So anyway, welcome, and we are delighted to have you with us. Bios are in the program so I won't go into them much except to say that our two principal speakers today are extraordinarily well qualified. Michael Posner is president of Human Rights First. He has been a leading voice in human rights in the U.S. and internationally for 25 years or more. He played a major role in helping get the McCain Amendment passed last year. He is very active behind the Fair Labor Association, an effort to address supply chain working conditions, industry, and we are delighted to have him. I'm going to ask Samantha Power to speak first. Samantha I imagine most of you know is a professor of Human Rights Practice at the JFK School at Harvard and many of you know her through her magnificent book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which won the Pulitzer Prize in '03 and the National Book Critics Award and then on and on and on. I'm going to ask Samantha to go first. I think we'll have a chance for a fair amount of dialogue here because we are here for an hour and a half and with only two speakers I will chime in a bit here right at the beginning, but the main speakers are the two individuals on either side of me. Let me just say one introductory word about the overall subject. In 1945 there were 20 democracies in the world. Today --these are Freedom House numbers, there are almost exactly 120, 90 of them operating under the rule of law, another 30 with serious problems with the rule of law, corruption, say, in Indonesia, but nonetheless regular elections. There are another 30 or so governments that Freedom House rates as partly free, which tend to be places which are not democracies but are ruled in a fashion in which there may be some violations of human rights, but one thinks of them as --you know, a more complicated way than the remaining 40 or so governments in the world, not free, which constitute the dictatorships and autocratic kingdoms in which human rights are regularly oppressed by the government, sometimes within their borders, sometimes without. Human rights in the information age is not however solely a question of the dictatorial or highly authoritarian governments. It is also an issue that arises through ethnic and other tensions underlying horrors such as genocide, for example Rwanda and Darfur and others. It is also quite possible to have your human rights violated by someone flying an airplane into a building where you are working. So we do not want to focus exclusively on governments here. There are many, now, possibilities for a terrorist attack, an action which are themselves a very important human rights issue. And then of course there are the 120 or so democracies including our own who are generally on the side of human rights but sometimes do not proceed satisfactorily, to put it mildly. And all of these types of actors have their effectiveness and their ineffectiveness potentially enhanced by the developments of the information age. In China, if you want to be optimistic, you will look at the hackers and the young people and the human rights advocates who are in part sustained by clever use of information technology inside the country. If you want to wrinkle your brow, you will of course look at the policies of the Chinese government and its restrictions on freedom of speech and the Internet. And from time to time the behavior of Western corporations, including American corporations which may give them a hand in that sort of repression. So we have a wide range of activities by governments and nongovernmental organizations, some of them positive, some of them negative, all of them, in one way or another, influenced by the information age. And with that I'm going to ask Samantha if she would start. And then as soon as she finishes we'll turn to Michael, throw it open to some questions back and forth between them if they so choose. But the bulk of our time we'll reserve for questions and short statements, short, from those of you here in this room. Samantha? Thank you so much, Jim. Many of you probably don't know about Jim Woolsey maybe or you probably do if you've been to a panel or two of his here, but is that he is becoming one of the leading advocates for the electric car. And I just learned --and I just wanted to share with you before starting that on one of his cars he has a bumper sticker that I think should become a bumper sticker for the 21st century, which is simply "Bin Laden hates this car." So --and I'm trying to help the spread the wealth and the wisdom here. What I thought I would do is just two things. One, talk about the categories or the ways in which I think we can think about the effect of information on human rights. And then second, to talk more specifically and briefly about the United States and what we are seeing about --we are seeing in the Bush administration's relationship to information its mistrust of information at a time when it feels obviously under siege and under threat, and which parallels analogously, not directly of course, some of what we see in developing countries where most of the time we, you know, are talking about human rights or have been talking about human rights in the past. So when I was thinking just for the sake of this panel about the effects of information on human rights I broke it down in my mind. I'm sure there are more categories than those that I've come up with but into six categories, one, enabling, which I'll talk about; two, mobilizing; three, pluralizing; four, demonizing; five, diluting; and six, daunting. And so in talking about each of these briefly I'm going to talk mainly about societies where human rights are manifestly under siege. So first, enabling, what --to what degree is information an enabler? Well, Amartya Sen, the