and other problems that the bush administration had accumulated. this administration encumbered by far fewer of those problems has a greater latitude. and that's a wonderful opportunity for us. and the secretary has seized it. but it will be a long process. >> go ahead. >> let me just say about korea, because i'm a korean-american. my late father said there are two things he really wanted to see. one was the red sox win the pennant and they did that twice. the other was in his lifetime see the reunification of korea. and there have been times when i wonder whether i will see that in my lifetime. but in october 2000, i had the opportunity to go with secretary albright to north korea, and the moment that really struck me was flying out of north korea, which

is a country which cannot feed its people and which has no electricity, in the dark. and then 30 minutes away, seeing the lights of seoul and realizing these are the same people. the only difference is democracy and human rights. and look what is accomplished, and the difference between the well-being of the people in one place and another. and it just gave me some sense, the bright lights of freedom, that it is an unsustainable situation over the long term for people to live in that kind of darkness. >> hear hear. >> we're going to move right on to the next panel if you'll stay with us. thank you both so much. we could go on. thank you very, very much. [ applause ]

in the next panel from the state department, the focus is on foreign policy, after september 11th, 2001. topics include syria, burma and egypt. we'll hear from senate staff members with jurisdiction over the human rights bureau. this is just under an hour and a half. >> do you want to begin? go ahead. okay, great. welcome again, everyone. this is going to take us from this -- i think we'll end up covering a lot more than that. this conversation is going to begin with 2001, 9/11, through the arab spring and maybe even

beyond now. i want to begin by quickly introducing -- i'm kyle gibson. they give you longer, the much better by yos on our great guests. i'll quickly introduce beginning with the current -- the assistant secretary for drl currently, mike posner. [ applause ] you've heard a lot about mike today. michael posner. i would also like to introduce lorne craner, who is an old friend of mine who found himself here on 9/11 running as the assistant secretary for dlr from 2001 to 2004. [ applause ] beyond lorne, we have paul grove, who is the minority clerk for lindsey graham. and next to -- and you have much

longer longer bios. and the majority clerk for patrick leahy on foreign operations. and we want to dive right in. oh, and i haven't introduced, now with us now running the savon center at brookings, which is a very, very powerful think tank on the middle east, particularly the savon center. i'm a fan of the work there. let's dive right in. it's 2001. i actually remember being involved in an event in the spring of 2001. actually, a lot of interesting intellectuals. we were talking about what the next crisis might be in the spring of 2001. and no one mentioned anything approaching what was happening, what was about to happen on 9/11. so on 9/11, you are -- you find yourself here running drl. and what does this mean for your

priorities? what suddenly becomes your primary challenge? >> well, let me start by thanking mike for organizing this conference. truly. let's have a round of applause. [ applause ] i recently met a friend of pat darian's at a dinner. it was as if i had met a movie star or something. because the work of this bureau since it has begun is tremendously important. those of us who have held the position, i think, belong in kind of a brotherhood or sisterhood. i think all of us, you know, there may be things we disagree on, and we have disagreed on here and there, but it's a very, very tough job. so i'm always full of respect and admiration for those who have held the job. and i just want to thak mike again for organizing this today. 9/11 changed everything. i was telling kyle that i was

watching with one eye on my tv in the assistant secretary's office. if you haven't been in there, the assistant secretary's office looks down the potomac. you can see from the national airport and the pentagon, and i'm watching the reruns, or the redo that morning of the planes crashing into the world trade center. and my other eye starts seeing the smoke coming up from the pentagon. and i was saying to kyle for about half a second, i thought, it's a terrible day to have a crash at the helicopter pad. it took me about a half second to realize what had happened. i had spent the previous summer working on a very, very worthy cause against racism, which some of you may remember ended disastrously. some of you will remember that very well. on the 8th of september. so on tuesday 9/11, i was sitting in the secretary staff meeting wondering why i had joined the state department.

i joined personally because of colin powell. and in my interview that i had for the job, in february of 2011, i said, what do you want to do when you come here. i mentioned working on human rights, democracy in china, but also working on human rights and democracy in the middle east. so that summer, the summer of 2001, he said start working with bill burns, and ryan crocker. bill was the assistant secretary and i had known them from my iteration here before. so we were already working together on some new things to be doing in the middle east before 9/11. i remember right after 9/11, there was a lot of talk from across the river from the pentagon about draining the swamp. and those of us who had gotten into this business, who had been in it for some time, knew that that wasn't going to be sufficient. that you would spend -- we would spend the rest of our lives killing off individuals, one by one. so i wrote an outside the system

