i do mean that in an accusatory way. i think all of us were caught by surprise. can you reflect from your time there on the inside how this played out within the obama administration? what do you think the administration got right? what do you think they maybe got wrong in responding to these events in real-time? >> well, first, i think you're right about the fact that everybody was caught by surprise. the truth is that nobody predicted what would happen. i will take a little story because it tends to validate this point. in the summer of 2010, the president signed out a decision memorandum that was to launch a whole of government review of our approach to the middle east on the question of reform. and was based on the premise basically that steve, you were describing that president bush had articulated, that the kind

of, the reality of the region was creating maybe an illusion of stability but not the fact of stability. and that you couldn't, the formula that existed was not one that was going to be sustainable over time, and that in a sense our relationship with some of our arab friends that were authoritarian regimes that were rooted in traditional strategic sets of interests were understandable one level, but the cost of association was passionate with them was going to go up because they're about to sustained himself with power was going to become increasingly more problematic. now, i tell you this not simply too great a backdrop, but in the course of doing this review and taking a hard look at a lot of the questions associated with our relations, we not only have a lot of internal discussions, we brought in some people, some of the think tanks around town and around the country, but we also at one point brought in 30

activists from the region. and i met with them, and this was six weeks before the man set himself on fire and effectively set the region on fire. they were from anywhere in the region. when i say activists, that almost everyone of them had been arrested. they all have a huge stake in belief and commitment to transform the realities in the region. and the changing what was the authoritarian situation they found themselves in. at one point i asked the question house and you think change come. and 30 of them, and they were from morocco, tunisia, egypt, yemen, bahrain. meaning they covered the whole breadth of the region but not one of them thought change would come soon. this was six weeks before mohammed fcc sets himself on fire. and is not a criticism of them. it's that they look at the situations like many of us do and said as a look at this an abstract we say this is not a

sustainable reality. but when you look at at the reality of trying to change governments that the good is having a monopoly, no hesitancy in terms of being repaired to use it. a determination to keep themselves in power, a sense that they themselves were not organized in a way that would necessarily produce change, they drew the conclusion that you wouldn't see change happen very quickly. so people of the greatest stake in change themselves, and by the way, not that they represented geographically, they also represented demographically. and they didn't see it coming. we can go through all the reasons why it eventually erupted. so the fact that they didn't see coming is, doesn't come as a huge surprise that we didn't see it coming when it came. wendie king, the the administration was confronted with a lot of very immediate dilemma but there were debates

from inside which won't surprise you, between those who said look, this is not only the right thing, it's also represents kind of the sweep of history and we should be on the right side of history. they were those who felt that, particularly when you look at egypt, and saw the relationship with mubarak, we see, you can change is coming, but you can't see them sweep away 30 years of friendship that would be seen by the rest of the region? how would it be seen by the rest of our friends? how they interpret this? many of our friends in different parts of the region were at the highest level, calling and saying for god's sake, if you're going to get us in the bar, what does that mean about as? the real world, policymaking you have to make choices between options, many of which are not all that desirable and sometimes you choose the ones that you think are least bad.

in this particular case, a judgment was made to convince mubarak that his own desire to preserve a kind of egypt that he himself, you, put a premium on, which was stability was the only answer to that was to create a transition. the transition where he would leave. and where his son would replace him. and even i have to say, even within the context of what i just described there was a debate about how hard you push that versus how to manage this. the basic decision that in the end was made a decision that would have us, actually had the president speak to mubarak, in addition to the fact that a decision was made to send an emissary, frank wisner, to try to manage the transition. and again when you look at the debates, you can imagine the

debates between those who are saying it's not only the strategic interest of some of our friends in the region who are going to be highly unsettled, it looks like you're walking away from a friend of 30 years, but also there's the question of all right, what's going to replace them? and what is, what's the reality about trying to manage the transition. and, frankly, to take the point that steve made earlier, we are not the ones were driving this. we are not the ones, we are not the people, too many people in the streets. the best way to try to exercise it. there was a conversation that the president had with mubarak that can only be described as a dialogue of the deaf, because the president was saying to mubarak, you know, you were a

child of egypt, a patriot, you have sought to do a great deal for your country. and now the greatest thing you can do for your country is to help to manage that transition. and mubarak said, i have to say this, words that i go in my ears because over the years when i served in different administrations, and i dealt with mubarak, even though my main responsibly was on the peace issue, there were a number of times when i would raise the issue of reform with him and even i would raise the issue of what was immediate with him, and he would tell me i was naïve, that i didn't understand. and that i didn't understand his people, he did. and he wasn't there to preserve stability, then chaos would emerge. the muslim brotherhood would take over, you know, and he would paint these various

scenarios, and explain to him, it's hard to see how, if things didn't change, he wouldn't face it anyway. in this particular case in this conversation, the president was trying to persuade him, and he said you don't understand my people. you will see, this will all blow away. the president literally said, you know, what if you're wrong? you know, you could be wrong. and he said, mubarak said no, no. you don't understand to the president said let's talk again in 24 hours. let's just see. and he said no, let's do several days. and there was just, he was living in a world of complete denial. i will say this, that after he made his initial speech, we got a lot of feedback from a lot of the people in positions at that night after made initial speech where he talked about waiting until september, the family

wouldn't succeed him, we got a lot of feedback or indicated that action of the mood was all right, let's not humiliate him, and in effect we have, you know, we have succeeded because he's going to leave and is going to be a transition. and everything changed the next day when suddenly those who identified with him to send it on tahrir square, dissented on to demonstrate and wielded files. everything switched and the game is over. but he still didn't understand. he was still in denial. what i think is, as a broad principle, i think the administration got right the fact that you're to manage transition. but you also have to realize the limits of how much we would be able to manage the transition. the effort to identify with the spirit of what was on the street i think right.

one can debate the question of, should we have done more, sooner? there's the question of what it is exactly we could have done. you know, there was an effort made that i think was right, to realize that we ourselves are unlikely to have that kind of credibility that others there, people on the street basically would look to us as being a symbol of change. we were too associated for too long with the mubarak machine to have that kind of credibility. i can also tell you that i spoke to a number of egyptians who basically were saying to me, what does the united states know about transition? hungry know something about transition. polo know something about transition. indonesia know something about transition. when did you have your transition? one of the things we try to focus on early on was not work with the e.u. but working with a number of those countries that have transitioned to see if we

could develop what were a common set of themes that we would all be using because that would have a greater likelihood of recent active and have a greater degree of credibility. could we have done more to try to help the forces that needed i think greater identity and organization? we certainly could have tried, and i think we did to some extent. you know, i think that in retrospect, i'm not sure that, i think that on the issue of what we could have been doing and saying publicly, i think we were basically right. i think on the issue of how we could have tried to orchestrate with others more, sooner, we could have done more. on the issue of how we dealt with, and have dealt with the staff, the obama administered in debt with them come here again there were a lot of high level

treaties to them. the question was, maybe more could have been done with them sooner to impress upon them the need to adopt, not just the words of transition, but much more credibility when it came to how they were responding to real freedom of speech. some of what they did, people they threw in prison early on just undercut their own credibility. and they think they were also creatures of habit. it was hard for them to break. unit, the short answer is getting this exactly right is may be easy to describe theoretically and hard to do practically. >> all right. a question for elliott. elliott, doing it good part community unique dual roles of being the white house's point man on democracy, human rights and religious freedom promotion, and also point man for middle

east policy. and we heard steve reflect a little bit of some of president bush's strategic vision and new calculations for the order in the region. as you look back now on your time with the bush administration, if you could engage in a little bit of reflection of self-criticism perhaps, what do you think the administration got right and what you think the administration could have done better on these issues of democracy reform, human rights, religious freedom, in the broader middle east? >> self-criticism. it's a very chinese. nogma[inaudible] >> well, i think that after 9/11, president bush begin an effort to understand what happened, why did it happen, why

this hatred, and hatred of what? and why from saudi arabia, in particular, so many of -- and i think he came to a few which steve described. that is, that it was, and it was a view that was beginning to be more broadly expressed in the region, the famous 2002 arab human development from undp, that there was a freedom deficit in the region. that is, that what, what the bin laden, for example, was against the whole world, was against the saudi regime. and that you could, you could see this as a problem in the political, especially political organization of these regimes. we saw this.

i think that analysis was correct. and that led the president to do these regimes were not actually stable. now, he said, you know, that change is the work of generations. he did not say, you mark my words, india this will all be gone. we thought it would take a lot longer. but i think the fundamental analysis that these were not stable regimes because they relied exclusively on force, i would make an exception here to some extent, for the monarchies which have some legitimacy, varying degrees of legitimacy but not zero. in what i would call the safe republics, what did they have to say for themselves? it didn't have legitimacy. they were repressive and violent, and they were not producing. if you want to compare it to china. you couldn't say well, the number of people have been moved out of poverty, no arguments

really in favor of these regimes except inertia. which after all had worked. i remember in discussions you could talk about why in theory they're all going to fall, but we have been hearing about that for a long time. and the only come in the arab world the only regime that followed was the one that we brought down in iraq. the others, decades after decades after decade. now, i think president began to act on this. remember the 20 anniversary, and his second inaugural, and for egypt, condi rice's speech at american university, cairo 2005. now, could we have done more, yes. and the pressures against, dennis has referred to some, their very great because, you

know, the united states government is not an ngo. an ngo which has the luxury of having one interest, religious freedom, political freedom, anti-slavery, whatever it is. the united states government has a number of interest. dennis mentioned it in a number of his conversation with president mubarak were in the context of seeking arab-israeli peace. with the same, i will call it a problem, which is that once in 2007 and eight the administration was pushing hard again as and after annapolis for an israeli-palestinian peace treaty. the view of president mubarak saw this because he was, in fact, very useful, and a deep the egyptians still are useful. now it's the staff in the israeli policy in context. so i was in the long run i think this was a mistake. someone who saw, who was in

cairo recently and met with secularists, liberals, and muslim brotherhood officials said to me that all of them said we remember very fondly 2004, five, six when you are really pushing mubarak, because he did respond by opening political space, some. i think it had we pursued a policy over, you know, 35 to 40 years of greater pressure on these regimes, more political space would have been created, which would have benefited us in the sense that people would not just remember 2004, five, six, but say you are always on our side against these regimes. and it would benefit them. because what's happened now is, regimes where there was no politics, tunisia, libya, egypt. now are open for politics. and they have no practice.

they haven't moved slowly and steadily into greater degrees of political activity. they go from zero to 100 miles an hour. and maybe if the united states had, over five or six presidents, go back to ford if we want, or general grant, maybe had we been pushing harder all along, maybe there would have been greater political space, and the shock of trying to develop it from nothing would be less. and i guess i would just make one more point, and that is, it would be especially useful to the people who united states tend to view as the most closest to us. which is to say, liberals in the general sense. people who want a kind of secular liberal state.

because they are the ones who have had, who have zero experience where as the brotherhood of various countries seem to. when i argue with friends who bemoan the passing of, politically of president mubarak, one of the things i point out is, you know, we are where we are in egypt. they are where they are due in large part due to mubarak who did not crush the muslim brotherhood. he played footsie with the muslim brotherhood. you can have 90. you crush the center. and that's one of the reasons, if not the reason, one of the reasons that center is quite weak, and got what, 20% in the recent election. >> well, we have heard each of our panelists reflect in some ways on his own experiences and assessment of his time in office. one thing i have been struck by

is the existential sympathy if you of the policymakers from different parties often have for each other. even if there may be significant policy differences, usually for the man or woman who sat there in the office, had to make some tough decisions that all three have referred to, is essential yeah, it's really hard, and it's one thing that doesn't pop up on and off a page. it's another thing altogether on the other hand for those who have positions, sometimes critiques can be more pointed as will because you do feel like you have a sense of what can and can't be done. so with that preface, i'd like to give our panelists a chance to assist each other's administration. not personal, but stephen, if we can start with you, what would be your assessment of the obama administration's record thus far on democracy, religious freedom in the arab spring? dennis, you'll get your chance as well. >> so, i get a couple questions that will will ask him and i see this one and i laugh out loud.

you know, it's sorry, will. you know, look, these are very difficult issues. and i want to give you one more thing yet that is relative to what elliott talk about. and it's not been written a lot about. in 2005, you know, there are experts here who can correct this. egypt goes to elections. the first one is a presidential election and in the second is parliamentary in 2005 and six, and its two stages. so, i asked national security advisor and president mubarak right hand man come to washington to condi and i have dinner with just three of us. i think maybe john gold was there as well. and -- [inaudible] >> no, john. for a lot of reasons. and we said to the general, this

is your chance. this is mubarak the chance. let him out of jail. let him run. and run an open free and fair election. mubarak is going to win. he will win with 69% of the vote. who cares that it's 73 or 85? but have a free and fair election, and have him campaign. has been described to the egyptian people what he's going to do. we sat there for about two and a half hours, and he said well, what about the secret service? we said we know what there's going to be demonstrations. don't crack down on them. and we talked about how you have to work with your security forces to maintain law and order, but in the context of free and fair elections. we spent two and half hours, and he was taking notes. and they did a lot of that, and mubarak did go out and campaign. and after that election, the egyptian press was saying, egypt

will never be the same. and so we said, great job, you're on the road, go to the parliamentary elections. the first round of the parliamentary elections occurred, and the brotherhood, not surprisingly, since mubarak had destroyed the center, and the muslim brotherhood was the only vehicle for expressing dissent left. the muslim brotherhood starts to do well. and mubarak got scared, and in the second part of the parliamentary election, they crashed down. and at that point, our effort to get mubarak to reside over transition into. it's not that we didn't keep talking about freedom of democracy that the president didn't keep making the case with mubarak, but we got, you know, you don't understand our people, we tried your experiment and it blew up in our face.

