that this statute chills nothing. that should be a sufficient answer to your honor's concern that with respect to other statutes in the future, they can reevaluate it to determine whether or not they impose a chill to the conclusion that they ought not be sassed by first amendment. there is no chill here. so this statute is constitutional. thaupg. >> thank you, general. council? the case is submitted.

talks about the decision and what his group plans to do. david pollack from the washington -- on the crisis in syria. washington journal live at 7:00 a.m. eastern on c-span. ask everyone to move to the center. coming up next, the state department looks at the evolution of u.s. human rights policy. this year's the 35th anniversary of the bureau of democracy human rights and labor. to mark the occasion, they brought together senior diplomats who served in the bureau including thomas pickering. the highest for a diplomat at the state department. this panel is an hour.

welcome everyone to the second panel. i have a lot to live up to. it was fabulous first conversation. my name is kyle gibson. i'm with newsweek as it says here. i'm also the executive producer and managing editor of a gathering called women in the world which is now had three years. now lincoln center which examines global issues through the prism of narratives about the lives of women and girls around the world. what we've discovered this last year at lincoln center with when we were sold out is that human rights has become the issue of our summit over the course of three days. i feel passionately about these issues and i'm delighted to be here. i'm also from centuries ago a producer for nightline in the

old koppel days. which nightline began after the invasion of afghanistan. people associate it with the hostage crisis, but it was really at the height of the cold war and we had you on our program and dean ko as well. i'm glad to be here. let's begin. there's so much to get into. our esteemed guests. i will begin with the great ambassador, thomas pickering, who has the highest title here at state department, the career ambassador, known as the diplomat's diplomat. it's a great honor to have you. we also have -- someone started to applause. i think he deserves a great hand of applause. [ applause ] >> we also have harold coe. your title is legal adviser. he's been dean of yale law. he's going to give us the great important perspective international trib unls criminal courts. he is a very, very important

intellectual force in the human rights movement because of the rule of law, the role of law and the role of international law in human rights. [ applause ] and sto my right, ambassador daniel fried. the closure of the guantanamo bay detention facility. i hesitate to ask who you ticked off to get that assignment. it's an important one. it's terribly, terribly important. i'm excited to have him here. he's also posted as the ambassador to poland and in central america -- not central america. central europe. pardon me. assistant secretary in central europe. we have so much to talk about on the arc from 1989. the fall of the berlin wall till

2001 is our theme of this conversation. i am hope you'll all interrupt each other as i turn the tables to you. i thought we would begin with present day. the news this morning from russia this more than. putin is rounding up protesters because they wear ribbons. there's a congressional movement to crackdown on sanctions, impose sanctions for putin. i guess my question to you, is it deja vu all over again? >> yes and no. the putin effort to deal with the streets has been real and i think it raises the question of the fact that he's seriously concerned. it's involved two equally opposite policies, intimidation and co-option. co-option where he could and intimidation where he thinks that he has to. he's now re-elected, he's in an intimidating mode. he's going to move ahead with this because it presents a serious danger to him, perhaps more existential than he had realized up until now.

you'll have a movement in the streets that is not going to stop. that there is no serious way he can use force against it in the kind of root opposition that the soviets would have practiced had it been something that occurred with them. we need to be very much aware of it. i am deeply concerned by two aspects of our policy. i think we need to get rid of jackson because it no longer applies and for the russians, it's, in a sense, a torture instrument, the purpose of which has long disappeared. but i support congressmen jim mcgovern. i had wished, in fact, that we had scraped up the host of issues at the top. people who have been killed with no examination with clear sense that there's been government

involvement. and i think that that concerns me. could i say two other things at the outset which will not be for any of us happy news, but i think it is important that we put them on the record now as we take a look at what we are facing ahead. one of those is us. i couldn't agree more with the job that dan has taken and taken the burden off everybody else's shoulders. but we should not forget that we have people permanently in detention in the united states. it is not in my view in accordance with the constitution or with our rights and it is something we ought to face up to. my feeling is that they deserve trials. i don't like military commissions, but i think that the administration has made a serious effort to make military commissions as much like district courts as they can.