Harvard --now Harvard economist famously found that no country with a free press had ever suffered a substantial famine. Now, there's been all kinds of scholarship trying to rebut this and so he's modified --it used to be no country with a free press had ever suffered a famine, and now it's substantial famine. But his idea here is that if --in the human rights community there tends to be dichotomy between those who talk about leading with social and economic rights, leading with full stomachs or health care, antiretroviral medicines, et cetera, and those who talk about freedom of movement, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of religion. He said "Enough of this dichotomy. Let's be clear, if people can actually speak up they will have then the ability to mobilize on behalf of more equitable distribution of resources." So again, the idea is, you know, if you actually have the capacity to protest governmental policies that would give rise to mass death with regard to famine, you are more --much more likely to deter a government from behaving in that way. So the idea here is that information is a kind of enabler to greater sort of distributive, in that case, justice. Second, I think the way that Mike is probably going to talk more about, mobilizing, to what degree is the 21st century information bounty actually helping human rights activists do their bidding around the world. And you know --I mean, it's no secret that the Internet has created networks across borders that were unthinkable before. But I just would like to give a couple of examples of things that you literally would not have seen happen, I don't think, if you didn't have the ability to cross borders. The first is with regard to antiretroviral medicines and AIDS treatment. In the --you know, once antiretroviral treatment became available in this country, it was hailed of course for the incredible innovation that it was, the lifesaving --even held as a cure, which it didn't prove to be. But it of course cost $20,000 a year for a regimen of triple therapy for HIV-positive Americans. How in the world then when HIV began tearing through the continent of Africa could one begin to imagine that HIV-positive Africans would have access to this kind of treatment? And if they didn't have access to treatment, what would their incentive be to go and get tested to in turn serve as prevention? You know, if they didn't know they were HIV positive, why would they use a condom, et cetera. So treatment is an indispensable part of course of the prevention story as well. Well, one of the things that happened was in the late 1990s, the tail end of the Clinton administration, drug companies in this country were very reluctant to bring the prices down even in the developing world. And a group, a network called the Treatment Action Campaign came into existence in Sub-Saharan Africa, teamed up over the Internet with intellectual property lawyers in North America and Act Up activists who were suddenly living in a way that in the 80s they would never have imagined being able to live --well, with HIV AIDS, many of whom were younger and actually felt guilty that they hadn't been through the sort of crucible movement of getting the Reagan administration to focus on HIV when it was, you know, at its height of crisis and also of governmental indifference or neglect. And what you got was this transnational network in which Act Up activists here protested, picketed pharmaceutical companies, which in turn owing to the shame and so on end up bringing drug prices down. The intellectual property lawyers provided the legal expertise so that those same activists in Sub-Saharan Africa were actually able to file court cases, in South Africa in particular, calling on Thabo Mbeki, you know, to actually --to define the right to health and to healthcare by including antiretrovirals and specifically the drug that prevents mother-to-child transmission of HIV. All of this inconceivable even just 10 years before. And you couldn't have had any piece of this movement being functional without the other piece, and no one of these --or three all of these pieces weren't available, you know, in one domestic setting. And so that's just one example. Darfur, an obvious contemporary example; 75,000 Americans gathered on the Mall in Washington on April 30th of this year to protest the Bush administration's policy on Darfur, to try to get it to do more. These are 75,000 people --this didn't get many headlines because next to the immigration protests and so on what are 75,000 people. But when you think about it, these were 75,000 people not one of whom practically --and there were probably 500 people from Sudan, but apart from them maybe a dozen or two had ever actually met a person from Darfur; 75,000 people were protesting something that had absolutely nothing to do with them at all. And that came about as a result again of one of these Internet networks. Another example, one of the things that came to light about nine months ago was that the State Department which had issued a genocide finding around Sudan's behavior in Darfur had actually created an exemption for a lobbyist to represent the Sudanese government in the United States at a rate of half a million dollars a year. This lobbyist was being paid by the Sudanese and this was a -should have been a violation of U.S. sanctions, but an exemption was made by the State Department. The day that this was leaked to The Washington Post, the students who were based --Students Against Genocide or Genocide Intervention Network, who were based in Washington looked up on the Internet where this lobbyist --it was a Washington-based lobbyist, lived, sent out a mass alert to all the D.C.