applies to more than just a handful of and finance it through their states. we have to be able to ensure that the merchant facilities or utilities also have the capacity through loan guarantees. that is the single greatest policy going right now. it is important that we see the cap expanded and some of the other bells and whistles evened out. >> thank you all very much. we have reached the witching hour. let me ask you two quick questions that can be answered yes or no. the first is whether the cap and trade regime is a good idea. mr. lieberman? ? mr. rockwell? >> i would save from an energy

security perspective, probably not true >> the market's only work if you let them behave like real markets. >> all right. going to the point that mr. guith made. let's assume that the government does produce cap and trade and it produces a significant amount of income to the government, would it make sense to have that income dedicated to the building of nuclear plants? >> [inaudible] >> you cannot get past the note for capt. trade. -- you cannot get past the no for cap and trade. >> i would say that there are a myriad of places for it to go. we need to allow the markets to operate. we need to allow utilities to make the choice themselves.

>> i think the money belongs in the technology agnostic loan guarantee program to secure clean energy. i think nuclear might rise to the top of the list right now and that it should win on its own merits. >> if you put it in a loan guarantee program and everyone makes the right decision on what to do with the money they get, it does not go to anybody. it might even be used to reduce the national debt. that is not a bad idea. >> a lot of people do not know this. 50% of the electricity being produced right now by nuclear power plants is coming from uranium that was taken from russian warheads. 50%. 14,000 russian warheads, i have been told. it is actually coming from dismantled russian warheads

there were aimed at u.s. cities. they are now producing 50% of the nuclear power. that is pretty wonderful. >> i keep telling my constituents that. they get upset about another issue that i will not go into. thank you all. it has been very useful. we appreciate your time and expertise. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2009]

>> the senate is meeting right now. they are continuing debate on a bill to create a commission to encourage foreign tourism in the u.s. off the floor, committees are working on health care legislation. lives in the coverage is on c- span-2. house members return to moral force short speeches -- for short speeches and then legislative work at noon. on wednesday, federal spending, spending on homeland's security, and in our image of programs. also, defense programs, and policy. >> there is still time to get your copy of the 2009 congressional directory. it has information on house and senate members, the cabinet, supreme court justices, and the nation's governors. there's also information on how

to contact committees and caucuses. it is available on line or by calling the toll-free number. >> the sec it should be a model for transparency, openness, and fairness. >> tonight, a discussion on president obama's choice to lead the federal communications commission. it is about what the f.c.c. would look like under a new chairman. that is coming up tonight. >> discover an unfamiliar sight of our nation's first president as we are live from george washington's estate on the accent of george washington join the conversation live on sunday.

> >> the supreme court ruled today in a challenge to the voting rights act. it cited with a small texas authority to let it change its policy. the supreme court has made it easier for parents of special education students to be reimbursed for the cost of private schooling for their children. the court ruled 6-3 today in favor of a teenaged boy from oregon whose parents sought to force the local school district to pay the cost to send their son to a private school. marc garlasco talks about human

rights around the war. for the last six years, he has been an analyst for human rights watch. this is just under one hour. [applause] >> thank you very much. i will try to live up to that welcome. i would like to thank the world affairs council for having us to hear. i would like to thank the college for hosting us in this finding you. i would also like to thank all of you for coming, for your interest, and commitment to human rights. i would like to begin by telling you a little bit about myself. people are often curious about how one goes from the pentagon to working on human rights watch. then, i would like to tell you about the organization, what we do, how we operate.

better than just telling you about it, i would like to show you. we have a short video. it will give you an idea of some of the dangers that we face when we are on the ground in the conflict zone and how we approach working in the conflict zone. it will give you a real oppressor. -- a creepy -- it will give you a real appreciation for what it is like to go and do the research that we do. after we are finished with the video, i would like to talk about some of the work i have done, some of the successes, and some of the challenges. i will tell you what it is like for us to face some of the things we do on the ground with the work force human-rights watch. let me begin by telling you about myself. i am originally from queens, new york. [laughter] in all the times i have ever

spoken, i have to say that is the only time i have ever gotten applause for being from queens. thank you, houston, for this weather. it is outrageous. i really appreciate it. when i graduated with my master's degree and was looking for work. i was offered a position with the defense intelligence agency. it was one of these jobs where you literally go in for the interview and the people asking you questions are a panel. when it was all done, they said that they like me and think i have what it takes an like to offer me a position treated i thought it was great. i thought it was fantastic. but they said they could not tell me what i was going to do. i said that was even better. [laughter]

then i went in, after a lengthy background investigation, i walked into the defense intelligence agency. the pentagon is a little too small to house all of the intel folks. you may find that hard to believe as large as the pentagon is. then i went to the air force base across the river. i eventually transitioned to the pentagon where i spent many years. what i found myself doing was preparing for a war that i never believed would never be fought. my job for nearly seven years was to basically try to track saddam hussein and to be predictive so that if we ever endtered into war, we would know where he had been and where he would be. i happily did my work.

