunk uncle, but if the drunk uncle calls my child on christmas morning and says merry christmas -- if the drunk uncle calls my child and says happy birthday and is there when my child needs my child, that is a caring adult. so i'm not looking necessarily for a placement. that's another segment of my job. i'm looking for someone who loves my child. too much of my work is involved in safety and placement and not enough focus on appropriateness in or love. so that is the new goal in cook

county. i would suggest that's your recommendation, in other language, but that's your recommendation. we also talked about improving the practice in courts, especially, proactive courts. i've already mentioned the national council of juvenile and family court judges and i mentioned the lead court judges in the model project. what i would suggest one of the things the model courts do is we collaborate so i have medical schools working with cook county child protection division. i have child -- children's memorial hospital residents rotating through my court for a day trying to understand what we mean by child protection. my judges go to their ground rounds and listen to what happens in grand rounds about broken arms and spiral fractures and taking in the totality of the circumstances before making a determination of how a child has been injured or whether it's abuse or not so there's a lot of

collaboration in these model courts. another collaborator -- or a big collaboration for us is our chicago public schools. you're speaking with a judge who's gotten off the bench and gone to an iep and i will readily no idea what an iep was but someone had to go. and i work with chicago public schools but the one thing when we walked through the door is we speak two different languages. i don't understand what they're talking about, but through that effort, we have a member of the chicago public schools who is on a level of a principal housed in my courthouse. she has a computer for the chicago public schools and a court computer. so when my judges are trying to figure out where this child's academic history is and performances, what grade did they fail? how many more credits do they need to graduate? i don't have to wait 30 days to have a worker go to the chicago public schools, figure out their system.

i call barbara up to my courtroom, give her an hour and tell her go back downs, figure that out and come back and tell me. things like that -- even though we don't have data systems that intercommunicate or intercommunicate together, we can figure out ways short of trying to turn a system around to get the information. so i would suggest demanding that courts be collaborative similar to the model courts is a requirement because we can't do this work alone. we have to rely on others. all of us in this room today know that states do not raise children well. no matter how good our court system is, no matter how great our foster care system is, families raise children. and we have to figure out ways to treat our children and families more holistically and i would suggest this is one way to do that. we talked about domestic violence. i will admit to you this is kind of in a duh as my nephew says, but we were taking the perpetrators out of the home

when it was a domestic violation situation and we were charging the custodial parent, typically, the mother with failure to provide adequate support or supervision and then taking the perp which is typically the father out of the home. one day we realized that trauma is affected on all of our children, whether we have to move the child for life preservation but that still produces trauma for the child so we got this duh moment and start taking the perp out of the home and leaving the child in the home. even to the point when it's a financial burden for the family, we still take the perp out of the home and even sometimes move the mom and the children to a relative's home, even if that's what we have to do, but we keep the child with the family unit as opposed to isolating the child out. those are things that we learned somehow -- we couldn't figure it out in the beginning but we finally got there and that came from a suggestion from one of our other model courts. so it's sharing information once

we go back to our laboratories and our jurisdictions and share this information. so i would suggest every jurisdiction should be charging on domestic violence and figuring out ways to address the trauma and violence for the children as well. we talked a lot about our courtrooms across the city, whether it's a juvenile justice courtroom, a child protection courtroom, a divorce courtroom, a child support courtroom, we focus on providing services for parents. i would agree with you even though my charge is making decisions that are in the best interest of children, so what we are doing now in cookie county -- i have this benchmark hearing that's for older adolescents and all we focus on to the older adolescents to the point that, for instance, if i terminated the parental rights of a parent at 3, when the child was 3, the risk factors and support factors for a child -- that same child of 13 are vastly different. so what i've done -- even though the mother is no longer the legal mother of the child, i've invited her back to my benchmark

hearing. i've put in a legal relationship, a legal guardianship so the department has a way in which to funnel funds, legal gymnastics maybe but to funnel funds back to that relationship. at 13 -- i'm not asking mom to get off drugs. if she does, great. if she doesn't, what i'm doing now is making certain my 13-year-old knows how to navigate his mom. so when mom's drugging, what do you do? when mom's okay? what do you do? each and every one of us sitting in this room have an uncle or aunt we were told not to sit next to at a barbecue. it's no different than my child in foster care and we also have to teach them how to navigate the bad parts or the not so positive parts of their family and i feel i have an obligation when my children get older to look at their permanency a little differently. i would hope that we can find a home. i would hope that i can find a family, but if i can't, at least give them the tools that they need to be able to find their