it's a hard business, and you know, one of the challenges for the obama administration is for those regimes that have not had revolutions, the monarchies which elliott spoke out, have a legitimacy and are trying in their own way to reform. one of these challenges for the obama administration is to help those regimes actually do a democratic transition before there's a revolution. not after. but i offer the vignette about mubarak. it is very hard, and final postscript come in the last meeting that president bush had with king abdullah of saudi come and we talked once again about reform and applauded king abdullah's reform, on the way out to the van when abdul left. he said mr. president, i understand what you're saying but i'm afraid. i'm afraid. man in his 80s, maybe '90s,

trying to reform your but, you know, such a long way to go. so it is very hard. but one of the things i think the obama administration had an opportunity to do it to try to get these regimes that have some legitimacy to lead their people to a democratic future, without having to go through the disruption of revolutionary change. >> i want to make a couple of comments. you know, one is to offer further explanation on why there isn't dissent. elliott started and i want to add to what he was beginning to describe. and the second point i want to make will relate to the last thing steve was saying, because there have been a lot of focus within the obama administration with precisely what you're describing, and, indeed, having precisely those kinds of conversations, which is, you can see what's coming, get out in front of it, and then offering

certain kinds of suggestions. let me offer the first observation. mubarak very much did what elliott was describing, and he wasn't alone. basically all of the so-called republics, they had no justification for why they were in power. they had no idea that explained what was their reason for ruling. unlike the monarchies had dynastic legitimacy. you could say it has limits but please do is the simplest of legitimacy. they had none. because they had none, they feared in a sense those who could create a narrative, that would justify an alternative. so what they did is, what mubarak focused on was make sure that there could be an alternative narrative. and, therefore, it had to be in a sense a binary situation, it had to be him. in part for our consumption, not just ours but the west, but also internally because he sought to create a sense of fear about

that alternative, and he played upon what has been historically a sense with egypt, the great value and virtue stability. now, he did something along the lines of what elliott was describing, because he did play footsie with the muslim brotherhood. at a certain level they rolled out violence and the crack and very hard on that and they were extremely brutal in that regard. and they outlaw the muslim brotherhood party, as most improved as a party as such. but by the same token they allowed them to take over all the professional syndicates. egypt has a very interesting history in terms of if you look at the judiciary committee back to the 1920s, and over time this developed sms of independence and in a sense they allowed them to come in and take over. you look at all the professional cynic is whether it's the lawyers or the doctors. it was muslim brotherhood who came to dominate. this was okay from mubarak's standpoint. because in a sense this was the

way he lived and let live with the muslim brotherhood. he gave him a kind of outlay. and by the same token anybody who was under the rubric of secular and liberal, no possibility of emerging. no tolerance for them. basically we are in a situation where you had one place that was seen as being completely authentic and off limits, precisely because the regime didn't have let -- didn't have legitimacy which was the mosque. in the mosque you have freedom of speech. people in the mosque would stand up and say things. you come to the mosque and you see people who stand up and they're not getting in. and they knew how to play on the anger that people felt. and the fact that they didn't have an alternative or outlet, and so here was the mosque where you assume is a freedom of speech, where you were allowed to organize, the brotherhood could organize, where the embodiment of being non-corrupt was seen, and the sense of

being, in a sense also the embodiment of social justice was seen because they would engage providing clinics. ..

secondly, they're not allowed to organize. so when the time comes and they're able to use the, the young generation is able to use the social media and the internet. they're able to organize around a principle of opposition. but they're not in position where they have had the time to create in a sense an identity, an agenda, a platform, where they think how do we now present ourselves and identity to the public. we have all the disadvantages in the early going and. there is one very interesting change in everything that happened if we use the word awakening and that is this was a region that was characterized, since i'm in an academic setting i will use the jargon. this was a subject political culture, not a participatory political culture and what's happened in the last year, this is one of the reasons i don't despair although i'm not feeling easy about where

things are, the fact is people in this part of the world today increasingly see themselves as citizens, not as subjects and the citizens they should have rights and as citizens they can make demands. as citizens they have expectations. as citizens they should be able to hold their governments accountable. what they don't have and this gets to the point elliot was make as well, they don't have institution that are there that allow them to express what citizens would express and it is going to take time to build those institutions. one of the things that has to happen now, playing upon their self-image of being citizens and the fact that they feel they have a voice and they're not simply going to give up that voice it's important to create standards of accountability. and again on our own we can't do this because we don't have the credibility to be able to do it and it's very easy to try to blame things on us but the more the narrative of blame is the one that is adopted, you

know the more you're not going to see one house built, one job created and it is not going to address where the demands and expectations. there are things that can be done but you will will have to create standards of accountability as it relates to the reg gym wheres islamists have all the advantages. get to the what steve was saying it is essential and administration done a lot of this and done it at lot of different levels and there have been sustained conversations especially with the whole range of our friends, the one thing you can see in the region you see a sense of citizenship emerging and you're going to have to find ways to respond to that you will have to create a sense of inclusion. you will have to create a sense that people have the means to participate in somehow shaping their own future and their own destiny. it is an easy thing to say. it is a hard thing to do precisely because you get back to what king abdullah said to president bush.

many of them will say we understand. i'm not going to identify the individuals who say this now because they're in power. many of them say they will understand but they don't quite know even when we make suggestion, even when we suggest ways we and others can be helpful they don't quite know how to take the steps that will be responsive without unleashing a set of forces that they fear will undo them. and there aren't too many people in power who will take steps they think will actually undo their hold on power. >> thanks. well, dennis, especially since you brought up the question of islamists and the mosques and also this shift in identity from the subject to citizen that brings us to, the main topic for the gathering here today which is the question of religious freedom. elliot i will put this question to you first and i would like the others to reflect on it as well. what is the role of religious freedom in these ongoing transformations?

when we hear religious freedom is that a stalking horse for a greater role for islamism which in turn will be regressive or is religious freedom potentially a key solution to pluralism and to creating these institutions and habits of citizenship that dennis was talking about, especially for nonislamist muslims as well as minorities such as christian and jews? >> why do i get the easy question? seems to me a very difficult question. these are countries in which for the most part there was a fair amount of religious freedom for the most part. the restrictions on religious freedom tend to be two kinds. one minorities. for example, in many, many of these countries there are laws against changing your religion from islam to

another religion. and then there were the restrictions that the state put on the muslim brotherhood and other expressions of, let's call it islamist belief. now the systems are open and you can have something closer to popular sovereignty. it raises a question of religious freedom again and it is interesting, i wrote a column in monday "washington post" that criticized tunisia not because it is worst example at all of difficulties but because it is so important because it was the first and it is kind of the model. well everybody says tunisia has a really good chance of making it. the movie, persoplis was shown. and this led to led to prosecutions that showed it on the ground because it

offended public morals because there was a scene in which one of the people of the movie had visualization of her mind of god, an image of god and i said that's a violation of freedom of expression to go after, for the state to prosecute and it is, it is wrong and i had a liberal tunisia ann friend, say to me, no, no you're wrong. here is why, we're trying, this is brand new to us. we're trying to, he would have said a liberal democracy and there are a million issues and one of the toughest issues is precisely the kind of thing you're talking about. if you push those issues, you americans, complete freedom of expression in the religious realm, then tunisiaians, none of want to see that kind of movie and,

tunisiaians will say, salafists are right. democracy is right. bring chaos and sacrilege, prostitution, homosexualty and that is the line that is given by the salafists. and, you know he is not wrong but he is not right either. what i, what i wrote back to him was the problem with what you're saying there is no limiting principle. first of all, there are no tunisiaians who want to see do not want to see the movie, a ward winning and only 20% of the country and they don't count? if the argument is you can't show a movie like that because the vast majority of tunsians don't want to see it, both the vast majority

of tunsians don't believe women should be allowed out of the house with a burka. is that okay too because the vast majority? there is no limiting principle. that is my problem with that argument that. so i think, what you are going to have is to some extent a competition among the freedoms that we want to see these countries adopt. you will see this happen in election campaigns where islamists, say generally will argue against the secular parties they will take you down the road that is going to end with french-style secularism there is no place for religion in the public square want and take you down the road to sodom and ga mora. gomorrah. which will sell in

someplaces in the region. the answer that we won't have freedom of religion for 25 years until things settle down can not be right either. i think it is a complicated interplay and not a simple question of sort of saying, well, every kind of freedom you can think of should now advance at exactly the same pace and will advance at the same pace because after all they're all, they're all interrelated. i do think that we have a role here. the american style of secular system not the french style and i think we should be trying to explain sand to defend the american model because ba i think a lot of people in the middle east are beginning to become in tunisia, also, familiar with and realize it may be a much better model than the french model but also we, you know, we don't believe in majority rules period, end of sentence, end of paragraph. we believe in liberty under law. we have a constitution.

it has three articles to begin with how the state is constructed. it has 10 amendments about freedom. and i think that we do need to say repeatedly and out loud that we don't view democracy as the ability of those who get 51% to impose anything they like on everybody else. that is not what this struggle is all about. >> steve? >> i want to pick up on that. i think, you know, the religious freedom is extremely important to us, extremely important i think as a value. you know, i was, i looked at the 10 amendments elliot was talking about and the first amendment, i well i better check that. i think it starts out with freedom of speech. for those of you who don't have your pocket constitution with you, actually the first amendment says, congress shall make no law respecting establishment

of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof and only then do you get free speech and assembly and all the rest. i think in some sense if you've got freedom of religion the other parts of that amendment follow on as corollaris. so freedom of religion is very important. but as lawyers say, hard cases make bad law. and if we force these regimes coming out of their history as a first issue to deal with that question of how far does freedom of religion reach, an issue that has bedeviled our country for 200 years, you will hobble their democracy and i think at that is elliot's point. it is very difficult to draw that line. we're struggling to do it after 200 years. if we put that on these governments as first order of business they won't make it. so what should we be doing? i think something short of that. something that will enable

the resolution of those questions but does not force them prematurely. and that is religious tolerance. and that's where i would make the focus. marlon washer, who is known to a lot of you, i was on a panel with him a month or so ago, he said something i thought was very profound. he said in the middle east neither arab nationalism or political islam had a tradition of tolerance and plurallism. and that's what the middle east needs. now why does he say that? because if the middle east can not solve the issue of tolerance, then you're going to have a situation where the political authoritarianism of the mubaraks is going to be replaced by religious authoritarianism which is what the middle east is now. either shia oppressing sunni or sunni oppressing shia and both of them beatings up on

the kurds and everybody else. that is the threat to democracy and freedom under the long term in the middle east. so what does that mean, we, and elliot is right, we have a role, we need to be pushing for religious tolerance. for understanding that majority rule does not mean you get to impose your values on everybody else and that there has to be some space between the state and religion. and interestingly enough, prime minister erdouan of turkey helped in that in a speech he made in cairo that actually angered a lot of islamists because he came and said look, the state should be eke qau distant from all religions and no religions. and the state ought to run a system where all religions have a place but the premise of that is going to be tolerance. and i think that's what we need because if there is going to be stability over the long term there has to be tolerance as an element

of democracy because if we go to sectarianism where one religious group is able to impose their view on the other, that is also an instability waiting to go viral. so i would say tolerance. >> dennis. >> religious freedom and islamism and arab spring. >> i think, i don't really have much to add to what either elliot or steve have said. i think they not only captured it effectively by eloquently. i think this is not a difference and probably it is not even, may be simply a semantic way of saying the same thing steve just said. i think the critical point here is respect for minority rights. and if what, again when i was talking about standards of accountability i was trying to get at the idea that there are political standards of accountability and there are economic standards of accountability. and one of the political standards of accountability has got to be you preserve a space for competition. when you preserve a space for competition it means you

also have to respect the views and rights of others. so, there has to be, and you were both saying this, it is not majoritarian rule. there has to be, the right of those who get elected have a right to make laws but they have to respect the rights of minorities. and if there's a respect for minority rights and by definition there will be tolerance, and this i think is going to be a really, this is going to be a hard slog and we see it by the way in the egyptian muslim brotherhood right now because you see, you see a kind of pulling and thrashing there over exactly trying to define what the role of, you know, religion is going to be as it relates to the state. everyone may say they're all for article 2 which is the rule of sharia in egypt and enshrined in law but there actually is a difference mopping those who feel it should be much more

omnipresent role and those who see there has to be a kind of separation. the extent i agree with both my colleagues up here on the idea that we have a role to play, the one thing i would add, i think we'll be more effective if we can build what months to a large number of partners saying this internationally and repeating it over and over and over again so it become as mantra. if it become as mantra. then it becomes something that the muslim brotherhood in particular will realize the world is watching at a time by the way they want help but if they want help they have to meet certain standards but also their own publics will, it seems into the bloodstream in a way with their own publics. as i said, i think they have the psychology of being citizens but they don't have the existing mechanisms in terms of how to act on that. >> i want to put one more question to our panelists before we turn it over to the audience for any of your questions here as well.

this is on a country that is not necessarily associated with arab spring but argue bring some might say the early seeds of arab spring were not just in tunisia in 2010 but in iran in 2009 with the green movement protests. headlines on iran these days mostly have to do with the impasse over their nuclear weapons program but i would like to ask the panelists, elliot, i will begin it with you, i always put the hard ones first. given the nature of the iranian regime is almost defined by a particular brand of religious intolerance, do you think that religious freedom advocacy whatever that might look like might be a way into the side door of promoting reform moderation, better path forward in iran especially given religious minorities as well as many iranian muslims who don't share the regime's termtation? >> i do. i think the think the people of irran have not been inoculated against this form

of political and religious organization by having the horrible experience of living under it. they have seen what it really means in terms of intolerance and repression and corruption and i believe they would vote against it if there ever were a free election. which is not why there will not be a constitutional referendum in iran asking the people whether they want it anymore. so i think, it is something that will change when this regime some day falls. i think there are many, many, iranians, we'll never know the exact numbers until iran is free but, who believe that this is a corruption of shia islam. in fact i think it is and it is a great change from the way shia islam has been practiced at least for the last couple of centuries. they have really, i think, essentially destroyed the system of having emulated

leaders marjia by bringing them all under the state which ruins them and the entire system. and it is not therefore surprising that some of the most important resistance to the regime comes from the clerical establishment that and in fact, there were several prominent shia leaders including some grand ayatollahs who refused to vote in the recent elections on the grounds it was all such a corrupt, such a corrupt political system. ultimately i, and they look around i'm sure and they realize that in some of the arab countries we've seen free elections in tunisia, in egypt, islamist parties win a free election, big victories but in iran the

population is really disgusted with the kind of islam that the state is forcing on them and they realize what that means, the future of shia islam in iran. so i think, in the case of iran, the, carve out an exception here but generally speaking the push for religious freedom is very helpful overall in arguing for a, a better future for iran. i am troubled by one part of this picture and that's the high. this regime has been really vicious and bloody and murderous when it comes to the bahai who have had troubles in a lot of is islamic countries including egypt. never as terribly as iran. and i don't know whether the

post-islamic republic in iran will understand. this is all part of the same disease of intolerance and should be ended, or whether what you will find is people saying, the state should not try to impose what is the correct form of shia islam on us but, the bahai are hair ticks so that can't be tolerated -- heretics. what we hope this experience teaches tolerance not only for your own group obviously but by definition, the real meaning of it is tolerance and i would hope they would go beyond that to real religious freedom. but at least tolerance for those not in your group. >> steve? >> i want to go back, i think the answer, i would have given a different answer and i think elliot's actually right. my answer now would be having been informed by my colleague, is yes but in a

sort of indirect way, and i go back, actually to that first amendment. congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. and those, you know, for 200 years there is tension between those and i think it helps iran in the following way. if the watchword is free exercise of religion and free exercise of all religions, that requires a tolerance of all religions. if you're going to have a tolerance of all religions, then you can not have a state founded on a religion because it is inconsistent with freedom of religion and the free exercise of religion by all groups. and that really is the issue in iran. you have a thee ecratic -- theocratic based regime.