memo which is in some box somewhere in the archives to powell saying that this was an insufficient strategy. and i had in mind some of what had been done during the cold war, that as in the cold war, we had to offer an alternative. and i always do credit the beginnings of that to jimmy carter. and also to ronald reagan. i was just out at the reagan library. i gave a talk in october over at the heritage foundation about how we were going to have to emphasize this. but it was cleared in the building. so it was obvious that there was going to be some effort. there was an effort at the time obviously to get rid of this issue. but it was also obvious from having it cleared. and i talked to paul and armitage before delivering it. where i said it's going to be the more important to work on these issues. i wasn't here before to hear elliott's speech, but elliott as alys writhis. and i think the most momentous and important thing was

president bush's state of the union in 2002. and he gave this little notice passage at the end, where he talked about the nonnegotiable demands of human dignity that we were going to push them, including in the muslim world. and that was a really important signal to us within the bureaucracy. to start pursuing this. we had a lot of help from capitol hill. there were large increases in funding after 9/11 for hrdf in particular, including for the middle east. in those first two years, we were able to use that increased funding to really begin some of the work in the middle east. and obviously, we were working on other issues. i mentioned china, central asia, ncc, the muslim world in general. but 9/11 really gave us an early focus. and really enabled us to begin working -- i saw gene kirkpatrick, he used to be on my

board at iri, and this was some years before she died. i remember going over to see her, and she said what's different over there, this was early in '02. i said, finally the middle east is open for business. she said, that's huge. because even under reagan it was not open for business. it gave us a real focus. we had never been able to move on the middle east before. and i think it's true, and i'm sure we will get into this later. we made mistakes in the bush administration. i think every administration makes mistakes. but it can't be a co-incidence, that things finally started to move in the middle east. and i think that's really, really important. >> let me address quickly then the political will created by 9/11, both in two different directions. now it's about us in a different way, when we're attacked on 9/11. and what that does to human rights, perhaps overseas, and also the new legislation here at

home, that some saw as an invasion of privacy, but all geared to accelerate the ability to track down terrorists at home. since these people had been inside the united states. can i ask either of you who have come from the capitol hill to talk about how 9/11 affects the will of congress in this moment in terms of the issue lorne was just discussing? in this context, in the human rights context, and in the context of drl. >> i have to go first. that's one of the things i'll be looking forward to when i'm in the minority. >> you're welcome. >> let's see. i guess i would respond this way. i think that one of the things we've learned about the congress is that it has a way of

overreacting to almost anything that happens. it's a very reactive institution. and when bad things happen, it tends to sort of shift into overdrive. and legislate in ways in which retrospect often cause more problems than they solve. and we then spend years, or more, kind of trying to find our way back to a reasonable point, that if more caution had been taken at the outset, we could have got to earlier. and i think what happened after 9/11 is an example of that. and for the most part, that much of what was done, while well-intention the and understandable, was ant ethey cal to human rights. and to the principles of democracy. and that we are trying to find a balance that both addresses the

legitimate concerns that 9/11 focused our attention on, and at the same time protect the most important values and rights that distinguish us in many ways from those who attacked us. and i think that, you know, that's still a big work in progress. we're clearly not there yet. it's a struggle every day within the congress. there are diametrically different views, different priorities, different emphasis. i work for senator leahy, so he has one perspective. and i can only speak from that perspective really. his view, i think, is that we are still at a point where our own rights and principles are being threatened and challenged by some of the very actions that

we have taken ourselves. and that in the end, that makes us weaker, not stronger. so, you know, i think that's at least how i would begin. >> paul, do you want to weigh in on this? >> let me start with a disclaimer, which is the views i express are entirely my own and don't reflect that of the committee or anybody on the committee. i want to talk about democracy and the funding aspect of democracy. as lorne indicated, everybody had one eye on the tv and one eye -- or part of the brain thinking what do we do about this, how do we approach it. i think in terms of the response consistently since that time, there has been emphasis on democracy promotion and human rights promotion in the subcommittee's bill. bipartisan, recognition that it is not enough to drain the swamp. recognition that the rule of law, inclusive government, competition, political competition are all essential

components of a country's development, governance, progress that are in our direct interests. and so it has really been an issue, as i look back, and i was in this position on 9/11. i had just come on board, full disclosure, i came on board from iri, was regional director for asia and the middle east. it certainly was an opportunity in a part of the world where there were limited opportunities, and frankly, there was limited political will by the state department to really push on these issues. and that's not the case today. >> tamara, i would like to quickly ask you about the context of 9/11, in terms of human rights. just back up for a minute. it's an explosive issue, but that's why we're here. the notion that what gave birth to this movement, to a certain