-based students. And they basically began putting up posters, flyers, on the telephone poles in his neighborhood that were the equivalent of sexual predator alerts. So basically the message was, there goes the neighborhood, you know, you have a lobbyist for a genocidal government, you know, in your neighborhood. And within two weeks of that campaign, again, which was only made possible or at least in that kind of rapid form by the Internet, he had resigned his position as lobbyist for the Sudanese government, maybe to be replaced at some later date. The --in the realm of mobilizing as well of course --I've been talking about the Internet mainly but the CNN effect is notorious for the pull factor, you know, and for the possibility it creates of narrowing distances between those of us who live in relative comfort and those of who don't. I'll come in a second to the sort of negative aspects of the CNN effect but certainly you could argue that the CNN effect is necessary although by no means efficient to drawing Western governments, into attracting them to human rights crises and to convincing them to mobilize resources on behalf of combating these kinds of abuses. Pluralizing, you know, in places where atrocities happen --this again gets to Amartya Sen's point, it is often in places where information is centralized and is controlled. A friend of mine, Alexis Sinduhije, who is a Burundi's great human rights activist, sort of the Mandela-to-be of Burundi, created something called African Public Radio, because Burundi had traditionally only had one radio source. And of course in Rwanda, the fact that Rwandans only got their radio from Radio Mille Collines, which became hate radio in the middle of the genocide, convinced Alexis that in the wake of that genocide in his neighboring country that the best thing he could do to stave off atrocity would be to create a competing radio network. And that's what he did. And about two and a half, three years ago, when the government of Pierre Buyoya basically in the interest of sort of trying to hijack the democratic process or the pluralizing process announced that there had been a military coup, which was untrue, but he announced that as a way of justifying a kind of crackdown, Alexis took to the airwaves on African Public Radio. And he had sort of cultivated his base by airing principally soap operas and local music in order to build a constituency over time, not wanting it to be political right off the bat, but in that moment of crisis was able to take to the airwaves and to compete with government radio and say that in fact no such coup had occurred and the alarm, the false alarm such as it was, was derailed. Demonizing, here I'll get to the negative effects of course of information and the enhanced technology. Rwandan hate radio has now become a poster child for the peril of modernity, and you know, if the Holocaust was the first great testament to mechanization and the way it could be used in the tools --or in the hands of the wrong people with the wrong agenda, so too hate radio and the ability to demonize one's foes and the over-reliance that certain populaces have especially in the developing world on radio or on technology as they skip over newspapers, now on cell phones as they skip over landlines, it testified of course to the, you know, very deadly effect that greater information can have if there aren't multiple sources of it. Diluting, what does it mean when we have so many sources of information that we can no longer -you know, it used to be that if --there was sort of one-stop shopping if you were a human rights advocate. If you could just get on the evening news, if you could somehow Jennings or Rather or Brokaw to take your issue seriously, if some human rights activist could become person of the week, you know, it was a windfall to drawing attention, governmental attention as well as public constituency attention to a particular crisis. Now, what do we do? You know, where do you go in the blogosphere, and you know, in 24-hour news cycles. And then daunting, I mentioned earlier the sort of potential pull factor of the CNN effect but in the heads and in the hearts of Western governments --and Jim Woolsey and I were talking about this earlier, the CNN effect is also a specter. It is the recognition that if you get involved in the developing world on the basis of mere human rights, let's say, to stop genocide or to defuse atrocity or to ease repression or to democratize or whatever you're there, you have the CNN effect. The CNN effect may have brought you there, as it did perhaps to Somalia, but it's also the first thing that will drive out because at the first sign of trouble, you know, there will be great transparency that will be broadcast right into the American living room. Okay, briefly, final point before handing it over to Mike. You know, one of the things that --when one thinks about information --and I think many of the examples that I've given reflect this, information is a prime way of weakening state control. And the corollary of that is that weak or fearful states are afraid of information. And one of the things that's happened of course in the wake of 9/11 is that we have seen this at work at home. We talk a lot about Putin and his crackdown on the media, we talk a lot about Robert Mugabe and how we --the first thing he did, you know, when he was doing farm seizures was to blow up the Daily News, you know, Zimbabwe's one independent newspaper. But one of the things we have seen here --again, not talking about technology but information itself is that the U.S. Government has this wonderful thing called the Freedom of Information Act, without which I could not have written A Problem from Hell. And over the years you had --you have regular declassification that occurs of course just by time and calendar. But over