the region will have to conclude that has not worked to the benefit of the people and that you can't establish a government on the base inch of the slogan, islam is the answer. if your question is, what is the answer to all political problems and the question of how to found a political system, islam is the answer, the region's going to have to decide on that sense to that question, no, it isn't. and in that sense iraq is ahead of iran and because of the remarkable character of ayatollah sistani, who in the early early days of 2003 all the political parties came to ayatollah sistani, tell us what to do, he was self-limiting as to power. that is to say he said no. that is a political

question. you need to work it out. i think that is the right answer and i think as part of this tolerance dimension, the second piece of that is the region will have to understand that a political system based on religion is not the answer. >> dennis? >> i don't have a lot to add. it is one of the points that elliot made i think is exactly right in iran. what this regime has done is give religion a bad name and in many respects it is probably discrediting it for the future and the, it is one of the ironies that it is, we've seen a decline in the power of the clerics under this regime. we've seen militarization of the regime and powers being taken in a sense away from the clerics. it is also as elliot was saying, the quietest rule of shia islam which is really

dominant one which sistani represents is a polar opposite of what has emerged within iran. so, you know, i think at some point, in iran we're going to see a change. it is true the focus is on the nuclear issue right now for reasons that are understandable but there is a, i, having been trained initially as a specialist on the soviet union and you can always tell someone's age, you were talking about us not being long in the tooth you can always tell someone's age when they're specialist on a country that no longer exists but the reason i cited as an interesting example i see within iran what looks to be analogous situation to the soviet union in the early 1980 as where ideology, in this case, religion as they describe it, as lost its relevance as being an idea to justify rule. it is there as a cloak and

underneath the cloak you have a kind of corrosive reality which is eating away and will eat away at this regime over time. you can never know and predict how long it takes for something like that to emerge but i do think its impact in iran on religion is going to be increasingly negative over time and we're not going to quite know when this, maybe there will be an evolution from this regime. maybe that's what will happen first but if there isn't, then, there could be a reaction and could be a reaction against religion. >> okay. now we're going to open it up to the floor for any questions. let me say up front that the three stipulations for any question are that you first identify yourself. second you keep it brief and third you keep it civil. so all right, right here. right here in front. microphone is coming around to your right. >> thank you.

[inaudible] i really appreciated hearing the sort of inside stories of talking to mubarak and i think it is really heartening to hear because often this perception that no one in the u.s. government is trying to push these issues and i think it is important. i wonder if you could share stories about other regimes in the region, have those conversations happened? i'm a specialist on yemen and jordan and i know in 2006 yemen had its first real alternative candidate in its presidential election. also, you know, in jordan i'm wondering if there is conversations there? king abdullah, our best friend, very western but the regime is not legitimate i'm sorry to say. the fact that he doesn't have to perform pretend elections every four years and pretend that is what his basis of legitimacy doesn't mean he is widely popularly supported. i wonder if there are conversations there? i wonder if there are conversations with saudi arabia, the other give religion a bad name

countries in the region? i would love to hear more stories from that. >> thanks. all right. >> you know, let me start. one of the problems you run into of course is that while it is true there are some times rulers who respond to these questions which they probably see as lectures by these stupid americans they respond by saying you don't know anything. you don't understand my country. that happens. but what happens with equal frequency is people saying, absolutely. you are right. i'm doing it. i'm with you. i'm ahead of you. when that is just, you know, pablum for us. now there was a period it looked if president salah was moving ahead with democracy. he had a reasonably free election. he had an opponent in that

election and he had a couple of good years. but i think looking back one can say that, you know, he had not sort of read that constitution that said, this is it. i'm there. he did it. he did what we wanted him to do. we and others in position to give him money, the world bank, eu, imf and so forth, and in the case of jordan i'm not sure. that is, the most effective for jordan is the king as his father was. you there isn't anything you can tell the king that he hasn't thought of and said in his most recent speech about his own liberalization in jordan. my sense is he has got a

gigantic problem with division between east bankers and palestinians and the division of spoils in the government. he has got a system where quite intelligently the prime ministers do not come from the royal family. he comes from politics. because that means when people get annoyed after eight months he's gone, the prime minister is gone. he gets a new prime minister. problem you do that every six or eight months year after year people will begin to doubt whether the changes and the reforms are serious. the king has promised in the aftermath of the arab spring real reforms. i don't think there have been real reforms. i, you know, if i, he's worried about something that we're not worried about and this can be positive or negative and that is, i don't think he is so much worried about what is going to happen between now and december. he is worried whether his son will be king of jordan and he's got to sort of

figure that out and it's hard. i think if you try to think, what would you tell him if you were his brother or a close advisor in the royal court, how do you maneuver through this over time? it's, you know, i would argue that the game he's been playing really for 10 years of, i think it is fair to call fake reform will ultimately have to be jettisoned and for real reform. but, i mean given the political situation on the ground there, that is easy advice given from washington and hard to implement in amman. >> dennis or steve? >> i guess i will add a little. i think elliot's description and analysis is quite apt. in the case of salah, clearly there were there were extensive conversations

with the obama administration to move him out to accept the transition n this particular case it was coordinated very closely with the gcc states because they were central to providing him the means. of staying in power. and, it moves with fits and starts. he, as was his wont he would make certain commitments at a certain point, even everything was done and he would back away. and this is a guy who had obviously stayed in power for 30 years and, was pretty good at maneuvering and, that meant not only internally among the tribes but also meant externally with choosing to have certain allies at certain points and choosing to have different allies at different points. in the end he did go alongwith the transition. now obviously there are some very positive signs with this transition. there still are some open

question marks in terms of the, the weight of his own family within the military but it is pretty remarkable to look at what the reaction to these elections were, including among those who had been fighting each other. there was a genuine sense that something profound had now happened. so, you know, look the problems in yemen are enormous. they have few resources. they're running out of water. and, you know, they still have separatist impulses in the south. they have the hutis in the north. they face real challenges but the transition is underway now, to show some promise. clearly it needs a kind of support and the fact is saleh in the end did leave and it came after an enormous effort of a lot of players including the

administration in a kind of repeated way. the number of conversations with him i can tell you were of high frequency and at high levels including the president. and, you know, you're also striking a balance in these cases between what's the right balance between what you say in private and what you do in public? now as someone who has worked in the middle east for a long time what i can tell you with a high degree of confidence and, and i say this at a time when the truth is humility should be the order of the day because none of us predicted what happened and we're not the authors what is unfolding there we should in the first instance have a lot of humility. so when i say the following i'm saying this not only with humility but with some sense of experience you can't limit to what you do only with private. in this part of the world especially with leaders if it is only going to remain private they will never take it seriously. now how you balance what you say in public with what you

say in private it is part of the art. this isn't a science. this is an art. with each leader it is going to be different and you will have to figure out what the is right balance, what is the right moment. when you say it you obviously have more than one audience because others are going to hear it. you have to calibrate this. but if you're going to operate only in private you won't be effective and what worked i think ultimately in getting saleh out was at different times we ratcheted up what we were saying in public but even then we coordinated that with the others who we were felt had even greater leverage in terms of moving him. so, you know, having written a book on statecraft i can say an element of statecraft here is also realizing what you say in public, if you have other actors who are key or at least are, maybe pivotal in terms of helping to succeed in producing the outcome you seek, you also have to orchestrate what you're saying in public and not surprise them.

you see, it isn't just, it isn't just the individual leader you're working on but also who else may be your partners this effort to manage a transition. and that was very much the case in terms of finally getting saleh to agree to go. i don't really have much to add to what elliot said about jordan. i think, i do think that the king now is, is more conscious of the need to try to carry out reforms that will be seen and not just be, not just from an image standpoint but in reality to be real. it is a very hard, very hard nut to crack because, the backbone of his regime, also is recipient of about 80% revenues of the government. if you really are going to open up the system and if you're really going to create the kind of reforms that will allow jordan to

flourish over time, you're going to have to manage the fact that they get 80% of the revenue now. you can't have them go cold turkey without unleashing forces in a sense that you're not going to want to see happen. so again, this is, this is one of these cases where you can do a lot in the laboratory that seems to make sense but in the real world where you have to carry it out it is a very, it is a very hard process, you know, i think to orchestrate. i do think the king has thought a lot in the last year about ways to create not only reforms but also to demonstrate to the reforms are real and also he is looking at models much more than the was the case before and the moroccan model in some respects because both of these particularly monarchies trace their lineage back to the profit,

they have a lot in common. i think he does look to morocco with, as one potential model and, you know, the king of morocco is kind of an interesting example of someone who did look what was happening and decided he had to get out in front of it and, you know, what has emerged there, again, there is never going to be anything that's going to work perfectly but it was emerged has some potential. i think the king of jordan is still trying to think there is that an appropriate model or are there others some hybrids he will try to pursue? my sense he really genuinely is wrestling with this and trying to proceed but the context is a very difficult context and there are no simple answers for it. >> steve may want to go to another question so we have time. >> we've got right here, mike and then over to dan please.

>> yeah, dan filpot from the university of notre dame. thanks for an excellent panel. one of the things i appreciate about it how much each analyst takes here the genuine role of religion in world affairs but it wasn't always so. in his book the eagle and the lion, james @. bell recounts story of a cia analyst who in the 1970s saw religion as being very important in iran saying we've got to look at this. we've got trouble on the horizon. but all of his colleagues ridiculed him and called him mullah ernie was the sobriquet that he earned. my question, how much, how much in u.s. foreign policy as we saw in the attitude towards mubarak, maybe hanging on too long and so forth, how much is u.s. foreign policy shaped by a kind of widely shared

secularism in the u.s. foreign policy establishment? a secularism that says religion is irrational or is irrelevant? how much is that still true today? >> steve, do you want to take first crack at that? >> we'll try to make our answer as little briefer. there is, and elliot alluded to this. there is issue what is secularism. i once had a conversation with conde rice, and i said conde do you consider yourself a secularist and she said, no, i'm a religious person. what do we mean by secularism. the french have a view they have to sit on religion to make sure religion does not intrude in public life. that is kind of secularism i don't buy. i don't think our country buys. i think the best one is, is whatter dough -- erdouan talked about in cairo.

a equestion distant from all religions but about tolerance of all religions >> i think the political establishment is somewhere between the american model and the french model. the american people are between the medical model with something more active place for religion. i think the government has been conscious of that. i will just explain my own experience. i was from '89 to '93 i was in the pentagon. i co-chaired with the deputy, the number two person in the turkish military, a high level panel. i used to talk to him one-on-one how the turkish establishment needed to provide space for religious

population. i think americans agree on and diplomatic community agrees on. at various times that is the model we urged on country is -- countries. you have to "spro" side a space for your citizens. president bush used to say to the chinese the your people at the end of the day will never feel fully satisfied and you will not get the best out of your people if you do not allow some pays for the -- space for the exercise of religion and exercise of the spirit. i think ruffle is where the united states government has been. >> dennis? >> i would add one quick thing. i agree with what steve said. i don't think there is this kind of impulse of people on the inside who have this kind of generalized view. i think it is country by country. you're looking at the circumstances and i think that is actually, that's the way i think most analysts within the government look. i don't think they come with a priority view per se. i want to add one other

point and it's not, i think it is germane but not directly on what you're asking. having been someone who negotiated for a long time on arab-israeli issues, often times i actually wanted to have reledge just spiritual leaders support the premise of tolerance coexistence and speak against nonviolence and i couldn't produce it ever. and i recently met with an interfaith group from the area and included israelis and palestinians and, and for the first time they said they would like to see if they could play a role. and i said, you know, it is interesting historically that has not been the case. indeed i recall in the year 2000 the pope went, you know, went to, made a tour throughout the middle east and went to jerusalem and

went to ramallah, and they came, his representative came in advance to us and wanted to, wanted to create an ecumenical meeting where they could reinforce the importance of tolerance and they put together a meeting in jerusalem. it was a complete disaster and so it was actually refreshing to see an interfaith group come now from the area and want to promote something. so in answer to your question, i didn't, at least, in my own experience i didn't view it as being something that was at odds with peace making although i didn't want this conflict to turn into a religious conflict and then you couldn't settle it. i wanted spiritual leaders to see if they can reinforce the values of tolerance, nonviolence and coexistence. >> the gentleman standing at the back right there. microphone over there, please >> mohammed from the naval

postgraduate school. two quick questions. what is the obama administration's view or assessment of libya moving forward? is democracy going to take hold in libya or if not, what are the challenges that prevent that? secondly some have made the claim that the current administration is cooking the intelligence on syria to prevent an intervention in syria. what is an, what is your assessment of that? >> dennis, i think that's to you. >> i'm assuming it's to me. first, i'm not in the obama administration so, you know, i don't speak for the administration. they have plenty of spokespeople and and i'm not one of them. i would say, obviously i was in the administration for most of what went on libya, including the intervention and its aftermath. i think that there is a continuing hope that what can emerge in libya will be a government that is largely

representative. it will be a government that, you know, is not a government of tribes or sectarianism but it is a government that would, that will be largely representative and inclusiv inclusive representing there are, this is not a simple process to generate. the prime minister of libya was recently here and saw the president. when you speak to the people who are in what is an intermittent administration in libya right now, they are very much committed to trying to produce what would be a representative democracy. now they have, you know, coming after qaddafi and absence of any institutions it is both in some ways easier and harder because, you know, in other places there are what i would describe as sort of ersatz institutions. they're not real. in some way you're trying to take them and reform them.

in libya you're trying to build something out of largely nothing. so there is a potential because of that but there are also all sorts of splits within the country. there is no doubt that the islamists are trying to gain the upper hand but when you talk to people trying to manage the change themselves and many of whom by the way were educated here, they're incredibly impressive. they certainly are saying the right things. whether they can deliver on it remains to be seen but the administration is looking for ways to continue to bolster and move things in a certain direction. and, i would just say on the issue of syria, i don't believe that what just came out at least where there were some intelligence briefing, i don't believe those were by design by the administration. i think they may reflect certain views within the intelligence community. it is not my understanding that they represent the views of the administration. >> we've got one over here.