i disagree why we aren't using our district courts and i think the congress has been uncon shonn obl in interfering with the process of justice in these cases. [ applause ] i recognize that unhappily we may not be able to convict some terrorists. and i'm distraught. but i think because of our own faults, we do not have the right to violate our own constitution and keep them permanently under detention with no access to a judicial process and if it means, and this is highly unpopular, letting them go, we're going to have to do it. >> i'm afraid i have to then ask. i was going to get to guantanamo bay later. but i think you better respond. >> first of all the, it remains the position of this administration that guantanamo should be closed. that is the president's

position. that's the administration's position. [ applause ] the fact that it has not closed is the result not simply, not even principally of the intrinsic difficulty but because the congress has put numerous roadblocks in our way prohibiting us for example, from the kinds of civil, normal trials in federal courts that have actually a very good track record of convictions and long sentences. i say this with regret. also in the spirlt of bipartisanship i will note that the bush administration also sought to close guantanamo and moved out many detainees, over 500 and faced none of the congressional restrictions that we face. so two presidents, not simply one, wanted to close guantanamo. which begs the question, if both presidents wanted to close it, might they both be right? that's a question for congress,

though not for congressman mcgovern who has been on the right side of the issue. >> dean coe, i think i'm going to ask you to weigh in on this since we're getting to the issue of the courts, please. >> let me say first what a joy it is to serve with both tom pickering and dan fried who you've heard why. let me also say that it's great not to be on the early years panel. [ laughter ] but i think the most revealing point to me when i came to the state department and from academia that indicated to me that we were in the post cold war years, which was tea en man/berlin to 9/11. was a meeting i attended with tom. i don't know if he remembers this. we were meeting a russian senior leader and madeleine albright came over to tom pick erg and the red of the russian desk and me. they started and said, you know,

everybody here speaks russian. let's do the meeting in russian. so they started talking in russian. then the interpreter looks around and sees that i'm the only guy that doesn't speak russian. he comes over to interpret for me. i thought to myself, i'm glad jesse helms isn't watching this. this is a sign of how much had changed, that not only could you have real dialog between people -- countries which had non, zero, some interest even though they were not in a strategic partnership and where human rights could be discussed and that our diplomats could have the kind much knowledge of the other country that previously they only had about us and we didn't have going the other way, i would note also that it was during this period that guantanamo arose as an issue at my last birthday, my

family and i counted that i have worked on guantanamo for -- on my birthday for 17 of the last 22 birthdays, which is a very scary thought. and i do believe that -- i disagree with tom in one respect. i think that this administration has tried to make what is currently at guantanamo lawful, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea. i don't think that off shore detention of enemies of the state is a good idea. whether it can be brought within legal rules or not. and i think that that has been the challenge that this administration is facing. and i hope it can be addressed at the start of the next presidential term. >> all right. let's now get back into the area around 1989. i would like to back up a bit before that. you two why at the forefront.

i'd love you both ambassador fried and pickering, could you give us a flavor of the weight of human rights pre-'89. >> i remember the extraordinarily well. in the 1980s, the human rights bureau looked at eastern europe as the place where dissidents were being beaten up and trade union activists jailed and their job was to defend these people. the notion that knows dissidents and those trade union activists might actually succeed and that that -- their success would change the world was a thought that occurred to no one. and when 1989 occurred, the realists in the department who opposed human rights in principle, dismissed it as irrelevant and the human rights activists were skeptical because they thought the communism was too rigid to change.

well, they were right. communism didn't change in eastern europe. it collapsed within a matter of months. and the profound consequences of that collapse unfolded only as it became clear that it would, in fact, in great part of central europe, be replaced by real democracy. and in the '90s, from '89 through the clinton administration, two presidents, american foreign policy had to take account of the profound change which the fall of communism meant for the world. and it meant, in fact, that europe hold free and at peace was at hand a cause which we championed rhetorically since 1945. a cause in which we had long since ceased to believe and a cause which was suddenly upon us. that was a profound era and i'm proud to say that presidents