extent, not to necessarily all of these people who join al qaeda, but that there was this -- nobody cared about the human rights of a certain group of people. and that part of it may have been economic, or not. i read all these wonderful books about this. but my question for you is the context of what elliott abrams talked about earlier this morning, that our eyes were not on the middle east in terms of human rights prior to 9/11 is what he said. would you agree? and then how does that then read 9/11, or does it? >> sure. well, kyle, thanks. and let me first say what it is to be a treat to see former colleagues and friends. i think elliott's correct in saying that as a matter of u.s. policy, the priority in the middle east over a number of years was strategic cooperation with governments who were not that rights respecting. i think that both under the bush

administration and under the obama administration, that shifted. and it shifted fundamentally i think, yes, because of the shock effect of 9/11 which created an opportunity as paul noted. but more particularly, it shifted because of changes taking place on the ground in the region. and let me be very clear, i've come to this issue not as someone who spent a career on democracy and human rights, but as a middle east policy specialist. as a regional specialist, tracking arab politics over the last 15 or 20 years, you could see those trends building. you could see the impact of the youth, rising social and political expectations in the region. you could see the breakdown of the rentier state model, where autocrats could buy off dissent effectively. you could see the impact of global trends in democracy, and the communications revolution on

perceptions in the middle east. and so all of that was creating a very volatile mix. now, was al qaeda one outcome of that volatile mix? i think that's a complex question with a lot of variables. but what i would certainly say is people in the region were, and are, reaching for dignity, and there are different political entrepreneurs, if you will, arguing for how that dignity can be achieved. and al qaeda, and ayman al zawahiri were among those. they say you get dignity through resistance and violence. and the tremendous opportunity presented to the region, to us, to the world, by the arab awakening, is a counternarrative that comes within the middle east itself that says, no, the way to dignity is through peaceful participation and politics. and that's a big part of what's at stake in the region today.

>> mike, i'm going to give you a chance in a second, but i do want to ask you a quick question. didn't -- sharon walked on the mount. was that 2000, tamara? >> 2000 september. >> you have the palestinian issue, which the u.s. has seen right or wrong to not be fixing, right? i covered the first one in '88 and now here we are in 2000, talk about deja vu all over again. someone asked that you address the plight of the palestinians from 9/11 to today as well, which i'll ask you to do. you can address it now or a little bit later if you like. do you want to say something on it now? >> well, if we're moving -- i guess what i would say is that, whether you're talking about the human rights of palestinians in the context of the ongoing arab-israeli conflict, or the

context of a struggle for -- to defeat terrorist threats both in the region and those directed here at home, it comes back to something that was a topic of significant discussion this morning, which is the integration of human rights into u.s. foreign policy. it's not a stand-alone issue. you can't treat it as a stand-alone issue. it has to be integrated into your overall strategy. and it's integrated through the recognition that the secretary articulated, that only through the encouragement of a more rights respecting environment, an environment that allows for political participation, an environment that creates public accountability for governments, that there is lasting stability, that there is security that is the basis for reliable partnerships by the united states, whether it's in the middle east or anywhere else in the world. similarly, you can say in the palestinian-israeli case that

not only do incidents of human rights abuse complicate the negotiating environment, and undermine trust between the parties on the ground, but it's also very difficult to envision a lasting negotiated peace that is not accompanied by respect for human rights on both sides. and so if you're smart about it, you're going to build that into the negotiating work that you're doing every day. >> let me quickly ask mike. at that point, lawyers on human rights was four years old at that point, five years old. when was it founded? >> 1978. >> i'm sorry. 1978. much older than that. >> yeah. >> but were you -- where were you and what did you see in terms of the human rights shift, since human rights has been your cause in life? >> you're talking about the -- >> 9/11. >> yes. well, i was actually in new york on 9/11, and saw one of the towers fall. so it was a transformational moment i think for the human rights ngo community.

we had been at durbin, so we got back and i remember on september 10th, meeting with the staff, having just been part of a contentious and disturbing meeting and saying, i don't know quite how, but the world is different. and we're going to have some challenges ahead. i obviously had no idea what was coming. but i think we all recognized that all of our work was going to be fundamentally different. the one thing i would say from our ngo perspective in those years is that we were very mindful of the challenges posed by some of the legislation and some of the things that tim and you all have talked about. clearly, as secretary clinton has said often, we need to lead by example. and some of the things that happened, particularly detention policy, some of the issues around guantanamo, made it harder for the u.s. to be a leader. as an ngo, those are issues we focused on.