>> stanley colbert, i'm a georgetown a lump. in october 1789 george washington wrote a letter to governor morris in paris on the french revolution. the revolution, he warned, he said is wonderful he also warned it is of too great a magnitude to be effected in so short a space and loss of so little blood. from running to one extreme to another is no easy matter and should this be the case, rocks and shells not visible in the present may wreck the vessel. i was looking at an article about people in tunisia having a demonstration calling for sharia law. so and i think back to washington going from one extreme to another he warned. he got the stretch revolution right -- french revolution right. it was words applied to our own day. >> elliot.

>> i can give you a firm maybe. we don't know yet. after all, the, the changes in government began roughly a year ago. there are many significant changes replacing regimes that were there for 20, 30, 40 years and i think, you know, we also don't, we know from the experience of, for example, indonesia and malaysia and some others that islamists tend to do best in the first election. dennis mentioned some of the reasons why before because they have the opportunity to organize because they, in the eyes of many people in the country they stand for integrity. they weren't weren't part of the old corrupt system. then what happens they get elected and they can't produce in many cases. islam is not the answer. doesn't tell you how to create economic growth, jobs. and so in a second or third

election, of course then you have to have a second or third election. if there is one, then the tide tends to recede. now will that happen? in tunisia, by the way if it happens in tunisia that proves nothing about whether it will happen in libya or egypt. i think the truth is, we don't know. >> but let's just say one thing. in the egyptian revolution, almost all the casualties were in the first 18 days of the revolt and they were governments shooting at demonstrators. since that time it has been a remarkably peaceful revolution. and though did have a, conduct a the freest and fairest election probably in the history of egypt. so, you know, i think, there are all the risks and it all could go south. but i think you have to give the egyptian people some credit for what they have

done so far and we ought to give them such help as we can and that they are willing to accept because it matters how this comes out. remember, there's another revolution that was made in the name of freedom and democracy in 1979 and that was the iranian revolution and it got hijacked and it has been the principle problem in the middle east for the next 30 years. so how these revolutions come out really matters to the people there but also to us. and that's why we need to be providing such help as we can. >> i think this is a, this is the beginning of a story. we're seeing chapter one of what is going to be at least a 10 chapter book that is going to emerge. we're not the authors of it. they are. but we have a huge stake in what happens there. i don't know what's going to happen you about think, a, i don't think people who suddenly found their voice are going to lose it. b, i think we have a huge stake in figuring out a way

as i was saying before to create standards of accountability because politically and economically because they do have to deliver. and i think, at this point, they're showing signs, at muslim brotherhood in egypt showing signs they have to deliver and i think the same in tunisia. you know, it's i go back to, there was one interview i read of a, of a woman in cairo from one of the poorest districts said she voted for the muslim brotherhood because they weren't corrupt and they would build housing. you know, they get in there and they don't build any housing and they don't create any jobs, i suspect they're going to have a problem. so the key is, as elliot said, got to have repeatable elections. and that is why we need standards of accountability. and we'll see. we have a huge stake but our ability to effect it is limited. >> well, the tolling of the bell reminds me we have to adjourn our panel.

we'll take about a 15 minute break before the next one starts. please join me in expressing our gratitude to our panelists [applause] >> just ahead, more from the georgetown middle east forum as a group of scholars look at the role of islamist religious groups in arab politics following a year of demonstrations and protests. at 1:00 p.m. eastern, live road to the white house coverage of a speech by gop presidential candidate rick santorum who will speak in dixon, illinois. the boyhood home of president ronald reagan on the eve of the state's presidential primary. later the senate returns at 2:00 p.m. iron for a period of general speeches followed bill more debate on a bill to ease securities regulation tosses a sis eye merging small and mid-sized businesses. no roll call votes are expected today.

according to the centers for disease control 1.7 million adults an children sustain traumatic injuries every year. later today a house subcommittee examines, state federal and local efforts to treat these injuries. watch the hearing live beginning at 3:00 p.m. eastern over on our companion network. c-span3. >> in march, 1979 c-span began televising the u.s. house of representatives to households nationwide and today our content of poll and public affairs, and none fiction books and american history is available on tv, radio and online. >> we even had advice we do not do as i did today and come in with a plain old, white shirt and a summer tie. heaven forbid. i don't know whether my colleagues would feel this is better decorum for the senate and i see the

distinguished senator stafford over here, nodding no. but the perhaps the people of ohio would be glad to make a judgement on what they want to see me attired in here in the united states senate. so, mr. president, these are just a few of our concerns here in the senate and i'm sure that none of us will do a thing differently in the senate of the united states now that we are on television. thank you. >> c-span created by america's cable companies as a public service. we return now to georgetown university for another discussion on the middle east focusing on religious freedom and the role of religious groups in the arab world after a year of political unrest. this is a little over an hour. >> let me turn now to this extraordinary panel of experts and introduce them to you. first let me tell you what we've asked them to reflect

on and you will find a remarkable similarity to the other themes of this conference. and this isn't everything we asked them to do. this is will give you a feel for the kinds of things we asked them to give some thought to. whether a free and fair democratic system that makes room for all religious actors including islamists is best for egypt and the other arab spring countries in the long run. second, whether a regime of robust religious freedom which we posit although they may not, is an essential component of religious democracy. whether robust reledge just freedom is likely to moderate the ill liberal radicalism of some of these religious actors. or is it to the contrary more likely to unleash the liberal radicalism and then finally, here we move back into the area we just discussed a bit in our keynote conversation. how can u.s. foreign policy including our policy of advancing religious freedom,

best foster both robust democracy and religious freedom in egypt or if you like religious tolerance as well as the other countries affected by the arab spring. let me now introduce our panelists in the order which they're going to speak. and we'll each talk, 10, 12 minutes. we'll have a little conversation among ourselves and then as always we want to get our audience involved. sir, same shehata contrary arab studies at georgetown university. he teaches courses on islamist politics. note that, islamist politics, comparative middle east politics and economy. u.s. policy toward middle east. egyptian politics in society and culture and politics in the arab world. he has served as acting director of master of arts in arab studies program and his writings appeared in many journals and newspapers including the international journal of middle east

studies, middle east policy, georgetown journal of international affairs, i'm glad that you have published here at the georgetown. slate, is salon, "al-hayat" and, aal aram weekly. i met him once before but saw him recently on the news hour with jim lehrer and was very impressed what he had to say and look forward to hear from him. next is jillian, schwedler. political science prefer from am hurst. we heard from jiflian, a good -- jillian. her academic interests include, listen to this now, political culture, protest and policing in jordan, neoliberalism, identity politics, and this is my favorite, contentious politics. where is there politics that is not --.

that is me. and state repression. professor schwdler reserved from fulbright foundation, council of american overseas research centers and american institute for yemen any studies. you heard a yes about yes, ma'am men. she has conducted wide-ranging field research in egypt, jordan and yemen and traveled extensively throughout the region. and finally, last but not at all least, sam tadros, a research fellow at the hudson, statute. he was a senior partner at the egyptian union of liberal youth, an organization that aims to spread the idea of chrs call liberalism in egypt. before joining the hudson institute, tadros worked on the subject of the muslim brotherhood at the american enterprise institute and the heritage foundation on the subject of religious freedom in europe. he has written for many journals, newspapers and blogs, "wall street journal", the american thinker,

especially about the subject of liberalization in egypt. i just have to add, that this is the first panel that i have ever moderated in which a former student of mind participated in and that is sam tadros. so glad to have all of you here. . . >> i'll try to briefly address them as much as i can in order.

and the first, of course, and easiest to answer was whether a fully inclusive free and fair democratic system that makes room for all voices, including islamists voices, is best for egypt and other arab spring countries in the long run. i think the answer to this question is clear, at least for me, and that is yes. and that, in fact, any implication that limits the participation that seek to participate in formal politics in the political process by peaceful means, even those who hold views with week we might consider liberal and even some cases, as some of the groups views are, i think detestable, any attempt to move in that direction is antidemocratic. and for that reason alone i think the question needs to be addressed in the affirmative. yes, a fully inclusive fair and free democratic system makes the

best since. and, in fact, anything other than that represents a set backwards. a failed logic of the past. a logic in which we supported mubarak because we thought the alternative was worse, or as mr. sarkozy said in france, it's better to have -- better to have mubarak than the muslim brotherhood. i reject that not only on the basis of religious freedom issues but on the basis of my commitment to democracy. the second question has to do with, and i think how i received it was slightly different than how you presented it, a moment ago in your question was hard to answer, some going to tell you the question that i understood, was would a regime of liberal democracy, including adherence to the principles of religious freedom, moderate or unleash the liberal radicalism, somebody's voice? the difference is the emphasis upon liberal democracy as opposed to a regime that

highlighted religious freedom. that's a slight variation. and my answer is, and i think this is somewhat similar to some of the excellent discussion that was in panel one this morning, was i don't know, but i would hope, i would hope, and this is where i refer, defer to both jillian and mohammad, i would hope that conclusion in the political system from the political inclusion would force some groups, if not to moderate, to at least behave like political parties interested in gaining votes, interested in winning seats, interest in influencing policy. and maybe less like only ideologically committed organizations that are not necessary interested in doing these things. because if they are interested in participating in the clinical process, gaining seats, winning those in influencing policy, then you would think that, that

they would present their message according to the meeting voters theory, present their message in a way that would attract the largest number of voters and, therefore, and, therefore, it would be transformed in that sense. in addition to, in addition to, attempting to build coalition, involving compromise and negotiation with other political forces, including ones which they disagree with. and that also would have a positive affect. and i think we've seen that actually with regard to muslim brotherhood from the 1980s, forging alliances on specific issues, and in other cases as well, not only in egypt but other places. we've also, surprisingly seen that, in a very beginning sense with some of the celibacy parties in egypt. moreover, and this is something that dennis ross and stephen hadley and elliott abrams, and i'm surprised that i agree with

so much of what, some of what they said, because my policy is little different than theirs. moreover, we would think that any elections and a participation in elections that the voting public or electric would make future decisions based on performance, based on whether these groups have delivered jobs, whether they have established better educational systems, health care that wasn't deteriorating, whether they have generated economic process as opposed to simply idea that she is the solution. the other thing that is related to that question, i think, is it's not directly implied but i do want to just highlight it a little bit. is that it does seem to be an assumption, and i have a little bit of difficulty with this, that the type of government and places like egypt or tunisia or elsewhere should somehow look

very much like the government that we have here in the united states. and i think that's a false assumption. i think that we should expect forms of politics and political discourse to look quite different. the key thing, however, is whether these political systems, constitutions, institutions, are robust enough to guarantee rights, including rights of religious freedom, not whether the system in the end use our model of the ostensible, the ostensible separation of church and state, and so on. the third collection that was supposed, and i will also take some liberty to move after i initially addressed in a different direction, was how can the u.s. best foster both robust democracy and inclusive religious freedom in egypt and other countries affected by the arab spring. and hope you're looking at the

minutes because i am certain not on how much time i'm taking. i think some of the key things to understand about this question is that the legacy, unfortunately, you know, the legacy of u.s. involvement in egypt and other states in the region, supporting of the mubarak regime for decades is not a very good one. and it makes it extra difficult for the u.s. to be seen as credibly interested in promoting democracy, freedom of human rights, even religious freedom in egypt and states in the future. when most egyptians i think look at the united states, they see decades of support for the mubarak regime. politically, militarily and economically. they see little, in fact sustained criticism in the past with consequences of systematic human rights abuses, consistent violations. the u.s. did focus sometimes on some liberal activists when they were the victims of the regime's wrath, a guy who i thought condi

rice's favorite egyptian because that was 20,000 or 50,000 egyptian political prisoners in jail at different times of the mubarak regime does she seem to only focus on the one. what that means is other people who are in prison, including members of the muslim brotherhood, who now is quite prominent in people talk about him as being a potential prime minister. the deputy guide who was unfairly tried in an egyptian military court and sentenced to five years in prison, and served many of them. no mention was made by u.s. officials of that injustice. it doesn't own end on january 25 with the beginning of the revolution. you might remember that on january 25, the first day of the revolution, in quotation marks, secretary clinton said the egyptian government was stable and that he was looking for ways, and i'm quoting, to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the egyptian

people, unquote. and the following day she called on all parties, meaning the protesters and the regimes, to exercise restraint, setting up some kind of a moral equivalency between the protesters and the regime's repressive apparatus. the following day on the 27th, vice president biden said that mr. mubarak was not a dictator, and so. and, in fact, if you want to go even deeper with this, we can speculate that the message that ambassador frank wisner gave to mr. mubarak on his visit there on february 5 was that the message that we were hearing the american imagination was presenting, and that is immediate change now. but, in fact, the message that he told reporters afterwards, which is in order for an orderly transition, quote unquote, to take place, mr. mubarak needs to stay in power to oversee the transition until september, probably so that an outcome like we saw in the recent elections doesn't transpire. so this point, the point here is

usually a dilemma for the united states right now. as witnessed by the recent ngo controversy. there also has to be recognition that the u.s. has decreased influence, not only in egypt but across the region. that an authoritarian state, like mr. mubarak's and king abdullah's and so on, which don't allow citizens to a significant voice in politics and policy, and which are aligned with the mistakes and heavily dependent on u.s. foreign political diplomatic support, that the u.s. is much greater influence in those kinds of policies than in policies which a popular sovereignty. and in which governments are supposedly based on the will of the people. and there's one other thing, i'll get to the freedom religious issue directly and then i will stop. the idea, and this is more of a question really. it does seem to me, possibly

because the way discourse of religious freedom by the united states, we've seen and received in egypt in the past and so on, as a kind of colonial discourse, as a kind of a discourse that was insincere and that championed one group, egyptian christians primary, and so on, at the expense of everyone else. and i'll be the first person to say that egyptian christians have and continue and may be increasingly suffered discrimination and deteriorated status post egypt revolution. but nevertheless, because of that discourse was viewed as such, he generated a tremendous backlash among egypt. and, in fact, it might even be counterproductive thinking about it now, to continue to pursue a discourse that focuses exclusively on religious freedom as opposed to a more general discourse focused on democracy, and equal citizenship rights,

including within that, of course, religious freedom. i'll stop there. i was hoping or planet is a lot more about islamists in egypt, particularly the muslim brotherhood and southeast but maybe in the question and answer period i will have an opportunity to do that. thank you. >> thank you. so yes, a lot of what i want to say was also actually act of this i'm going to try to move quickly past some of the things that were mentioned, but to reiterate where i agree and maybe some where there's a little bit of disagreement, or at least some question. i see the theme is these two related pcs, the inclusion will lead to moderation, and exclusion will be to radicalism. connected with it is a question of religious freedom and will religious freedom in general produce the kind of moderation. saw want to separate those two and take those in turn. on the first i think it's important to separate the arguments, the hypotheses i would say, the propositions that

repression leads to extremism and inclusion leads to moderation. it is not a simple slide along a continuum where it is reduced repression is going to automatically to moderation and then he can go back again. there's different mechanisms that could be worked in each case and we'll talk about some of these briefly, but just to give a simple example, you could easily have a system become much more inclusive, have a large number of parties move to a more moderate direction, and have some of those that are still left extremists escalate what they're doing. that's going their extremism. so over all you still maybe see more violence and i think actually the literature which the professor talked about this book, the literature on oppression leads us to expect this. when you have extreme oppression it loosens slightly, you may have some pull but you also see an explosion of over all violence. and so think we need to sort separate these two propositions. and so the one that gets, that

has to do with a sort of religious groups is less about the repression producing extremism and which i think the logic of that is very clear. it doesn't always do that, but said the repression leads groups to go underground and when they don't have a whole lot else they can do, there aren't a lot of options. they can lead groups that otherwise might be strange bedfellows to work together. this after all is the basic logic of why we end up with revolution. you have groups with radically different images of what the society should be but they all coherent on the people want the end of the regime. they cohere on some simple point. that happens because all the other differences get put aside. so the logic of that inclusive system is to take away that unifying point of overthrowing a regime, overthrowing a system entirely. so as you lead to more inclusive system, people then can move more to what their own individual groups, with a more individual agendas might be. you will see for example, islam's groups that might have

all bit of affinity in a repressive -- you would expect to see. and i think empirically there is evidence to expect that. in a number of cases in the region but as mentioned this morning it doesn't necessarily question as long as politics. i'll return to in a second. but i do want to mention, one of my big points i want to emphasize here is in a more inclusive system, you may not actually see extremists becoming moderates. what you might actually be seeing and what i think is more often what you see is moderates don't have a logic to ally with extremists anymore. so the moderates will pull away and the voices will become more prominent and their agendas will become more prominent but that doesn't mean you're seeing them boldly, that they were the ones that were extreme. i think that's an important one. that is an extremist might not miss out a moderate but also very often does what you're seeing.