bush, clinton and bush 43 responded in similar ways and were enormously successful and the europe that we see today, despite the economic problems, but an undivided europe which seems now inevitable and is probably taken for granted by the -- the people from the hugh plan -- from drl who weren't born when it was established, that europe was regarded as impossible, impossible and that experience of going from impossible to reality affected all of us who went through it. there's more to say, but that will do for now. >> ambassador pickering? >> i agree with much of what dan as said. two things. in the '80s i was in el salvador. it was a huge problem. i wouldn't have taken the job if

george schultz hadn't assured me that not only was he in favor of dealing with the human rights violations, but that he would back it and that was critically important. it made the job from a horror into something in which there was some satisfaction. the tragedy is, if anybody follows el salvador now, we have deported all of the youth gang members and they have now afflicted el salvador with a second hell. we're now beginning to take conscious sight of that and beginning to work on it. in russia, there was consternation and indeed lack of any serious sense of what to do. what did happen in the main, however, was the old abuses that were -- freedom of movement and private life disappeared pretty quickly and indeed, by 1994,

they were pocketed by the public who were worried about the other problems economic adversity, no pay, no pensions, no jobs. and this took on a different category. that dan is right that we got europe whole and free, but i just spent last weekend in croatia and we know that that's a reminder of the fact that there were many remnants of difficulty still not cleared up that we need to work on. and that they had a dimension which crossed both human rights and what we would call traditional diplomacy. i don't think realism is necessarily there. that we have a diplomacy and a policy that's informed in part by our moral values and principles and in part by our national interests and objectives that human rights is a critically important part of that. i want to talk later if there's a moment about this potential

conflict between realism and idealism and human rights and the regional bureaus. because i think there's much to be said for ways to bring it together and harold was sitting there throughout most of this period, certainly the second half of the clinton administration and i had the honor and pleasure of working with harold as undersecretary, when in fact many of these issues, as harold knows and as i know, were on the plate. we had to work our way through them. i think, although harold may have a different view, we worked our way through them intelligently with balance. >> let me back up there for a minute. you did talk about poland, a success story by and large. yugoslavia. what were the mechanisms that didn't come into play that could have come into play? harold, do you want to take that? go ahead. >> maybe we can go to what i think was the big picture shift in '89. fall of the berlin wall and ten

men square. there's a change of paradigm and strategy in the response to the change of paradigm and there was a change of tools. the change of paradigm, the early period of human rights, post world war ii, is genocide. in the cold war, the paradigm was individual dissidents and then after the wall came down, it was a little bit like the floodwaters receding and suddenly you see all these other problems and the paradigm became group and ethnic conflict with yugoslavia and the balkans being the model. as it started to fall apart, there was a need to change our approach. so what was the approach? democracy, human rights and labor, basically. when i was sworn in, my son who graduated from college who was only eight years old. i remember he comes back from my swearing in ceremony and a frepd of his says, what's your dad's new job.

he says, my dad is assistant secretary for truth, justice and the american way. [ laughter ] i actually thought, you know, that's not bad. the strategies being used were telling truth. my pal mark suser is here. the number of reports were line by line, word by word, our only motto was tell the truth. justice and accountability, the creation of tribunals, truth and reconciliation commissions, engagement, particularly with the big powers, china, russia and then the promotion of democracy and focus on atrocities prevention. i think that continues to be the strategy. finally the tools had radically changed, particularly private/public networks became a

key part and this is the early days of the internet where suddenly in teen men -- in china, cultural revolution occurred without many people knowing about it. by tea en men square, people are -- you have people twittering and tweeting in present day. this is president clinton's statement. that you knt r can't oi owe trying to block the internet is like trying to nail jell-o to the wall. i think it's radically changed the paradigm. >> let me stop you there. i was there the night of the crackdown. it was a slaughter. i stayed on another month. i was there the month before. i know that bent skoe croft went back to china not very long after that and met with officials there and was seen toasting them. i understand how things change elsewhere. but i've just been back to china two weeks ago. we know the situation there. help me out here.