it was very interesting and rewarding. on september 11th, i was in the pentagon when the airplane hit. in all honesty, i must say to you that i look to that day when people ask me why i left. it was simply because of that. though i have great respect for the u.s. military and intelligence community, at that point, for me, things changed dramatically. i went back to work. i was tasked along with others in trying to discern whether there was a relationship between saddam hussein and osama bin lawtodin. i had to sit down with the chief analyst on counter-terrorism for iraq.

we looked over just about every piece of intelligence we could in the time allotted to us. since then. people have done even more. even back then, we put together an assessment that said there was no relationship between the two. as the united states went into afghanistan, my work turned more towards taking the old target lists we had for the various contingency plans for a rock -- for iraq, dusting them off, rechecking them, flying out to meet with defectors from iraq. sat down with them and spoke to them. some did it willingly and others not as willingly.

i did these discussions trying to piece together where he would be. when the march moved on in 2002, i decided it was time for me to move on and find something else. while i loved my nation and the organization, i could not support the war in iraq any further. it took awhile to be honest with you for me to find something new. when my wife finally received an offer from the bronx zoo, we knew it was getting close. then human-rights watch did offer me a position. it was a very odd and meandering way to get there. unlike most people, i found a job at a newspaper. i applied i without asking if it were possible for me to work for a human-rights organization. the question for me was whether they would take me seriously

with my background and whether they would be concerned i was coming in to report on them. oddly enough, they took me seriously. they offered me this position. they offered me the position one week before the invasion of iraq. i told them they would have to wait. i would not leave until after the bombs had stopped falling in iraq. whether it was heber's or reality, in my mind, i felt no one knew that targets that as well as i did. i was going to take the necessary care to ensure that our pilots did not fly against targets that were unnecessary, that civilians would be taken care of, and that we did the best job we could, and got the targets when the job was necessary. i went in and work. i did a long shifts, 18 hours every day during the war.

my compatriots at the cia, etc, and we dropped the bombs. i worked on many hundreds of air strikes. on the target sets where we were trying to kill saddam hussein, it was a limited target set. we have 50 missions -- we had 50 missions where we dropped emissions. in those 50 airstrikes, we had a grand total of zero successes. not only did we not get saddam hussein, we did not get any of the people on the deck of cards. as we went through the war, it was failure after failure. i would estimate about 250 civilians were killed in the air strikes that we did.

i truly felt that we did the best job that could. and then left the pentagon on the 11th of april, 2003. this was days after the statute of sitcoaddam fell in baghdad. one week later, i was standing in an air strike area. i stood facing this man. he was in his 60s, may be older. his fingernails were really worn down. he had brown hands. he told me how two families were wiped out. his children and grandchildren

were killed. his son was a doctor, his wife was a doctor. that was a difficult moment. but it was also a moment where i knew i had done the right thing. in coming to human-rights watch, i could help to tell the story of those people about what happened to them treated i could look to assess whether the geneva conventions were being followed by all parties of the conflict. that is what it comes down to, what we do at human rights watch. let me tell you a little bit about how that work happens. at human rights watch, we have about 270 people. we work in about 80 nations worldwide. we are split up into different ways. -- we're split up in two different ways. we have the regional divisions were people are experts on the areas where they work.

one of them lives in tablisi. he knows everyone in the government. he gets us into the highest levels of the government. our researcher in a roberuit, jerusalem, japan are the experts were they work and live. our researcher for afghanistan has just gone back to cokabul. we're working closely with the u.s. military and afghan groups looking at the civilian casualty issues. these people are there every day. these are the regional experts. then we have the transnational divisions. the work on issues that transcend national borders and boundaries. we have people in the arms division. they work on weapons. land mines, non-legal weapons,

these are some things that they follow. we have children rights division. they would follow a child soldier issues. then you have other divisions such as the emergencies division that i am in. sweet are the guys that go in at a moment's notice, about 24 hours' notice, we go into a war zone and try to work in an active conflict zone. when we are there, we're trying to research, expose, and change to research, expose, and change what isno carrierringconnect 120