my book examines islam is in jordan, yemen, as they entered the political systems, and pointed out repeatedly in the book is neither one of these islam is groups that sought to overthrow the regime, had ever perpetrated islands on bridging. in fact, in both cases they have been allied with the regime but still also as opposition but sort of from the opposition at times. and so do all those as cases of successful moderation, misses the point that they were never the extremists in the first place. but what happens in a more inclusive system is you separate them you eliminate the logic for moderates to have to go ally with extremists. so that's the first point of what i think is unpacked in this sort of inclusion exclusion question is a logic of alliances among these elite, different actors but and if it's not in the sense of social economically but elite in the sense of politically organize leaders of groups, movements. the muslim brotherhood, et cetera.

i think a more inclusive system changes the logic in what it is tactical or strategic but it changes the logic of those interactions. the second fight which i think is equally important has to do with the constituency for those groups. and so in a more repressed system when groups that are organizing don't have a whole lot of options, and they might work to gather or they might just be all underground separately, very often the broader population will vote for the group that is making the most extreme statements against the regime. so they might have a larger support base. again, this is the proposition that i would then come in the second. so the logic would be that not only does and exclusive system take away the logic for moderates to have to ally with extremists against the repressive system, and also takes away, introduces more possibilities for the general public at large. so a public that wants to see

something other than the incumbent regime now has a whole range of things to choose from. if you want to see a more religiously inspired morally religiously inspired regime, you don't only have one pole to go to. you have a whole range of different groups to choose from, and here we see historically very significant justice between the muslim brotherhood and the salafi. and i hope they say more about this in the question and answer because it's really very instructive. so i think there are these twin logic, the logic of alliance and also this constituency support base were a more inclusive system takes away the support base for extremism. it will not eliminate them entirely, even the best function democracies we have, we don't entirely eliminate extremists but you isolate them. they are fringe action figure seen as not cases, if you will. but they are there. and so the hope is to eliminate extremism, that sadly not going to happen.

the second part of a want to talk about has to do with this question of religion, and religious freedom. and i completely agree i think religious freedom for me need to be front and center, and i would even broaden that is a not just religion freedoms but freedom of beliefs, because you want to include in the freedom not to believe in freedom of course. so the freedom of belief needs to be front and center for me in any kind of inclusive system, whether it's democracy or a liberal democracy or a representative democracy, or some other kind of system. it's absolutely essential to me that be front and center. i would wish personally for more of a french system, just to say what americans think as an american, i would just like to throw that out. >> do you want to see americans becoming french? >> i edited his point the administers were more polling towards the french system. >> so our elite are becoming

french? >> or a line with the administration. i need to deeply reflect on. so i think for me, it is again echoes points that came of this one, for me, what's important about religion is not that it's confessional, per se. and so you do want to freedom of confessionalism. your freedom to believe whatever you like and you structure your more world around whatever framework works for you. but it's not religion per se. for me i would think of it more as religion, confessional systems as a kind of worldview. so a worldview is sort of an ethical, moral understanding of what the world is, how it functions and how it should function. what would be a better system. and religion of courts are front and center in the spectrum of worldviews. but there are other worldviews that present other moral system. the virtue of an inclusive system is it about as you to sort of fine symmetry and

certain components of that moral vision without having to be missing. so the logic of trying to give the moderates, moderate voices more platform to more opportunity to express themselves is to allow more places to find the symmetry. to isolate the worldviews, religious worldviews and the secular worldviews, that find no room for any alternative at all. it's my doing anything else simply is unacceptable. a more inclusive system creates the space where those kinds of things can happen. in that sense different religions and secular groups will find all kinds of common ground about moral issues. and i think that's a significant virtue of inclusive political system. and just jump ahead. so in some ways i think the confessionalism per se is almost at a phenomenal to the other sort of a facts of an inclusive and exclusive system. it isn't necessary about religion or about a belief system, but it's about a system

that allows different sets of beliefs, different worldviews, some of which may be religious, some of which may not be. but i think it's that kind of pace that i think inclusive systems can foster that within reduce extremism by a long for the creation of space where that symmetry can be explored, where groups can talk to each other and have open debate and have discussions, et cetera. and i found this in jordan and yemen, in the case of jordan i found much more moderation with the islamist party. in part because islam is that a lot of common ground with secularists, tommy's and liberals on the number of issues. they're often political issues, so objection to the -- the first one in the summer of 1993, for the very first time all of these groups, islamists and an and secularists, had a joint press conference, and it was a spectacle, a spectacular because a spectacle that they should all be sitting there together in agreement on this issue. that was one fine issue and that will bring me to another point in the second, but i think, an

open system creates the space is where we can set i disagree with you, samer, but let's agree on this and push this issue together. that is a positive thing for tolerance, if we will talk about tolerance. and also brings up a point though that moderation or extremism, but let's take moderation, isn't a single position on a continuum. so a group does not necessarily moderate in all aspects of everything it does. and very often what you find is an inclusive system leads to the logic of political moderation, may have nothing to do with other kinds of issues. famously with islamists, very concerned positions remain on women, elaborate and hurled debates about justification the roles women can play. what candidates will be filled, et cetera. criticism of certain foreign policy issues, notions of what's the best economic system, et cetera. that we should not mistake to say that moderation to the extent we might find moderation and in an inclusive system,

don't assume that single act will become more moderate across all issues but i think you need to unpack a different issue dimensions and say on what issues as the group moderating and on what issues have they not. and there was an interesting work on jordan in particular that the issues of women's participation is a redline issue for the islamic action front. it's an issue that they don't want to cooperate, even where there's an agreement they don't want a joint press conferences on issues. they want to maintain a separate space. well, i'm way out of order, as usual. the last point, u.s. foreign policy i always had a very similar reaction. there was a lot i found in agreement with the last panel, and that was interesting to me, and i want to think more about that. >> they are out of office now. >> exactly that and would make comments on anyone who still in office. that was the point of my question. i think, yeah, i think samer

latest up beautifully but, you know, the u.s. has questioned negative reputation in the region, and my point earlier about my question about jordan and legitimacy is jordanians tell me that if the jordanian state told them that their children need to take more mill, it would dump milk in the driver. the same thing with the united states. sort of anything the u.s. pushing is automatically going to be suspicious. any group that the u.s. stands behind is automatically going to have a problem. so i think the way the u.s. can speak loudest is by being hands-off on the particular mechanics, but very supportive of processes in general. and by being supportive of process in general that means not channeling vast amounts of money to the staff and very little money to other kinds of things. so being receptive to say what you need? do you need training of this? do you need is to come in and help you learn how to be parliamentarian's? a sort of a more open, what would you like from us, as opposed to let us tell you now

have to be good democrats. because i think that will inherently backfire, even if there's a lot of common ground in which there is an extraordinary amount of common credit i will end with one point that sort of i completely disagree with the idea that nobody predicted the arab spring. in fact, everyone predicted the arab spring, over and over and over. the properties we didn't take the exact moment. but if you look at the writings and the famous article on egypt, 1997 i believe said this cannot be sustained. and all of us have been working in the region, we know of vast pockets of dissent of people just test it for the moment. we didn't predict the moment so i'm not saying we got it right. but there was, you know, the idea that anybody saw these as equilibrium states and that they were repressive and nothing was are going to change, i don't think is quite fear of the i think of somewhere in the middle. >> sam, before you speak, i think what dennis ross says was that the obama administration did a review in which most agreed it wasn't sustainable.

but that is simply was not about to change. and it was the rapidity and the surprise of the change that took them -- weeks after this thing was published, this guy set himself on fire. so there's probably more agreement than disagreement. sam. which is unusual in this field. i would like to point out. please. >> first, thank you for inviting me here to speak. it's a great pleasure, especially as professor indicated, i'm a former student of his, so anything i say that you disagree with, you know who to blame for. anyway, the two questions, to first questions that were posed to us that i was commenting on, and then perhaps focus a bit on the situation in egypt towards religious freedom at the moment and how they would progress. the first question asked professor indicated is very hard to answer in the negative.

who possibly can argue that free, democratic system that makes room for everyone is good on the long run. the formation of question takes into consideration perhaps all those criticisms that have been put forward towards the promotion of democracy of the bush administration or in general. the inclusive free and fair takes into consideration this perhaps modern debate of the free society to essentially mean a ballot box, indicated no, we're talking about something more than that. it highlights the system we give room to others, whether it is all voices, whether islam is voices or whether religious minority, indicating that no one would be sidelined in this process. it also signifies a recognition of a timeframe. perhaps problems would be there in the beginning, but we are talking about the long run.

sure, no one would disagree with such statements. .. >> the statement indicates some form of qualification. some of the voices will either be moderated or become more radical, and not all of them, but there is an underlying assumption that there is some form of relationship between religious freedom or the lack thereof and religious radicalization, that this form of relationship is one of negative correlation, the more

you have of religious freedom, the less you have of radicalization. that assumption, however, needs to be tested with reality of the situation. as burke, edmond burke indicated in the opening pages of the reflection of the revolution, it is circumstances and not abstract principles that have any political policy, whether beneficial or toxic to human beings, and so in that light, the question is whether there is a relationship in the past between the emergence of islamism as a clear discourse and between the lack or the existence of religious freedom or liberal democracy. looking at the past, the beginnings of the movement in egypt, for example, 1912 and 1926, the establishment of the

first establishments in i gent, the establishment of the brotherhood, and whether at that time the lack of religious freedom was important whether it played the role in the formation of modern islamism and whether thus by providing more religious freedom lee -- we will get a better situation. we find in the writings of those founders of islamism a lack of importance of that factor. true, they have many complaints regarding the west colonialism, western interference, there are many there. perhaps they used democracy, used it rather in the negative and not something to complain about as to one of the reasons why he'd form his organization, and so looking at the past might be something to consider about this statement. the second, however, assumption, is also worth some consideration of ours. there is an acceptance in the

statement of the claim by islamism to be an authentic representation and interpretation of islam. now, that islamism claims to be so is something that is obvious to anyone, that that claim is correct or that we should consider it as something perhaps we have to think about a bit more. certainly, islamism is a modern phenomena. its roots not traced necessarily into islamic gurs presumption of -- but in the case of muslim brotherhood, those fruits are hardly there or hardly evident to point to. why should we care about religious freedom then? my arguing that religious freedoms only are nice concept, that, yes, we should promote because it's a good human

value? certainly not. there is a value in religious freedom in this debate and perhaps it was referredded to here. by religious freedom here, i refer to the ability of people to bring religion to the public square of making religious based arguments in that open public square. however, there's an interesting here word that is missing that is perhaps taken into, as a grant of fact in the united states, and that's diverse religious. the reason why religious freedom would be extremely important in egypt and other countries in the region would be because of the about -- ability of individuals to think freely. if there is no religious freedom in egypt, if was not allowed to write and criticize the basic

premise, then it becomes the explicit model and the only model presented to people. if not allowed to criticize or offer different interpretation of the islamic tradition, then the existing interpretation, the one dominated, will be the only one offered to the egyptian people. it is thus no surprise that being muslim would be only defined by how the islamists define a muslim. for this reason, it is important to defend religious freedom and to work on bringing religious freedom as an integral part of building a liberal democracy in the region. let me now move with this to the presence and future situation of religious freedom in egypt. religious freedom in egypt is hardly a happy story.

there's simply not that much religious freedom in the country. obviously; it's not saudi arabia or iran, but the situation of religious freedom in egypt has been traced by the dynamic interrelationship between the religious establishment, the state be islamist, and the general public. each of these played the different factor or different role in the lack of religious freedom in the country, tbu it is how they -- but it is how they operate together that creates this vacuum of freedom whether religious minorities, intellectual, and others who think differently. that situation has, perhaps, worsened much more after the revolution. we have seen a dramatic increase in the number of attacks, but more importantly there is an increase of attacks is the fact of the shape of those attacks. nrkzingly we see that the general public has participated

in those attacks, that your neighbors are ankerred by the fact that you are building a church or that some christian girls, some muslim girl has an affair with a guy from another religion. the participation of your general public of your neighbors is perhaps the most worrisome sign in egypt. concerning islamism and the role, two points in fact. first, if time allows, of course, is how the muslim brotherhood written very clearly about their view of the church especially. the muslim brotherhood accused of not having program, using slogans and not programs. well, we have a 96-page program anyone can read to see their views about it. there's a page about the church specifically. that page is extremely interesting to read.