way through this life. we talk about gaps. i would suggest cross-training is the absolute answer. it is no longer sufficient for me to go to judicial training than to learn to make determinations from the bench. i need to understand what a spiral -- when i first came to the bench, they told me the only way you could get a spiral fracture is from abuse. ladies and gentlemen, when they tell us that, when docs tell that on the stand we believe that until we have doctors coming in and actually telling us what we need to do and training us. so as a presiding judge, once a month i buy lunch for my judges but i invite a doc in. i invite a psychiatrist in, i invite someone from the substance abuse community in. that's where we found out that substance abuse providers are starting to use medicine, like zivatrol. we had no idea about that stuff until we brought them into our court building until they started talking to us directly. we work with the police

department in chicago and our sheriff's department. we've had problems with serving our child protection warrants, trying to find kids who run away from placements. i found numerous opportunities with them to help me figure out how to find my kids. my kids go home, when they run from institutions, they go home. so talking with my police and sheriffs we're able to execute those warrants a little better. i'm told i have to stop but i want to just say one other thing and that is this, that in cook county, the national council of juvenile and family court judges -- i have been the presiding judge for the last decade in cook county. we would not have been able to reduce our numbers from over 38,000 children to foster care down to 7,000 foster care without raising our rate of recidivism. if we didn't reach out to the medical field, if we didn't reach out to the education fields, if we didn't reach out to juvenile justice, and i would just encourage you, when you look at court and making recommendations for court, do

not look just at juvenile child protection but look at divorce court domestic court, child support court, even paternity court when we talk about siblings. >> thank you, your honor. just to make for the record -- we didn't want you to stop. [laughter] >> typically, speaking, i don't. >> just for the record, the attorney did not ask you to stop talking. >> that's a first. [laughter] >> thank you very much. dr. berkowitz. >> thank you, it's really an honor to be here and it probably shouldn't be a surprise that everything i thought i was going to say has been said, maybe that's one of the good and bad things about being the last panel. but especially since most of -- or many of the people who testified and are on the task force are friends, colleagues and mentors and as many of you

know, i was at yale with the doctor for 15 years as a deputy director of the eecod so i really have to acknowledge his mentorship over the years. one of the things i was asked to talk about is the neuroscience of trauma. and i'm going to do that briefly. but i want to also do some -- i did a lot of -- [inaudible] >> we really have in terms of neuroscience probably learned more about the effects of trauma and stress in the last 10 years than any other psychiatric or neurologic disorder. and i think that's really quite remarkable. so we do know now that experience changes the genome. we know how it does it, through

methods of epigenetics, changing methlation on the specific part of the gene which change gene products which then has impact on brain structure and on the body structure. and we have to remember that the brain is in charge of everything. and so anything that affects the brain will affect the body. that's why, as you've heard time and time again, that exposure to violence and trauma early in life and actually throughout life has such negative effects, not only on psychological health biophysical health and on functioning in general. if you look at the data, unemployment, homelessness, 100% of men on death row were abused as children. so i think we really need to understand that very carefully. and it is a biological

mechanism. we are biological machines. that's how we operate. and everything that happens is through a biological process. and it's not a surprise that the most exquisitely sensitive aspect of that process is about survival. and trauma is an attempt to survive. and that is what's changed and dis-regulated when children and adults are exposed to traumatic situations, particularly chronically. so i think it's very important to keep in mind the completely disregulated systems. we have brain scans that show brain sizes decreasing. we know about cardiovascular disease increase and cancer increase in all of these situations. what's really interesting to me is when you look at expenditures in terms of treatment and research, for every $100 that's spent on the very diseases i

just talked about, 5 cents is spent on interventions and research when it comes to child trauma. i think that's startling when we talk about costs. sitting next to the judge here and hearing about what she's doing in chicago reminds me about what i don't have. in philadelphia today, i sit with children on a daily basis -- about 50% who are in foster care who have been abused, neglected, shot. most of the kids in foster care not only have been traumatized in multiple ways but have been exposed to in utero substances, alcohol and other such things. and already come into the world

with two strikes against them. >> i would argue if we want to make assistance change, if we really want change what we're doing, we are all taking a short view your the long view is we need a new language among all the child service agencies.