they had faxes, but there were people who couldn't see me and hauled in by police instead of meeting me two weeks ago. >> i'm glad you mentioned that. i don't think anything more vividly proves the change of paradigm. after teen men square, june 4th. goes into the u.s. embassy for a year and ten days. leaves and dies in the united states without the possibility of having the kind of influence on human rights in china that he would have hoped. the only options for a dissident back then were what would be called inside china, dead to the world or outside china, dead to china. >> right. we don't have that anymore with chen guangcheng. were there possibilities, he could be in china communicating to the outside world or in new york, communicating with china through the internet.

this is an important point. because the media needs to understand this. we were getting calls saying when we brought chen out of the embassy saying what did you, the u.s. government, do to protect chen and the answer is, we got him to a place where the internet will protect chen. so you better stop thinking about it in the old terms. this is not about governments alone anymore. this is about public/private networks and the fact of the matter is, that we were talking to china about how their own vision of the rule of law, including granting passports, et cetera, would allow him to have a solution where his human rights was consistent with chinese rule of lawi shows that it was no longer a sub zero game. you looked like you had something to say. >> i want to go back to the question of tools. >> yes. >> the traditional 1980s human

rights tools were effective in the 1980s but when the new democratic governments came into power in central europe and after '91 in the baltics, they didn't ask us for human rights assistance. they asked us for economic assistance. we actually provided it. we didn't have any idea we could do it. nobody had thought that communism could be transformed in the liberal democracy. va'a lens a said it's like turning an aquarium into fish soup. we're trying to turn it back to the aquarium. a lot harder. we had several years of economic support and it wasn't just foreign aid. it was helping countries devise the infrastructure and systems of a modern economy. we helped the pols device a pension system, banking regulators, anti-monopoly laws.

we had legal experts coming over telling them how to do a budget. we did things for the poles that we frankly can't discuss for ourselves. pension reform. that's something else. balanced budget. i see bill taylor sitting here. he's responsible for summit for economic support for the middle east post transition. he's using some of the tools that we pioneered in central europe. enterprise funds. dick chefter, also sitting here, made the point in the early clinton administration that the stability of democracy in these new countries is going to depend on them getting the economy right. that was the first tool. the second tool was the strategic implications of the fall of the berlin wall and that was the european union and nato.

that created the reality and helped stabilize these countries -- the region in an unstable and uncertain time. that's where it succeeded where it failed former yugoslavia and other places is a different story. >> could we talk about that. you had rue wanda '94. very different places and circumstances. i would love any of you to please address either what we could have done and didn't. i know there's been a report on this fairly recently that albright brought together didn't she on rue an da. >> international tribunals. the icty, the yugoslavia tribunal, the role, the possibility that you could localize responsibility in a few

key leaders. one went to the tribunal, we did not end of occupying belgrade. it showed that if there are other ways to respond to international criminal abuses, the second was the notion of diplomacy backed by force leading to a negotiation, which is what holbrook brilliantly did at dayton. the third is the concept of atrocities prevention and what madeleine albright and others did is to bring this forward, the president has now signed a directive on atrocities prevention board for exactly the kind of early warning. then finally, democracy building. as a longer term antidote, the community of democracies and other kinds of devices. so these were horrible episodes. but i think what it did was it triggered structural change which is one of the hardest things to get in the human rights area. >> go ahead.

please. >> make a point. i agree with what harold said. i think there's another factor that's evolving but it's evolved very fast and that's international attention. in effect, rowan da was remote, out of the way. not well-attended to. slow rolling in the public while it was rapidly rolling in the disaster. so that, i think, held things back. on the other hand, darfur had more -- than peacekeeping capacity. it had early press attention which was complimented by very late deployment. so in fact, it wasn't the sovereign answer, but it was a piece of the puzzle that was absolutely necessary but entirely insufficient to make the process go ahead. there is the will of the international to act in new york. or there's the ability to do things alone.

to some extent, particularly in the clinton administration after somalia, we were highly gun shy. participation ourselves in peacekeeping endeavors that involved particularly the notion that we might have to use force for both good and bad reasons. i think in the end, darfur showed we paid a pretty heavy price for that when it was maybe even too much but much too late if coy put it that way in some ways. you're right, the evolution of the tools is still out there. it's still working. the tool that we lacked the most at the moment is what i would call foresight in preventive measures. they require more courage, more decisiveness, more good analysis and more ability to mobilize than i think currently we have at the international community.