first it says that it highlights the control of the christian church. this is that that's the religious endowments should serve all egyptians regardless of religion. nicely put i'd say. more importantly is the church role to take its place along with other state institutions in fighting the cultural invasion from the west. the church should cooperate with different state institutions and egyptian civil society to correct current deviate paths. that statement reminds one of a model that has perhaps become less relevant national church model. the impression that the churches have suffered under communism, by the ruling regime to control

the official religious establishment and thus use it as a way to control the religious minority. that, i think, would be something interesting to watch in the future, and more profoundly in terms of the muslim or islamic religious authorities in how the muslim brotherhood will deal with others as an interpreter or representative of islamic authority. the second interesting thing to note over dynamic to note in the future will be this relationship between the muslim brotherhood and the -- whether the muslim brotherhoods use to the fact of being thee guys on the right or thee guys on the more extreme. how will they feel now with the fact of being challenged from the right? how will they deal with the question of their relationship

and this will not tell us a lot about the future politics of e just a minute, but that will be extremely important in how the fate of religious minorities and religious freedom in general take shape. thank you. >> very good. thank you, sam. well, you've, all three of you gave us a great deal to reflect upon. i think what i'd like to do given the amount of time left is sort of ask, try to ask a question and start with samer, and pick up the themes that you'd like. picking up on sam's notion that religious freedom means more than private, if you like, professionalism, and i don't know that this was the way julian was using it, but the right to bring your religion

into the public square. that can mean a lot of things. that can mean politics, religion in politics, using religious beliefs to make arguments for laws, policies, economic, other foreign policies as well as domestic policies. it can mean, dare i say it, prophesy or trying to convince other people that you're religious claims are true and they ought to accept those claims and join your club, but leave the club therein, which is a big, big problem in the muslim majority countries of the world just as it was a huge problem in medieval europe or should i say in europe 14th centuries into existence as a christian dominated culture. it's not a new problem. it's not an unknown problem. religious freedom has meaning the right to enter the public square. here's the question. does egypt really need this to

succeed as a democracy? by success i mean last. i mean, you know, we don't get a collapse in a generation or even two or, you know, the return of mubarak-like figure or simply chaos. how important is this aspect of religious freedom to success? in my view, this means not only freedom for coptic christians. it does mean that, it does mean to enter into the public square, make christian arguments within egypt, sounds farfetched, but also as sam said, for muslims to criticize the muslim brotherhood or criticize openly without fear of recrimination an understanding of islam they consider to be simply false wows -- without being accused of blase -- blasfomy or disfavored

minorities of the community. samer? >> i don't know that i can begin to address that in any way, but i think what i'll agree with is that, you know, this idea of religious freedom is not as simple as one might think because i mean, as you have done, you kind much separated different dimensions of it, and, in fact, i have not gone that far. what i focused on and what i think is quite crucial at this moment and maybe that's because i'm living in this particular moment with regard to the difficulties going on in egypt right now are, and this might not exactly be religious freedom, but ideas of equality without regard to religion. it's not really religious freedom, but i think that, i think, is quite crucial at this particular moment, and i think that kind of a discourse is likely or has a better chance of succeeding in creating the kind of society and state which i think many of us would hope that egypt would become. >> if i can come back on that

very point, equality under the law is what you're speaking of without regard to religious difference, but including the right of religious actors, if we can call them that, to bring the religious views into the public square. i would prime you would -- presume you would agree it's not to bring religion or perhaps i'm wrong. >> i think you're right. i think it includes that. i don't necessarily think that that is the way to create the type of society that we want because one of the problems is that framing it in this kind of a way, this sectarian way, looking at individuals not as individuals, but as members of religious groups and so on, i think that actually does and providing rights on that basis does more damage in that sense than good in terms of creating a kind of liberal democratic society that we want, and so i would definitely include the point you've mentioned in

addition to what i have put forward which is in terms of equality without regard to religious in addition to, of course, the right to practice one's faith and in the case of egypt, i think this means dealing quite specifically with the creation of a unified building law with regard to churches and mosques and so on. it -- however, however, one could possibly then diff differentiate that level or that reach of religious freedom with this idea of conversion because that's such -- the particularly sensitive issue with regard to -- i have no problem with it, but many people do; right? so if there's a way, as it were, as i think steven said, frame it in terms of religious tolerance opposed to -- that might have a greater likelihood of success in the short term. >> stop short of the right to

prof size or convert others or the right to conversion. it's an interesting question how far democracy can go even a muslim majority without grappling about that at some point. >> when i teach courses on middle east politics, i start the first class by saying middle east politics is not limited to the israeli-palestinian conflict. it's not limited to egypt, and we've been talking about egypt, and i keep trying to talk differently. i want to say something about yemen. a couple weeks ago, yemen is one of these extraordinary transitioning countries with tremendous amount of religious diversity with a large shia state, and we don't call it that because it's nonsensical, but,

in fact, he's from the sect, and you have a strong wahabi influence that's saudi inspired and contentious. you have all these different religious sects, and so in the case of yemen, i think it would be a mistake to put the question of religious freedom front and center in the transition because there's all other issues of power struggle left over from the unification that saw the crushing of a largely secular south and very progressive voices there, not an atheist communist movement, but a secular privatized religious movement. you saw a devout muslim leader from a yemen socialist party assassinated in 2002 and one of the most contentious thing is they go into mosques in the north and start playing in the wahbi style standing there

quietly, but doing it very contentious and political. ultimately, one would want to get to the point that a muslim can walk into any mosque they want pray however they like. putting the questions front and center in yes , yemen's case is devicive, and one hopes you get there eventually, but it's interesting to sort of, you know, pull that back for a second and let other kinds of questions come to the floor. i have a piece about to come out -- actually might be posted today in al-jazeera, and they should a centralized state specifically to address the issues. i think when you have certain areas like a village with a very strong association with a particular religious sect to preserve that, you know, pushing towards them they have to be open to other voices and

prselytizing in the public square to be problematic. ultimately, i'd like to see all world views accepted and open to debate, but in certain transitions, putting those issues prompt and center will be more problematic, and others it might be a place to build brimmings of starting -- bridges the starting points. i want to bracket the timing of that. they could play out differently in terms of context. >> does egypt need this? yes. we have the historic problem of religious in egypt. religious, islam specifically, viewed with high suspicion by the intelligence that is formed the formed the modern egyptian state. we never found our peace with islam. many claim their problem is islamism and the kind of views

that it holds, but in many cases, the real problem, the root of the problem is they don't like islam. they never found a way to deal with the idea of this religious and how it works with the modern world. i think part of this is, which was referred to in the earlier pam, -- panel, is the huge influence of french secularism in egypt, and in a sense we never read burke. this is where the foundation of egyptian secularism comes from. while egypt never had an accurate model, it certainly was what they would have wanted if they could have achieved it. in this sense, i think the any hope of a long term stable democracy in egypt along with millions of other problems there will have to find a way of accommodating islam in the

public square, that people are allowed to bring, make religious based arguments against political decisions and economic views. this is not prohibited. it's there. it doesn't mean they can try to run, but people are allowed to do it. i think turning to the general, i agree we're in a transition period and nothing is entirely perfect in a transition period. it's not a transition to democracy, but that's another story. in a sense, i think the policymakers are beginning to realize that this is not the ut contest here, that we're not having the nice guys were and for three years things are lovely and things will be great, move to the next country of the arab spring. the realization is now coming to the city that we're in front of the situation where each country is different, where things might

develop in different directions and the rosy picture, and we're essentially in front of the least ugly girl contest. we're choosing between not very nice options there. none of them is entirely perfect. in this sense whether religious freedom comes at the forefront of the issues that people need to fight for or not, yes, it might not be one of those main issues at the moment. >> all right. very good. we have a few on that optimistic note, let's turn to the audience. i see we have a question over here. >> i'm steve mcfarland. question, how long must egypt stay in the halfway house of religious tolerance if religious tolerance is not going to permit

individuals of the minority faith to share their faith or to be perceived as even trying to persuade somebody else with the truth of their belief or to say something derogatory that would be at least by accusation, you know, blase -- blaphemic, and if that's a bridge too far in our lifetime, is that much of a halfway house to live in long term? and i believe the ability to share one's faith and to disagree with the majority fate and persuade them of the truth of the beliefs is the essence of religious freedom and religious tolerance sounds more like i tolerate what other people's dogs do on my lawn. you know, i just put up with

it. >> you shouldn't do that, steve. [laughter] >> i know, but that's not my notion of religious freedom, and so comments? >> samer, would you like to take that? [laughter] but you will. >> yes. maybe i'm wrong, correct me, but if you look at where egypt is now, where it's been, where the current state of where things are, we will be fortunate to achieve religious tolerance and achieve quality before the law regardless of one's faith. the struggle, you know, right now, nor should it necessarily be, for example, regarding article ii of the egyptian constitution. islam and the principles of the sharia the are primary source of legislation, exactly formulated as such is about, and the most liberal and realistic goal one can have is to preserve the article as is because, and i --

in myself, you know, mr. hamid also in favor of keeping the article as is, where as they want to change the article to increase the importance of islam and sharia by either getting rid of the principles because the principles of the sharia are things we can all agree with. the social justice, equality, truth, and so on to either the sharia or afghan sharia, the rulings of the sharia, so that you can have more specific rulings be the basis of law opposed to the wonderful principles, and so i think if we achieve religious tolerance, you know, right now, and probably for some time to come, meaning equality for the law for all, practicing one's faith and so on, that will be a significant achievement. >> okay. i hear you. i want to point out on steve's behalf, i think he'd say the standard you set of a equality before the law is not met if one

cannot share one's religious beliefs publicly. i think we have a disagreement of what equality before the law means and what religious freedom can mean. the question i asked is meant to get to the -- can it work? >> the ability to share one's faith, and if that means proselytizing. >> no, that's a bad word. if means sharing your faith and convincing others you're right. >> i don't know what the difference is. [laughter] >> there is not any. i'm just kidding you. proselyizism has a negative -- >> it's also not the kind of race that egypt should be engaged in right now. >> so the question is, and, please, you needn't answer this,

but the question i was posing given that reality, i agree with you, is democracy over the long term possible until this issue is resolved? at least grappled with honestly, and i agree that it isn't. >> yeah. just very briefly, i don't think that, you know, it is something that, you know, radically or fundamentally impedes the ability of a liberal democracy being established in egypt or the extent you'd like, but i think -- >> okay. fair enough. jullian? >> yeah, i echo, yeah, i pretty much echo your point. it's dpsh -- it's, yeah, i think it should be there, but not front and center. when there's other security and confidence that comes from the institution, when the institutions are functioning in a way people feel safe, i think that emerges, more freedom of

expression around particular kinds of issues where people don't have to feel one statement is, you know, just a complete threat to the whole community. they don't have to feel panicky, but i think that's gradual. i think you can get there in some ways through the exercising and functioning of that space. >> [inaudible] >> let me go by the stories yesterday in egypt. a month ago, there was a schoolteacher in the south of egypt who during the class break was sitting in the teacher's lounge, and he's christian, and the conversation begins begins that was resulting in a religious discussion. the salafis talks and results in course that one is arrested.

the court system, which is hugely dysfunctional, suddenly becomes very functional. and one day of hearing the case, the case takes three day, and without anything, they give him a couple years of a sentence. the salafis don't like the fact because that's not enough. they demonstrate in front of the court and want the death sentence. this is the good punishment for such an act. now, what happens actually yesterday is due to human right organization's pressure and so on, the case goes into another hearing, an appeal of that case, and the guy can't get a lawyer, not because he doesn't have people willing to represent him, but because there are 300 other lawyers that prohit any lawyer representing him from entering the courtroom. that's the problem. no, you will not have democracy unless you deal with such an

issue. the issue is not, you cannot escape it within the question of equality. not the fact that can he preach christianity to others or not, but can he get a fair trial for this crime if we even consider it a crime? can he get a lawyer to defend him in that case or not? i think it's an intreg grail part of the story of a democratic transition. will you get it? i doubt. should you work on it exclusively? no, it's part of a larger picture that not everything will be perfect not today, tomorrow, or not in 10-20 years. that's the sad story of the long process of a transition. ..

>> in its 1945 constitution says while indonesia is based on recognizing that the country, that there is one god, there's also religious liberty that recognizes people of the right to practice their religion. in the context of these arab spring countries, specifically tunisia, i'm interested in knowing what you think whether they will recognize the religion of the state, and how you think this will protection of minority of religions? >> i can, to briefly. i'm not an expert on tunisia but i spent some weeks there for the

average. one of the things that struck me was not having won, 40% of the assembly, i was in a mountaintop town on the anniversary of the revolution is one of the place where there were a lot of protests before it ever got to the capital, a year ago. and so they were defending the grocery stores that it burnt down last year, making sure they don't get burned down again. piles of tires burning here and there. nothing is changed after you. the most interesting thing is one of the most heavily guarded buildings in town -- they are the target of things haven't really changed. another incident and then i will try to we the together. another incident was there are women showing up for exams in the universities, you're not allowed to take an exam

according to the current rule because you have to show your face. so there was a very intimate to be very productive. the time i was there the group also established outside. i try to go my friends would not take me. so there's these pushing going on and tension between the salafis. one of things was that nahda kept saying they oppose this but their complaint against us but this is what the represented. they wanted to maintain as a secular state. but the nahda minister of higher education refused to make a statement against the sort of salafi in roads, refuse to take a stand on that. that was seen as very, very troubling by secularists in the country, that you know, you're saying one thing but really down the road you will remain silent but it's something people from the earlier session, sometimes on the coptic issue. sometimes the lack of doing

something speaks incredibly loud. the mubarak regime lack of intervention around all kinds of issues, attacks on university professors, attacks, their silence on these issues speaks on. so i think in tunisia there's this moment of everyone it's holding their breath. while nahda says it will not push that forward and there are threads of nervousness for some people that that might be coming down the road. i'm not an expert on tunisia not from a recent trip there i thought that was really interesting point attention. people are nervous about it. >> i think we had a question back here. we have time to unfortunately for only one more. [inaudible] >> okay, this gentleman here. sorry. >> hi. anne richard hi. i direct the religion consulting

group. i am curious about other bases of identity in the countries that you're talking about. they'll speak arabic. they're mostly muslim, but what differentiates the tunisian from a moroccan from an algerian from an egyptian, et cetera? there must be lots of other things going on here. >> well, i mean, there are unlimited differences. these are overlapping identities. to the editor, the tunisian speak is not the airbag that i speak. nor is the french in the arabic a tunisian speak the french that i, the little french that i know. you know, so these are differences in history, there are differences in colonial history and colonial influence. there are differences, the kind of historical sentiments of, for example, the bourguiba regime and the attempted secularism in law even in tunisia is something

for a quite long period of time is something that is quite different than what was experienced in egypt, for example. so there are, you know, there are similarities but there are differences. these are multiple overlapping identities as identities always are. i don't know what else to say about that. >> i would add, decides comparison from country to country, of course to me the biggest difference between countries is cuisine. but within countries i think there's a lot of tension. so in syria there regime and the majority is excluded in bahrain -- some of the internal tensions and identities even ones about religion sometimes are not about the context, content of those religious differences so much as about historical sectarian differences and u.s. power, who is excluded, who's been ineffective trading. i think those tensions underlie