courts, judges, et cetera. that have the child, have a human development and trauma and understanding at the center of that language. that is what's going to change things the long view. that's what going to change the funding in the long view. when we recognize that child maltreatment trauma is really the number one public health issue in this country, i think that is clear. you've heard it it time and time again. $100 billion, that's, that doesn't include the rates of incarceration. of course hearings, also won and so forth. it is the net when public health issue in this country. and we need to change the paradigm across the board. so one of the dilemmas with this panel being the person i am come is that it's only the oj who is sponsoring this. where is everybody else who was involved?

shouldn't they be here? shouldn't we be talking about how to create a common goal and that common language? we do know how to intervene. we have lots of effective intervention. you've heard about some of them. you've heard about my wonderfully thinking about things in the court system. but we don't do it across the country. we don't have that, and shared language that everybody believes in everybody agrees with. i have an anecdote. defenders association, a very controversial case where i was completely blindsided, and actually, frankly, caught on the ethical, by the public defender. and she was wrong. and i called her to task on it. and then was asked, after calling her to task to give a talk about what it means to provide trauma treatment. it ends up that nobody, none of the attorneys in this setting

actually knew when they were requesting trauma treatment what it was. and i had, you know, to teach them what it was and when to ask for it, and what really to ask for, and evaluation, not for treatment. you know, they thought, bayside terrible thing happen, they must have trauma treatment. it doesn't work that way. this is the language that doesn't exist among all our various agencies and facilities and whatnot. it needs to be infused to change the paradigm. and i would argue that that needs to be throughout the secretarial and cabinet posts and agencies, and at every level of government in every level of community, that we need to be talking about children and families and development from the same perspectives, sharon language and creating the language that can allow our interventions to grow and be

effective. and then the money, i think, will come to support what we know already works. there needs to be things that need to be adapted, we have many, many interventions that are effective that we can use, and we should not shy away from using them. what keeps us from using them is the lack of consistency, collaboration, and the funding that goes into all sorts of different directions rather than really think it was the primary issue is at hand. so if i had anything to ask the task force to do is to talk about that. as is the cornerstone of the foundation of the change that is required in this country, to change what i think is our number one issue. >> thank you, doctor. dr. abramson? >> thank you for the privilege of being here with you. what i'd like to talk about and and address is why we need to change our responses to violence, and how we can do that.

so, why do we need to change our responses, what we are currently doing is not working. what we currently do is we separate victims and offenders, and we punish offenders and we don't give them a chance to learn how to do things differently and how to do it better. in fact, when they go into detention, what did you learn how to do is how to be better criminals. the research shows that over and over again. what do we do with victims? we don't include them in the justice process. they are isolated. and if they happen to have symptoms of post-traumatic stress, which many do, the research shows that they do not seek treatment for it. so victims are often stuck in their sense of a good, and they are stuck with this identity as being a victim. so how can we do it differently?

in baltimore, for 13 years we have been at the committee conferencing center which i founded, we have been using iris toward intervention called community conferencing, which what we do is we bring together the victims and the offenders and their respective family members and supporters and anybody else who has been involved in an effected by the incident, the person who cleaned up the graffiti, could be a pastor there to support them, a coach, anybody. there's a facilitator. everybody sits in a circle and has a chance to do a very radical thing, they get to talk to each other. so those who caused the harm get a chance to say what happened and describe what happened, and then everybody in the circle gets a chance to see how they have been affected by what happened in a very emotional way. it is fundamental to why this process is so powerful.

and in everybody having a chance to share their story, offenders are beginning to take accountability for what they have done and victims are having a chance to put out in the external what they've been carrying on the inside, as everybody does that they get a chance to really learn different things about each other. and once everybody is spoken we asked the group what you want to do to make this better, to repair the harm and prevented from happening again, and if they can't, they come up with a written agreement and would follow through to see if there is compliance with the agreement. now, we use this as an alternative to arrest and court and incarceration, not just for misdemeanor offenses but for felony offenses as well. the more serious the better. and when i tell you the outcome, that will help explain why. we've also been doing this in schools as chief goodwin said in baltimore city schools as an

alternative to school suspension and a rest, to help stem the school to prison pipeline which maybe all of you are familiar with. about 100 students are arrested out of baltimore city schools every month. and we know that it works. there's a lot of research that shows that conferencing, that victims you much more satisfied if they go through conferencing than if they'd gone to court the offenders feel more satisfied come and there's even research that shows that victims are expensing ptsd who went through conferencing have significantly reduced symptoms if they have gone through committee conferencing than if they went to court. so let me give you just one example of how it is work. we had, there's a bullying case that started on facebook, very often i wish facebook really should fund half of this, these kinds of programs.