the years advocates have tried to make a point of convincing American administrations to release more documents sooner, not only so we can learn from our history but so that these documents can then be pumped into developing or transitional societies that are themselves reckoning with their dictatorships or with their repressive phases. And for many, many years, through successive administrations, the standard rate of declassification was about 20,000 documents a year, 20,000 early --I'm sorry, 200,000 early declassifications, not by calendar. One of the things that happened in the second term of the Clinton administration is that the National Security Archive in Washington and other advocates managed to convince certain elements in the administration to rapidly ramp up the amount of declassification that occurred. And so that 200,000 figure rose to 2 million documents a year of early declassification. And this had in incredible effect because what would happen was these documents would make their way back into Chile or into Mexico or into Guatemala. Remember, the School of the Americas disclosures and all of these things that would go back into the society and suddenly journalists and citizens in these societies would start to demand greater openness and greater accessibility and transparency in their own societies and investigations of militias and death squads and things like that. Too much technology in this room at this moment. Anyway, so this was a sort of high water mark, and perhaps it was unrealistic to think that it could be sustained. But one of the things that's happened is that President Bush of course has ramped that way back down. He is actually not releasing fewer documents than were released prior to this spike; he is back down to the 200,000 pages. I had thought there were 200,000 documents, I had thought that it was much, much lower but of course what he has attempted to do is reclassify documents that had been declassified for anywhere from, you know, 10 to 50 years. And so we see again this sort of hoarding, this sense that information is threatening, and rather than seeing information as a boon and as a source of innovation and entrepreneurship and plurality and all the things that we're sort of encouraging abroad we are starting to see it as a threat. And the other example just in closing is of course, you know, the debates that we managed to have in our society about the balancing act between liberty and security are debates that had been brought about not by Congressional investigations, hearings that are not actually occurring given that one party controls both the executive branch and the legislature, but Abu Ghraib came about because of Sy Hersh in 60 Minutes, the Gulag and the rendition stories came about because of Dana Priest and Jane Meyer. And of course the eavesdropping or National Security Agency story came about because of James Risen. One of the questions I have --and I think all of us have right now as there is a backlash against these kinds of disclosures by the executive branch is in an ideal world when leaks occur it becomes a boon to the democratic process, a boon to the kind of debate, maybe even an incentivizer of Congressional investigations. But in this instance, of course, when Dana Priest published her kind of landmark story about these undisclosed sites where prisoners were being held without any visits from Red Cross or anybody else, the Republican --the chair of the relevant committee came out the very next day and said that he did want to launch an investigation, but not into the gulags, into Dana Priest and into the leaks themselves. And that has been the --that was sort of the beginning of the sign of the approach that the executive branch would in turn take and that we are seeing now, which I'm sure Jim has lots of thoughts on, probably a little bit different than mine. But we are in a moment now where the chilling effect on leakers, who have proven indispensable to us to know about Abu Ghraib, to know about gulags, to know about rendition, and the protections for whistleblowers, which seem to be atrophying, I think, underscore really how essential information actually is in what amounts to an excruciating and what will certainly be a long-term balancing act that I happen not to believe we are balancing right at present. And without information I don't know where we go from there and I certainly don't know how we preach transparency, information, accountability in other countries where we have been trying to promote human rights in recent decades. Thank you. Thanks, Samantha. If everyone would follow not my example, since I left my BlackBerry on and it started interfering with the microphone at the beginning of this, but the example of those of you who have turned off your cell phones and pagers, please do so. And Michael, you're up. In the world of World War II or the world coming out of World War II the assumption had been that what a government does to its people own people is its own business. That's part of the reason we had the Holocaust. And quite remarkably and with tremendous leadership from individuals like Eleanor Roosevelt, when the UN was created, it was created really to do two things, to collective --create a collective response on peace and security issues, and secondly, to promote human rights. And the first important thing that Eleanor Roosevelt and her colleagues did in the 40s was to say two things. One is that there are universal standards of human rights that belong to everyone, regardless of where they live and where they are a citizen. They universalized the concept. You don't torture people, you don't disappear people, you don't arbitrarily imprison them or execute them. The second thing they did was to internationalize it, to