one of the reasons, frankly, i came into this administration was the president's declaration on the second day, that we would treat prisoners humanely, that we would address detention issues, including guantanamo. i'm proud to be part of an administration that takes the view that there really is no such thing as a law-free zone, that people are subject to legal protection wherever they are, and what circumstance. as dan fried said, we still have a long way to go. but i think those issues are going to be with us for a while. and we need to find a bipartisan way to address them going forward, to be stronger internationally as well. >> as we go to war and put boots on the ground in afghanistan and then iraq, how much does that -- i want to get into policy for a minute, but my question is more of one of perception around the world. how much harder is it, the running theme today has been the u.s. is a beacon for human rights, as an example, a shining light. i wrote a million different

variations on this today. which are all incredibly important. but now we have afghanistan, which is one thing. afghanistan 2001 and then iraq 2003. my question for you, we'll get to abu graub in a second, but hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground in these countries, how much of a challenge does that present when we're trying to present ourselves as a beacon for human rights, both for good and bad? does any one of you want to address that? lorne? >> it was interesting, i went out -- beth jones is no longer here. she was assistant secretary for europe when i was here. and we had taken an interest in central asia after 9/11, as colin powell said american troops come with values. and we were putting a lot of american troops through central asia. and i remember along about 2004, i mentioned to beth that i was going to be traveling to central asia, and trips to koz ak stan

and kyrgyzstan. she said, great, let's go together. i had never traveled with beth before. she and i were sometimes like that on human rights. and we were in kyrgyzstan, we were in beachkeck, and we at drl had funded for $750,000 a new printing press in kyrgyzstan. and the previous -- the only printing press previously had been run by the president's son-in-law. so on certain days newspapers didn't get printed in kyrgyzstan. and we were going to cut the ribbon on it that day, beth and i. and we went before that ceremony to central asia university, which is probably one of the most prestigious universities in the region. and our ambassador there said to us at the time, they're going to hammer on palestine, iraq, afghanistan, et cetera, et cetera. and we walked in the room, and we never got a question on palestine or iraq or afghanistan. all people wanted to know about was, why are you doing this.

this is an ally of the u.s. you're using our air base. i walked out as we were walking out, i said to beth, you know, we could have spent millions of dollars on some public relations campaign in this country. but instead we're spending $750,000 on this printing press. and that's what people wanted to talk about. and what i found in those years was what we were doing in iraq and afghanistan, and the detention policy, et cetera, were a big issue with our allies. it was always on the agenda in europe. many dictators attempted to make it a big issue, but i also found that if -- and i actually did this once straight out to a chinese diplomat. he brought up the tension policies and torture. and i said, look, in my country, most of these are not policy, they're anomalies if we're torturing somebody. i said, in your country it's a matter of course. it's been going on for decades, with the assent of your leadership. so i said there's no comparison

between our two countries. and that was kind of the end of that. what was most interesting to me was, i never had a dissident say to me, i'm not going to take your assistance because of guantanamo, or your assistance because you invaded iraq or afghanistan. so i'm not saying that i think all of those policies were perfect, and i think tim has put it very, very well about how the pendulum swung all the way this way right after 9/11 and started to swing back. but i think it is important to look at the different audiences that you're addressing. i'm sure some of the current administration, with all the -- now the lots of commentary and press about drones and all of this, is facing some of the same issues. but i think it's important to divide it into different audiences, and to realize how to treat each different audience. you know, try to modify our policies. don't let dictators try to throw it in your face. throw it back in theirs and

realize the dissidents aren't going to care. >> tamara wants to say something on this. >> two quick points. number one, i would argue, you know, maybe this was more in my nongovernmental life before i came to the state department, when you were here, and i was at brookings, and maybe dissidents speak differently to officials than nonofficials. but i certainly heard about guantanamo and abu ghraib and palestine and other dissidents in the region. the message i heard was, we want you to live up to your own ideals. we want you to live up to your own rhetoric. it wasn't that those things undermined their belief in the values, it was that they thought we weren't doing a good enough job and they wanted us to measure up. the second thing that i wanted to note is, i was in doha for a conference that the brookings organizes there every year, in march of 2004. it was a very, very, very tense time.

we were in iraq. things were not going well. abu ghraib had broken. and i think it was march. it was the week that don rumsfeld was up on the hill answering questions about abu ghraib. we got to doha. we had people from across the region. they were pretty angry at the united states. but we actually had trouble getting them into the sessions of the conference because they were all watching the abu ghraib hearings up in their hotel rooms. they were fascinated by the fact that our defense secretary was getting hauled up on the hill to face this questioning. and, you know, as bad as that series of events was, the fact that we could demonstrate instant and serious accountability for our public officials, i think, was really important. >> mike? >> yeah, just to sort of echo what tamara just said. one of the things i feel really proud about that we've done in the last couple of years