[laughter] >> and google. >> yeah. somebody made a comment about somebody else's boyfriend, and before we knew it, three girls had jumped to growth, and one of the girls had a broken eye socket. so we have a community conference, and what happened in that conference with his bullying incident is what happens in 10 out of 10 bullying incidents that we handled this way. the girls who bullied the other girls ended up in tears talking about the times earlier in their lives they were bullied. so we get this snapshot about how violence begets violence, whether you are a victim of it or you're a perpetrator of it. and he becomes this cycle. and so the parents agreed to pay the medical bills for the girl who have the broken eye socket, but what all the girls agreed to do, decided to do and figured out that they would do it there and then is that they decide

that they're going to get together after the community conference and they're going to great a presentation about their experience of bullying, and they're going to give that presentation, not just in their school, but in four other schools. and in each of the mothers and parents agreed that they would provide, rotate and provide transportation when the girls made these presentations. so, there are no longer victims and offenders. there are young people who are, have made bad choices, who have learned how to do it differently. 10,000 people in baltimore have participated in a community conference, and 95% of the time they come up with an agreement that they abide by. but not only that, they are 60% lower reoffending with kids who go through community conferencing then when they go to the court system. at the maryland department of juvenile services with a

$270 million budget can't find 1 penny for this program that the refer cases to year after year after year. we know what works. we know what doesn't work. the jerry springer model of dealing with each other doesn't work. right? but we need to change our culture. we seriously need to shift funding to programs like restorative justice programs that get better outcomes than the antiquated, costly, ineffective -- do you get how i feel about our current system? weighs about responding to harm. and we need to get our young people experience of opportunities. this is not about a curriculum. this is experiencing ways to learn how to deal with conflict constructively, because conflict is part of being human. and we need to learn how to healthy relations. we need to learn how to have healthy relationships. if i could borrow from mike

sailing buddy come when something breaks on the bow, we have the technology, what we don't have is the political will to use it. thank you. >> thank you, doctor. mr. rosenberg at thank you. good afternoon, chairman tour in chairman, and my mom said it takes and tells joe i love him. so i had to show that. [laughter] members of the task force, friends in college somewhere here today, though secure by reducing foster children welcome to baltimore. at baltimore child abuse after every child we see and meet with deck rates with a butterfly, and perhaps you have received a copy of this report with your material. we clicked over 850 butterflies every year, and that number continues to grow. this is a very real manifestation of scale of the problem here in baltimore city, nationally as well. we proud and each one of those butterflies from the ceiling at the center, recognize that every butterfly is different, everyone has its own unique story.

each one symbolizes the transformation that occurs within each child and each case. today i believe you all had the privilege of many stories from victims and from survivors, and we hear the stories every day at baltimore child abuse center, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. we are one of the few programs in the country that have the ability to respond to victims of abuse in that manner. at child advocacy center, and yet much more chimp material in my written test want, but a child advocacy center by baltimore child abuse center provides a single india and a point of contact for every reported case of sexual child abuse in baltimore city. we watch and producer in these interviews, detectives and child protective workers and prosecutors. for some to any result in the bad guy going to jail. for others it results in a child protective service intervention of some sort. and for many this is the start of a connection to therapy, treatment for both child and the non-afghani offenders who frankly when they come, they're also reported that they had been

victims of abuse. abuse is multigenerational that occurs in many of them are getting help for the first time when their child has been abused at the baltimore child abuse center. we are one of 700 centers nationally. where the third in the country. they used centers for urban and rural, governed by standards led by the national chose alliance in d.c. and the national child advocacy center, huntsville, alabama. they came about a unique set of circumstances. you see former congressman bud cramer, form with the district attorney in huntsville, alabama, had received his first case as da and whether those by state or the office was making his life difficult, they gave him a child abuse case. when he went to interview the victim, the victim and his own words, the victim said if you ask me another question i will kill myself. he realized the child had been talking 14 different kinds but everybody spoke with joe. he had a radical idea. he broke the silence and he said