things in long-standing ways, but then could be exposed and expressed in terms of religious differences. sometimes are about religious differences and sometimes are not about religious differences at all. they are but other issues that map onto those different identities and i think paying attention to the is crucial because sometimes, like the wahhabi's going into the mosque, that's about the religious difference. it's very specific. it's also political. but the alawite and the rest of say, that's about power and repression. >> sam? >> this brings this panel to a close. i'm delighted that we had a little bit of controversy. i was worried that we're all going to agree on everything and that's never happened before. in our religious freedom conferences. so please join me in thanking our guests. [applause] if i might, before you leave, if i could just thank a few people. there are many people who made

this possible. all the good folks at the berkeley center as director tom, a special kudos to our project associate, kyle, and you are mastered video and sound technician who has been doing these events for years, ralph. so it would give them a round of applause, too. thank you for your help. [applause] and most of all, thanks to you for being here today. come back and see us next thursday when will put america under the spotlight. hhs mandate and religious freedom. thanks for coming. [inaudible conversations] >> republican presidential candidate rick santorum said

this morning in illinois which alters primary tomorrow, it's a special a two-man race between him and mitt romney. however, mr. santorum cannot win at least 10 other states 54 delegates because his campaign failed to file the paperwork. the former pennsylvania senator will be in dixon, illinois for a rally and we will have live coverage of that add about 1 p.m. eastern. in the meantime that romney will be campaigning in chicago. he will be giving an economic policy speech at the university of chicago this afternoon. she's beec-span will have live e at 115 eastern. the former massachusetts governor one puerto rico's 20 delegates yesterday, and met romney's wife said last night that it's time for the other republican candidates to get behind her husband. as we mentioned, illinois hold its primary tomorrow. the status 54 delegates at stake and several polls show a close race in the illinois primary. a poll taken over the weekend by public policy polling shows mr. romney ahead of rick

santorum, 45-30% among likely republican primary voters. with newt gingrich at 12% and ron paul at 10%. including puerto rico's result commit romney now has collected 521 republican delegates compared to rick santorum's 253, newt gingrich is 136, and ron paul, 50, according to "the associated press" count. the winner needs 1144 delegates to win the republican presidential nomination. >> the strong support we have in our region of the country about which this movement originated gives us an excellent base to go forth on the day of november the fifth with, and we in my judgment will go forward in the beginning with at least a 107 the seven electoral votes that comprise the states of the south and border and when you add that

with just a few other states as being in your 270 odd electoral votes necessary to win the presidency. >> as candidates campaign for president this year, we look back at 14 men who ran for the office and lost. go to our website, c-span.org/thecontenders to see video of the contenders i've lost an impact on american politics. >> there's been on his contention, spirited disagreement, and i believe considerable hot arguments. but don't let anybody be misled by that. you have given here in this hall a moving and dramatic mood of how americans who honestly differ close ranks and move forward for the nation's well being shoulder to shoulder. >> c-span.org/thecontenders. >> a house committee last week gave the center -- the federal

government a seem as good for stability track about freedom of information act request that were received at the report come out as a marriage and university law school held an event on transparency and openness in government. the keynote luncheon address at the covers are good remarks by richard huff, a director at the justice department in his remarks are about 45 minutes. >> [inaudible conversations] >> welcome back, everyone. i see many of you are still enjoying our lunch up on the foyer. and we have now had a wonderful keynote to start us off.

and two panels, and we are now on the home stretch and we will have another luncheon keynote, and into more panels panels this afternoon. and i have the pleasure of first just telling you one thing by way of an administered announcement of sorts. we talked a lot about ogis this point and their website or a what legend there's another place you can go to find a lot of current information about ogis in sort of a series or sequential form, chronologically. and that is the collaboration on government secrecy website. cgs for shorter i can give you the long url for that, but all you really have to do is go into google, and put in cgs, collaboration government secrecy for short, wco, and it will pop up right there. then if you go to the table of contents section right up front you will see a minute of the

foia because ogis was great under the 2740 a minute and under that you see a whole subsection on ogis. franco village that as a subsection aqualung was amended, and on ogis has a chance to the point because this was going on the we might even wind up having to being an entire section on the cgs website once we upgraded finally to its non-native form. so that's just administratively to take care of that. i had the pleasure of introducing our luncheon speaker who we are quite well known to one another, because we used to work so closely together for so many years, that i think we once calculated that at least one stretch of time we spent more time with one another than with our respective spouses. and debbie and karen observed that from time to time as well i'm sure. dick huff is going to speak to you under the title, or give an address, foia over the decades,

from four to obama. you'll notice there, you have the dates next to his name, 1976-2005. well, that's when things that the department of justice. dick started with foia way, way back. first i should say that you spent seven years in active duty, with the army. and as a consequence of that, follow-up to that, he is now a retired colonel in the army reserve. he came to the department of justice in 1976 while the ford administration was still rolling along. and so the transition into the carter administration the following january. and he was at the justice department all the way until 2005. he retired about a year before i did he and i were founders and codirectors. he was there as an actor director of one of the predecessor offices prior to that.

dick is more intellectual than he might look upon occasion. he has a ba from stanford. you got into stanford? apparently so. >> is a lot easier to get in back then. >> that's when joan baez's husband -- >> you said that all of this was set out in your bios there so you didn't have to read any of it. about any of the people here. [applause] >> is that right? >> that was for other people, not for you. did, you are special. am i wrong? deck is special. ba from stanford and masters from st. mary's university in texas while he was in the army. jd from hastings law school, which apparently the ranking has improved tremendously since you graduated. >> l. l. m. >> is now fully accredited. [laughter] >> and from what i understand it was a touch and go thing for a while.

llm from georgetown university law center. needless to say, dick and i have over the years put on the dick and dan show from time to time. and this perhaps promises to be more of the same. so i will just come up with that, given that the bios are out there, i will just say welcome to dick huff. >> thank you. [applause] what i would like to do is i would like to exercise, first of all i would like to thank you very much, dan, and hope that you will save your comments as the rest of you also, save your comments and rebuttals until the end. [inaudible] >> exactly. i'm also going to exercise a prerogative that i thought miriam exercise to begin with, and that is dan has now told you what he thinks i'm going to speak with, and i'm going to modify that only slightly. this is not going to be an

overview of the foia from the administration of president ford to the administration of president obama, but rather a worm's eye view from the department of justice from 1976 to 2005. there are many of you here who are much more knowledgeable than i, and certainly more qualified than i to speak as to what is happening inside the federal government since 2005. [inaudible] >> both teaching and with other memberships. [inaudible] >> as i said, you can save the rebuttal until -- [laughter] [inaudible] >> now, to flush out, flesh out my background is a little more,

as dan said, i came to the department in 1976 after a seven-year clerkship with the department of army at fort leonard wood, fort sill, fort sam houston, walter reed, and the pentagon. and i went to the office of privacy and immigration, let's try that again. office of the information of privacy of appeals where i perform duties exclusively related to the appeals of them of information act and privacy act requests. [inaudible] >> o. ipa. office of information and privacy appeals. >> your memory is better than mine. i'm pretty sure that is what it was, okay? i'm not sure what i just called it but that's what, that's what i've got written down, which is not necessarily the same.

i realized that. had congress not overridden president ford's veto of the 1974 for your eminence, i certainly wouldn't have had the fbi wouldn't have had the thousands of requests it got four years, and the deputy attorney general's office, of which a white ba was reported, would not have the hundreds of administrative appeals it had. four years. so i think the congress -- i think the congress in that respect for riding the do. now dan on the other hand came to the department of justice. yet been there. he served two clerkships before he got there. as an attorney. he then served a judicial clerkship with judge oliver gash, and then he came to the department, i believe it was just shortly after i got there. somewhere in that general area.

[inaudible] >> and dana workman civil division, specializing in foia litigation. now, as he said, in 1982, the office of information and privacy was formally created. and it brought together the private appeals office and the prior policy office. and dan and i served as the to codirectors. he suggested, my primary response that should be administrative appeals and budget, and his would be foia policy and litigation, and i agreed. that same year, dan suggested that we update the freedom of information act short guide, which was then only about 30 pages long, and publish it in the foia k-swiss. i agree. subs only the department's legal education institute establish a government wide two day training class on foia, and dan suggested

that our staff should be the primary instructors. i agreed. later that your dan suggested we include two new features in our quarterly publication, foia update. the first would be foia counselor q&a's, which consisted of short responses to the more routine frequently asked foia questions. the second was a foia focus where we would profile someone active in the foia committee. i agreed with both of these suggestions. i note that the one problem we had with foia focus is that we did once feature that had foia officer who four years later pled guilty to falsifying federal mortgage documents. >> not under indictment at the time. >> exactly but it is being investigated it hadn't been shared with us. [inaudible]

>> in 1984, dan suggested publishing guidance on congressional access to agency records under the foia, extension seven aecom and personal records, and i agreed. due to the expansive growth of the short guide to the freedom of information day, the federal trade commission told us it was false advertising, continue to call it the short guide. so in 1986 dan suggested it be called just the department of justice guide to the foia, and i agree. in 1986, the legal education institute was no longer able to continue teaching these two-day foia classes. so dan suggested oipa handle it all by ourselves. and while we're at it, add two new courses, one for advanced foia personal and another one that dan referenced earlier, the dick and dan show where we would

go out and talk about all of the new cases of significance that it come out during the past year. well, this started out with about 200 people, and it grew up to slightly over 600 folks coming to again. now, i was never sure exactly why the popularity grew so much, but i had the feeling it might have been for two reasons. one, it was actually a half-day class and we never publicize it as such, but i thought an awful lot of people took off at, you know, right after we were gone and their agency never knew that it was a half-day program. [inaudible] >> the other reason though, and this is what i think dan has learned this lesson well, if they think that the people came because we gave away free coffee and doughnuts. and i noticed doughnuts heck, you're getting at dishes up there and lunches. you are really working to bring the people in here, dan.

and i think that is a point dan has learned quite well. >> i cannot take any credit. long before i write of the washington college of law it was well-known that the initial wcl stood for we cater lunch. this food all over this place. [laughter] >> that's your side of the story. later that year, foia reform legislation was passed the dan was instrumental in negotiating its provisions on the have a government. i don't member a drink to that one way or the other. subsequently though, he suggested that we draft a memorandum on the 86 amendments, which we proudly present to attorney general meeks for his second year. i don't remember agreeing to this one way or the other either. all right. >> do you agree when he changed one word, which was dispelled?

>> in 1987 dan recommended that we propose an executive order on the proper steps that an agency should take you give notice to a submitter of business records when the agency receives a foia request for those records. i agreed. dan drafted a. president reagan signed executive order 12600. in 1989, the government prevailed on the reporters committee case in the supreme court. dan suggested we draft and publish a policy piece explaining all of its nuances. i agreed. in 1991, recognizing a need unfilled by the office of management and budget, dan suggested we published along with the department of justice's freedom of information act guide and overview of the privacy act of 1974. i agreed. in 1992, dan suggested that the right and we publish an article

on the automatic disclosure provisions of a1 and a2 of the foia. mistakenly believing that this would be one of the most exciting topics ever to be addressed in foia update. i agreed. in 1993, dan suggested that we draft a new discretionary disclosure memo for attorney general reno. i agreed. but there was a bit of a delay because of attorney general reno's draft memo was shortened a bit when president clinton lifted some of dan's text verbatim and place them into the first ever presidential memo on the foia. three years later following over six years of on and off work by dan, congress enacted the electronic foia amendments. >> you negotiate a part of that so you're partly to blame. >> no, i negotiated speeds i was out of town that summer, remember. >> dan is exactly what the

little piece i was to negotiate, i failed miserably on and that part got left in. if negotiation can include unsuccessful negotiation, i did it. but dan was doing all of the heavy lifting over there. what happened with the electronic amendments was he then immediately suggested that the draft numerous parlous he articles with foia updates, explaining the legislation. and i agreed. in 1988, congress decided to hold oversight hearings on this new legislation. dan suggested i should be the one to testify on behalf of the department at these hearings, even though he had all of the background knowledge in the area. for the life of me i do not remember why i agreed to that. but two years later the house committee on government reform delivered a subpoena seeking

testimony in an upcoming hearing entitled felonies and favors, a friend of the attorney general gathers information from the justice department. i suggested to dan that since i testified the last time, he might want to enjoy the experience this time. he explained that since i was the one who released the information on appeal at issue, and that i did such a great job testifying last time, and finally because the subpoena was written, was in my name, i out to be the one who testifies before chairman dan burton. although i had nonrefundable air tickets for a summer vacation in idaho for the hearings scheduled date, dan told me i had to come back.

that hearing was no fun. all right. in march 2001, dan suggested we leap into the 21st century by dropping our pay per foia update and publish foia posted electronically instead. .. >> you knew that at the time,

nice try. >> all right. >> well, the way i said it i think makes a better story. >> it protects your integrity just slightly more than i've already done. >> truth is truth, right? >> perhaps so. in 2003, due to the fact it seemed that we had already addressed almost all significant issues dan could only suggest that we discuss update agencies rely on a wide range of exemption 3 statutes so i think dan is directly behind the fact that you're going to have a panel on later on this afternoon discussing those wide range of exemption 3 statutes. >> there is a thread, yes. >> in 2005 dan discussed the how to respond on unit prices on an

agency contract. and i remember reading the eighth screen of a ten-screen article. it was really dense and it was really well-written but right in that eighth screen i fell straight down onto my desk and had a bloody nose. and what that told me is i knew i had to retire. [laughter] >> and i did in 2005 so what went well at for my time in oip. i adjudicated some 70,000 administrative appeals and i taught close to 300 classes. dan formulated and distributed excellent policy guidance. we produced an outstanding reference volume on both the foia and the privacy act and most significantly i think we did a very good nurturing 200 senior employees. dan, i bet you've got more stuff to be presented in further panels this afternoon.

well, first thing you probably want to at least mention what you would commonly say when anyone visited our office and said how many people work here? >> about two-thirds of them. l[laughter] >> merriam, is that right? about two-thirds? [inaudible] >> i remember differently. you had a two-word response, about half. is yes, absolutely. thank you for that. i'm going to exercise my prerogative of asking the first question because we have time and i know you're willing -- dick, by the way, likes lots of hard questions. not the easy ones. >> say again. >> if you have an easy one in mind, give someone else a chance. okay? but if you have a hard one or two, definitely please line up on the side but i'm going to ask you first, having started way back in the ford administration,

and being able to see the character, the tone of foia administration back then and seeing how it changed the carter administration, and then ford to reagan 1, reagan 2, bush 41, clinton 1, clinton 2, bush 43, part 1, bush 43, part 2. okay? which administration do you think was the most effective and forthcoming and successful with respect to foia administration? >> sure. most effective and forthcoming was head and shoulders the administration all eight years of janet reno. [applause] >> oh, and there is the cheerleader right here. >> head cheerleader. >> head cheerleader. >> we have pom pom right there. that's carl stern right back there. carl stern who was convicted of being the head of public affairs. >> from march of '93 to july of