>> we are trying to save lives as the war happens. i want to show you what that is like in the field. we are able to have stunning successes in improving people's situations in these conflicts as the war is going on. >> she said that the planes were flying overhead. they were throwing out a lot of little bombs. we're going to go and see what is left behind. we had been trying to get into the district for a number of days. the russians had erected numerous checkpoints. it was very difficult even to get into the city much less the area that was the russian occupied zone. we had banged our heads against

a number of russian checkpoints over a series of days. we finally found this trail over the mountains. the village we are seeing here is a farm area. all of these people are farmers. when we got there, we were speaking to civilians there. they said that there were bombs bear on their farms. they described to us what sounded like cluster bombs. we decided to go out and investigate. [dog barking] >> it is a dcipm. it looks like a m-185. if the chickens touch that, it will explode. cluster emissions are dropped by either airplanes or rockets. they have dozens to hundreds of

smaller bombs inside. when it opens up, it covers about a football field area. when they come down, they are all supposed to exploit and destroy their targets. they are manufactured poorly. more often than not, up to 1/4 of them do not explode. that then creates the defacto minefield. >> this is behind the house. >> i will go with him. everyone else, please walk away from the bomb. i do not want you to touch anything. [foreign-language] >> there are several lines this way. >> ok. being there at the point that we were, and getting in where no one else was getting access, we were able to provide a filter

through all the propaganda so that we could tell the story. the biggest impact we had immediately was to get the georgian government to educate their civilian population. a day after we found these munitions, we went to the minister of defence, the minister of the interior, the ministry of foreign affairs, the highest levels of the georgian government. we provided them with all the quotas on the cluster bombs we had. the next day, we started to see pamphlets being handed out. they started a television campaign. the thing about this conflict that resonated with me was that it showed how these weapons had been stigmatized. even though they were used, the response from the international community was swift and harsh. even the russians were claiming they had not used cluster bombs. in the past, they would have said it was legal and used it in a legal manner. instead, they denied it.

it showed how utterly scared they were to admit to using a weapon that has been banned by 107 nations, and hopefully more when we finally get signature. >> that gives you all an idea of what it is like for us in the field. i want to assure you of that night, we all had chicken for dinner. [laughter] it was very satisfying. i have to be honest with you. in all seriousness, this video goes to our research, expose, and change to have an impact. those are the three things that we look for an hour work. the research that you saw is the research in the field. when you open up the human rights watch report, when you go on the internet and read what we have written, if you read a

newspaper article and we are quoted in it, you can rest assured that you are getting information from someone who has been there, from someone who has observed it and researched it at that point where it has been used. our research is done by people in the field. the next thing is to expose. we have two different things. there is a short-term exposure at that moment. then there are the longer-term reports. there is always this balance that we look for and go through. there is a discussion we have in the field and with our headquarters. it is whether we put out a press release now and make a big statement now. if we expose it now, will it have an impact? will it make an immediate change? do we hold onto it for a lengthy

report? here, we were able to do both with the information. in the short term because we have the access to the georgian government and have the information from the field, we were able to ride away show the weapons. we were able to get the georgian government to immediately [no audio] >> i like to compare it to what happened in 2006 anin lebanon. israel, that -- dropped e munitions on lebanon. it covered a large area and people were caught up in the strike.

afterwards, and upwards of 25% do not blow up. there could be 1 million land mines waiting for people to touch them treated there were somewhere around 300 civilians killed shortly after the conflict. there have still been deaths and injuries. there was a death a few weeks ago where a farmer was killed. one problem we had at the time was that israel had failed to provide the locations of the bonds they had dropped. they refused to provide the strike data for all of the cluster munitions. we pressured them. a lot of people pressured them. the international community pressured them. just last week, they did provide the data to the united nations. some people will say is too little and too late. it is late, but at least the date has been provided a. hopefully, the u. n will be able to find other areas that were hit that they did not know about. going from the short-term change we made, there were

approximately 300 deaths. then we go to the deaths in georgia. we're talking about less than a handful from the unexploded cluster bombs thus far. the ability to pressure the government into educating the population helped. it helped immediately. then there is the longer term. the longer term for us was that we wanted to outlaw the weapons. we want to get rid of cluster bombs as a problem for the future. that is something that we took on in earnest. as we did in 1997 when note -- human rights watch shared a nobel prize, we got the same people together. we used the same basic legal language. we began to work with our partners in the international community to shape the language of a treaty and also the desire by nations to out of the bombs.

we had a number of different meetings that began in oslo tricky was hosted by the norwegians in 2006. we were able to get a signature in december of 2008. i am very happy that we have 107 nations on board with a global ban of cluster bombs. i have to say that personally, it was a great success, for me, having stood in my first cluster bomb field in 2003 and seeing the news again in complex. now, i was able to say hopefully it will not be a problem for anyone else in the future. there is a but. but who did not sign? who did not come on board? russia, china, india, brazil, israel, the united states of america.