i'm putting together place all the social workers, but 25 years later that model works. and that's what we have here. and yet not every case and every child gets seen by the cac first. and the amazing part, i echoed judge martin, my testimony as it falls the day as this event of our ipad culture but i would send this disturbing report to our directors whether she reported to me that a six year old had come home and asked us. if he was going to jail because two police officers came to school with guns and another person was also there. he reportedly was crying and scared, and he told them he couldn't talk at what happened with his cousin. so poorly the report of abuse had occurred and the police rather than bring the child to us, have brought the child had just respond to the school. doing what they meant to do best but they show up with guns and asked police my questions. the child displayed anxiety that

has disrupted his sleep, and above indicate, she filed a formal complaint about the process. and stated that we should experience was not put her child's needs effort. and resigned interest share the story is because our process is able to share the feelings as well as the successes, so then we can take this incident and send it to leadership of these different agencies. so when reports are different, these cases are very different. reports of abuse need to be handled carefully than a regular investigation, cops, contact with these cases. often needs to unlearn the basic skills and use their traits differently. we all live in a world where inconsistency is normal, impression change and people to protect those who harm them don't know why they were harmed by those who are charged to protect them. these victims responsibly to violence and other adult witnesses of crimes. and those factors are taken into consideration in every interview. our center reduces trauma by

providing a single point of contact at a child and family friend facility. this multidisciplinary team meets weekly to make sure no case falls through the cracks. if there is immigrants to particles and procedures by law enforcement we provide the training and that urgency as well. we also educate the community on a very tight shoestring budget to urge adults to take responsibly for protecting kids. as we learned, unfortunately, the last few weeks at penn state and cities, adults how to report abuse. it is not strong enough for the child to report what happened to the. we needed them to out for them. there is great need for committee collaboration and that's how i met jackie who testified before you this one did she want to start her own nonprofit, and i covered a nonprofit, said that slicing you want to do. [laughter] what i encouraged her to work with us and she's been a model bolger and believing i would hire to do if i could find the funny but we need to encourage more collaboration. and other that's one of the recommendation this task force can make is that programs need

to work together to support successful efforts. we operate a big tents would bring everybody under the tent, and we do more than just helping in cases of child sex abuse, as local law enforcement agents, many who have been here today, have come across their cases, they recognize the fact that we can just help them make their investigation better pics better pics of not just any child sex abuse case but also in cases of human trafficking, domestic violence and other forms of maltreated. we're breaking this house advises people to come to a centers would help them with their investigation. however, there are other systems that need to be a part of this. the juvenile justice, probation. these systems need to be added as well. three things need to happen. there's a singly outlined the next have that can happen to all of you. one is funding to defend childhood must be made a priority. they are are just insufficient

fund support and even an understanding for this most critical programs. nationally they're simply just put together through local, federal and both robert fund. here in baltimore we barely get funded, less than 10% in the city we strive to serve, despite the fact that our process have asked me to save over 1000 off churchill which translates to almost $1 million saved per year. congress recently authorized the victims of child abuse act with $89 which is meant to cover 700 sites and national trend but it is my that is appreciated that it's wholly insufficient to serve. we are a best practice, and i often cite the studies to show that we help those who have been abuse and we can recommend the greater funny can be made and made readily available to the centers like ours in a multi-collaborative agencies needed with course skills. number two, i have to agree with many people have said. we need public awareness and

prevention education. this needs to be brought to the highest level. this is a public crisis that is going on right now in our country. if this was a disease without our mission to the moon like process been every together to find that your. and yet the numbers, 75 and children will be abuse over the next 18 years, it dwarfs anything else we're doing. and those become the root causes for all the other elements that were throwing money at right now. bolding and childhood obesity, truancy. we can help effect that change if we can begin to publicly educate people on the need to stop abuse. and there are many great models that exist. they needed into the hands of parents and the school. chief goodwin is correct that many children feel safe in schools i must find ways and find ways to have this but many senators are in to go online and do that here to have some examples are beginning to have mandatory education in the school system. and i believe that the recommendations the task force should have, that every state,

every state must have some form of child abuse prevention education available to it. and, finally, datasharing. doctor was right. when you access to the great trove of data that is out of the gusto many silos that exist. i love judge martin's suggestion the chevy principle in the poor house accessing that data. if we integrated system can only send you can look at that data. we have to have better datasharing. quite often school system doesn't know that the child if there bought to send out for truancy is a child of his -- a child has been abused. >> thank you, mr. rosenberg. i just want to open it up for question. we have about 15, 16 minutes. >> thank you. thank you very much. i learned a lot in a very short