'96. >> under janet reno who did one heck of a fine job of holding both dick's fifteen and dan's feet to the fire saying, wait a minute, you got to release this. and about the only defense we had, carl, throughout the whole thing was, carl's privacy act won't let us. there's criminal sanctions involved and carl says nobody ever gets prosecuted under that. [laughter] >> i know people in the criminal division. don't worry about that. [laughter] >> you know. >> that's funny but it's also true. [laughter] >> yeah. and, in fact, carl was prepping the attorney general on that because what she would do, she would come up to carl to start with. you know, i'm sure he thought of a lot of this on his own but the attorney general coming from florida where they had a sunshine statute with some exemptions. and their exemption 6 and 7 cfrs are here and theirs is about

here and they practically protected nothing under the privacy protections in florida and that is what she was used to working in so she'd go over there and she'd start giving carl a business and he'd have to give us is business, you know, that was -- that was the way it worked. but i would say easily janet reno. yes, ma'am. >> hi, my name is claudia and i'm a student here and i have a two-part question for you actually. the first is, do you recommend this area of law as a good area of specialization for graduating law students? and secondly, i know that the next panel is going to be going over some legislative activity but do you think foia should be amended with judge millner. >> the answer is yes. i think millner was probably was

appropriately decided although i sure understood what justice breyer said let sleeping laws lie. it had been the law for 35 years. 30 years and, you know, america had worked seemingly pretty well. i understand what the majority did and how that worked but i think particularly some of the folks with dod and some of the other areas that i'm familiar with where we have as dan mentioned vulnerability studies and of things of that nature, we've got some of the materials that are high too for the military that just really are very difficult or can't be protected right now. so dealing with that one first. with the second -- with your first question, no. i think you shouldn't go into foia. i think you should go and you should be an investment banker.

[laughter] >> that's what i would have done and if i would have been able to, you know, do a little bit better -- if i would have been somebody who was on law review like metcalfe instead of, you know, somebody who i only knew one person who was on law review on hastings and i didn't know him very well. i didn't know him very well. that was sort of the thing that i certainly would have gone into, investment banking. >> but dick, the question is for a law student today. not someone to go to go to -- >> you should become an attorney and learn all you can learn about corporate law and investment banking. isn't that true, tom? because there's a lot of big money in private practice. tom is an example of that right there.

formerly, you work for the ngos >> tom sussman, formerly a lawyer. >> recovering -- recovering. >> this is to dick and not dan. one of the things from your chronology that you didn't mention is that in the early on

appeals or 300 classes i taught. i think that sounds more like policy on dan's side, policy work and i bet we've got an answer for that other than -- [inaudible] >> did you hear that? [laughter] >> i know. but adjudication not policy it's alternative dispute resolution. >> well, that -- >> obviously, it fell in between the cracks. >> if i -- when was that? in the -- >> the early -- >> yeah, no, dick, what happened -- that's what tom did for janice mccloud. we had about a handful to a dozen what we called foia ombudsman-type matters that we handled every year. we tried to advertise that puppy up the wazoo. it really was advertised more than you remember, tom, but as a practical matter we could only take the cases that in merriam has more cases than we can deal with but we really did try to do that.

truly. >> we had one other difficulty and that is one that merriam suffers under at her agency. and that is -- it is not a class a misdemeanor. not to follow the advice of the office of information and privacy when we tell you you're going to have to disclose that information. when we're talking to somebody outside of the department. i mean, we could -- you know, we could say -- and the huge share of the time when we would talk to another agency on an issue like that. a huge share of the time. an agency would do what we told them when we were aware of a problem in that way. but there were a couple of them -- one of which initials -- i shouldn't say the name of it, but its initials were epa. [laughter] >> that we just once had a terrible problem with saying you cannot do that and we ended up telling them about three different levels and they had a political person who said, yeah,

we're going to do. and as soon as the organization was then sued finally the third entity in the department of justice -- they had asked us, the criminal division, white criminal division was not at all clear and then the ausa told them i ain't going to defend that. and that was -- that was one where they had to write, you know, attorney's fees for the cost of a complaint in that one but there was just no way we could -- we could enforce that in the exceptionally rare case where that happened. >> yeah. wasn't there an attorney general's directive at some point that the justice department wouldn't defend cases that it didn't feel were justified and did that happen often? >> sure. >> yes to both. but not often enough for many. >> and in an ag mobile home in may of '77 to may of '81 to reno in october of '93, to ashcroft

in october of 2001 and now to holder in 2009. >> yeah. it's in every memo. >> it did not even go very high up the line. the assistant united states attorney talked to his supervisor and went back and said, hey, agency, we're not going to defend this. >> the beginning of -- >> that's an example now, i don't know if merriam had many terror stories like that but that is one of the exceptionally rare cases where they would not take our advice. most of the time they would. >> dick, used to love more than anything else when we'd have to get on the phone -- i was telling this to someone earlier this afternoon and tell no less august personage that a general, admiral, you're flying wrong. >> dan was the one that did that. >> he loved being able to do that 'cause he's only a colonel to get to say that to a general. he loved that.

>> i was in the military reserve. i was worried. i was worried about the word getting back. >> the draft number. >> i know. >> 98. >> no, it's not -- sorry -- >> i can't believe you're doing this to me. >> are you trying to avoid my question like you tried to avoid my appeal, dick. [laughter] >> i thought -- i thought i responded to every one of your appeals. >> there's a lot of -- denying a huge share of them. >> there's a lot of blood on the 70,000. >> yeah, yeah. >> i want to thank you for your service on those. we always felt we gave a good hearing on our appeals even if we didn't get the right answer over the years. but i guess the question with the both of you here i guess the question i'd like to put to you is to think and to maybe expound if you will a little bit about the role of the justice department as a model and a

leadership role for the entire federal foia process, government wide, as well as in the world but specifically government wide and let me tell you why i'm asking you this question. currently, there are some debate in one of the critics who is sitting at the panel here about the justice department's numbers on foia compliance in foia a completion and decisions. so there's some criticism as to whether the justice department is being honest in its reporting to congress about its foia program and so i'm mindful of what that -- what signal that sends to the general bureaucracy si since you're reviewing foia over your 10 you're, if you could speak to the role of leadership for your office, thank you. >> sure. i think we did a pretty good job and i think that we did provide

leadership and i think the policy guidance that dan gave overwhelmingly through foia update and the case law that the two of us put out through the doj guide and the privacy act overview was extremely good and we would put in cases, for instance, in the doj guide where the department lost and sometimes where we lost and we didn't think we should, well, there's going to be a parenthetical in there saying, judge, apparently on narcotics ruling such and such and we are going to put -- >> aberrational ruling. we put that a lot. >> aberrational ruling or ruling without explanation that. >> inexplicably aberrational. >> we wanted to do that so that when -- and we were kind of flattered in one respect because we -- we occasionally would see

briefs that had been submitted by assistant united states attorneys which had clearly taken the information right out of the doj guide and cited everything and we looked down there, judas priest, you cited contra cases, two cases that are against the proposition. these are not in your district, not in your circuit. you are not obligated to do this as a matter of ethics or law and you have used, you know, inexplicably ruling such and such and you used that kind of language in there so we wanted to be careful that, in fact, we definitely put in, you know, the good, bad and the ugly throughout that guide in order to make it as straightforward and as honest as we could so i would say in that area i think we did a very good job. i'm not sure that responds -- >> by contrast there is no more small amount of sadness or basis

for sadness how things have gone since then. i'll just point out that not only with respect to the overall backlog reductions statistics of the justice department, department wide, the inescapable fact speaking of leadership and serving as a model that in the three leadership offices of the department of justice, ag deputy and associate attorney general and merriam knows this well 'cause this was her primary of responsibility for a dozen years -- not only do the combine backlog increase by almost 33% last year, but after that happened, and there was some focus on it, the combined backlog for those three offices, attorney general, deputy attorney general, and associate attorney general increased this past year like 35.27%. as dick would say who's counting but i think the people are getting guidance from justice to reduce their backlog are counting if they see, you know,

caesar's wife. that's just one of many things that are sad right now. >> that's kind of the motivation of my question was to speak of any lessons you would be kind of at the crucible for the head of the entire foia government notwithstanding the products you used to implement policy but those kinds of lessons about leadership. >> it's to speak straightforwardly and to make sure -- not just before it goes to an attorney to make sure what you say is accurate you're telling the truth. >> michael biggard department of the air force. as you know the department of defense is facing budget cuts -- >> you always say that. he always says that. >> it's the truth this time, i swear. [laughter] >> and so foia professionals are

walking around with targets on their back and i can attest that there are positions that have been eliminated. >> yeah. >> and you're looking at perhaps lower foia. i'm wondering does the justice department have a role here? i can tell people, hey, it's a law, freedom of information act is a law. we have to have people to carry out that law. but i don't really account for much in the air force so should the department of justice should be telling the defense department and other agencies you have to preserve these people because they are there to carry out a law? >> well, i think there's some -- there's some difficulty with justice telling other agencies how they should allocate their money. i remember going back quite a while ago when the head foia person at dod going back to the -- oh, jeez to go i don't

need being told more or less but i don't like being told to do it faster as well that's the sort of problem, i think, a lot of us have. sometimes we can get from automation, we are able to increase the speed and improve things a little bit with that but i recognize automation costs us money as well and once we made that increase of 17% the first year, it's going to stay at that 17%. it's not going to be, you know, growing by that every year. so i think that there's certainly are problems with exactly that. i have seen going way back the department of state used to have a terrible problem with its backlog and they went up once to senator leahy and leahy was wearing two hats, one in the senate subcommittee dealing with foia and he was aware of the problem at state. he also happened to be on state

department appropriation committee. and that was the time, at least with state, he was able to make a difference for about three or four years where he told them that they were going to get more money and he didn't want this money used for this that, or the other thing. he wanted this particular, you know, $4 million over here that is put in general administration to be put into -- into foia and, in fact, it did make a difference for that short period, but the difficulty is even if justice says something like that it's got to go through the appropriators. i think there might be a small, if i recall correctly -- a small bit of help that can be done through the chief foia officers who are among other things responsible for reporting to the agency head with regard to resources. but, again, that's a voice within the agency on something like that. >> secretary of state baker got $9 million one afternoon for the state department foia. that's a standard even with

inflation that sets the bar very high. go back to your agencies and tell them that's what you shoot for. 9 million in a single afternoon. >> i think foia is filed by people who oppose a policy's agency -- >> who do i have here? >> sorry. >> i think foia are sometimes filed by people who oppose an agency's policy is not merely to find more information on the policies but in some cases to require the folks making those policies to spend their time responding to the foia. i wouldn't accuse anyone in this room of that but it's something i have seen from time to time. do you see -- is that a problem that you've witnessed and do you see a way to try to address that? >> this gives dick time to think of an answer. [laughter] >> i saw that i think on -- at the department of justice on

fairly rare occasions. one of the reasons why that is not a terrible problem is that there are fees involved in processing most requests. and if you have somebody, you know, assuming that valid fees can be charged, that can calm some people down and help them focus on what they -- they really want. my experience at the department of justice was that was not a particularly frequent problem every great once in a while we would have somebody like that but it would be an individual seeking records that did not at all qualify as a news media or was not entitled to a fee waiver it was once in a great wile it might be a disgruntled employee. employees are entitled to get all kinds of records and that's entirely appropriate but there would be one or two of the rare

cases where i would hear something like that and usually fees would be the one thing that, you know -- given the first part, given the next part and after a while, that would be so. but i didn't see that very often at the department of justice. it was pretty rare. >> you've got a class here -- >> this gentleman has been standing here. >> cheated out of legislation which is going to be a lot more interesting than what i've got to see. >> this is an academic institution, dick, someone has an inquiry -- one more quick question. [inaudible] >> did your former office at justice have -- >> no. >> more authority over the foia people at fbi than at other agencies? >> oh, yes. [laughter] >> by far. >> even though they carried guns. >> i would get an administrative appeal -- well, we had a large amount of authority in terms of

general policy, not total but a very large amount. but on administrative appeal if the fbi withheld somebody or if the fbi took an inappropriate thing i could go back and i could overrule them. there was one particular case i remember. they said this is protected under exemption under 7d. if you disclose this is going to result in some guy being out on the street one of our informants and i looked at it and i said explain to me. well, we're not sure why. well, you got to do better than that because i've looked at it as hard as i can and i don't think it's going to identify him because of this, that and the other. and unless you can come up and explain it to me better, i'm going to order it to be -- to be disclosed. so within the department of justice, we had -- i had the power on administrative appeals with everything except for the folks that are on b1. except for exemption 1, i did not have the power to overrule

the fbi or anyone else under exemption 1. under the executive order i had the power to make sure it was properly marked. once it was that substantively, it went to a department of review committee which was made up of security personnel and they were the ones that made that determination on exemption 1. or any other exemption or any other policy fees, fee waivers, things such as that, the answer was yes. >> thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you very much. >> it's great to be able to go back over the years like that. >> we'll have the next panel. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> now, is that suitable for christmas cards? >> yeah. >> illinois holds its primary tomorrow. the state has 54 delegates at stake. several polls show a close race in the illinois primary while another poll taken saturday and sunday by public policy polling shows mr. romney ahead of rick santorum 45-30% among likely republican voters. mr. santorum's campaigning in illinois today and we'll have live coverage of his rally in dixon which is ronald reagan's childhood at 1:00.

and mr. romney will break down his economic policy. congress returns to capitol hill this afternoon. the senate meets at 2:00 eastern beginning with speeches and at 4:30 they'll continue to debate on a small business bill live coverage here on c-span2. the house gavels in at 4:00 eastern to consider a bill for u.s. visas for israelis and paul ryan is expected to release the republican 2013 budget plan this week. we talked to a reporter following the issue to learn more. >> paul ryan is about to release the republican's budget proposal this week and joining us to talk about it is nancy cook, "national journal"'s budget and tax correspondent. when can we expect to see the budget? >> guest: well, paulson ryan is expected to unveil it tomorrow morning over on capitol hill at 10:30 at a press conference and then he's doing a series of events at conservative think tanks throughout the week at american enterprise institute and the heritage foundation to sell this blueprint or ideas