amount of time. and i just, i have a question about, for judge martin and dr. abramson. are there any cases that you would screen out of work that you do? in other words, are the cases that are so egregious that sitting in a circle to potentially create more problems than it could potentially solve? >> first of all, i wanted to mention earlier that our model court also involves tribal courts and the national, i would as an individual to testify on congress on the hill to include tribal courts and the cd funding. they concluded the funding. but your answer is no. we do child protection mediation in cook county. i do domestic violence cases and all other cases, and the way we do it may be different so i had teams of mediators tried to mediators but i never do them with one mediated. i the deputies around to get the person is in custody, i have extra protection for the staff

and mediators. we do put in different protections, but i will not preclude any case from going to mediation, and i may make them go more than once because mediation in my jurisdiction talks about all the non-legal issues, who is going to help the kid on visits to drop off? you know, drop off visits, parenting time with her dad when mom is in a new relationship and dad can't stand mom or can't stand a new partner. those kind of issues on how to get along with the family, even if the partner is in custody and they're not there for murder, they will get out one day. i've got to make certain that they learn how to communicate on behalf of my child. and so i demand the mediation. the more serious the case, the more serious the valley, the more violence in baltimore i require mediation. >> what if the victim doesn't want to participate because i was -- i will still require

mediation. if they choose not to that's why. they still have, that figure how to committee. families have to communicate. >> i would say the same thing except that we maintain a process as a voluntary process. so if anybody can any key participants decide not to, then we won't do it. >> thank you for asking that question. i had the same one. naked very much. but at the end of the last count i asked the question that i was told the panel would respond to. over and over again we've heard about the importance of multidisciplinary, multi-agency community and public sector collaboration, sharing of information. so my question is, what are the impediments, if any, that we should address to multiple agency, sharing information on a case-by-case basis, or on an

overall program planning level? >> me i? >> excuse me, thank you, each of you. your excellent. it's late in the day. >> one of the impediments i think is tended toward. support of the need that there is a lack of willpower sometimes or even a lack of understanding that we can share the information. so it takes a lot of time for me as an executive director, i go to meet with both school administration as well a school principal parts i think we are to educate both top level and bottom level that we're here to help them we can provide some information sharing. some of us frankly, you know, it's perhaps a confusion that people are so deathly afraid of violating hit the that they don't realize it we do have the multidisciplinary agreement in baltimore at the states attorneys office chairs and the police can share with the department of social services, can share with health practitioner. how we would do that on a senate committee were taught how to bring bring in private health care practitioners so we can

share the information within as well. but it's remarkable that in your 2011 were still so far away from that, that we are so intricately wired and interconnected internet away that you can follow my tweets on my facebook post but in another sense i have no inability to sort of hide the various portals of information together that can serve a child or a family. sometimes fortified agencies may be certain one household at any given time. it's a waste of money and what a waste of time and resources. we need to streamline that. some of it off in these -- [inaudible] recommendation. but i think the recommendation needs to say companies the recommendation that these people need work together. that there can be information sharing. that it can be lost that can be put out there sort of opened up greater exceptions so that information can be sheer. that there can be a census put in place that it is shared and set up that then these other programs that may be available from federal government down in

terms of that. how we have incentives on your highways, there's a lot of highway related to what the state or local jurisdiction does. why can't we do the same thing with the federal justice money? >> common language issue? >> absolute. and i think there are regulations that forbid certain information sharing, and schools and others in particular often don't want to share the information that they can share because of turf issues and other such things. and i agree that it should be instant pictures like we incentivize the federal government to sacrifice electronic medical records. why not incentivize appropriate information sharing at that level? i think that would make a big difference. i will just add, on a very local level all you need is the judge's order. [laughter] >> we have the same problem in

cook county and all i've done is issue an order to the hospitals to get medical records, and i said the orders think it has to be first in line and medical records department, no one questioned my jurisdiction so i kept going. and going to chicago public schools, like with it i told you i went to me, i have no jurisdiction to be there but i was issuing orders to i guess the appellate court has to tell me i'm wrong and they haven't figured it out yet or no has taken to them. so get a court order. >> i will file that order. [laughter] >> you all are wonderful and like to all of you in my committee, i do want, there are lots of reasons why things don't proliferate, but we keep hearing the same story. anywhere you go around the country. so at the rate of getting going, dr. abramson, and mr. rosenberg, could you please really say something about how come, out of