say this is the business of governments, and it's not only the business of governments to protect their people, it's the business of every other government to make sure that some minimum standards are approved --are followed. The creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 was the symbolic emblem of both of those things, again, led by Eleanor Roosevelt in the United States. The second thing that happened in --over 25 or 30 years beginning in the late '40s is that governments sought to basically, through the United Nations, to create a series of laws and rules that would apply. We are not just going to talk in abstractions; we are going to say there are certain civil rights that are applicable to all, certain economic and social rights. There is a convention against torture, another on the elimination of discrimination against women, another on the elimination of racial discrimination, genocide, torture. And with great difficulty there has been a beginning in the last 15 years of creating means of accountability --the tribunal on the former Yugoslavia brought Milosevic to trial, tribunal on Rwanda that brought a number of senior government officials to trial, an ad hoc or a hybrid tribunal in Sierra Leone that brought Charles Taylor to the dock and now has him in the Hague, and an International Criminal Court which is looking at, among other things, the atrocities in the Congo and Darfur. All of that is I would say at an experimental stage but it represents an amazing evolution from where we were in 1945. The third thing that happened that is equally extraordinary and I think more important is that people, individuals, people like us, said, you know what, governments are never going to do this easily. They are going to have to be pushed. No government makes this their top priority and every government has a national interest which in some instances precludes their taking these things seriously. And so government action --I think when governments created the UN and they created the treaties, their thought was, this was going to be a club and government diplomats in a very comfortable setting were going to kind of have quiet conversations. And people said let's take this out of the hands of government. And so with the creation of Amnesty International in 1961 and then a range of other organizations including the one I work for, there has been another actor brought into the fold. And most important, by far the most important element is that people in their own societies are saying these things are just too important to be left to our governments or to anybody else in the world. So if you are in India, you are in Zimbabwe, or you are in Darfur, you are in Russia, today there are people working actively for human rights really on the frontline. Their voices are the most important and I'm going to come back to some of what they are -what it means to them to have a technologically wired world. All of this has meant that human rights has a place at the table and it's meant that we have seen real change, not entirely because of these things but they played a part. We no longer have an apartheid state in South Africa, the Soviet bloc has collapsed. When I started working in human rights, almost every government in Latin America was a military dictatorship. Today it's a very different scene. So while we can bemoan and worry about lots of problems in the world --and God knows there are a lot of problems in the world, it is also important to reflect back on what's been accomplished in a very short period of time. Sixty years is a very short period of time. The United States has been a leader in that and it's helped to empower the UN, it's worked with the UN, and there is, I have to say, now a crisis of --in two ways. One is that the United States' actions -and we can talk about this later, with respect to the post 9/11 security issues have crippled our moral standing in the world, made it very difficult for the United States to do what it's done traditionally in the realm of human rights. It works our work enormously more difficult. And the second thing is that I think the United States is not doing what it can do and what it should to make the United Nations a stronger voice for human rights. And you know, maybe Shashi Tharoor will say something about that when we get to questions. But I think we have a real moment of crisis here where we have to take a look at our own role in the world. Now, let me say just a couple of words about some of the challenges that technology brings. One which is obvious but --and Jim at the beginning, I want to emphasize it again, there are very dangerous groups like Al Qaeda in the world that take a kind of jujitsu approach to things. They take our technology, whether it's information technology to communicate, to amplify their propaganda, or it's our transportation technology, airplanes, or it's our weapons, and they use them against us. That's a feature of the world today and we are going to see more of it. So when we think of technology as a good and a bad thing there clearly are lots of bad forces in the world, private groups as well as some governments that are using the same technology for bad purposes. And we've got to be responsive to that. We've got to figure out ways to control that. It's not going to be easy. The second thing is that governments are afraid of technology, and Samantha said this, and Orville Schell in his panel earlier today talked about the Chinese government's unbelievable efforts to control the Internet. In 19 --I think '96 or '97 there were 60,000 people using the Internet in China. Now, there are about 110 million and the Chinese government is freaking out. And they have about 30,000 people on the government payroll basically trying to track what's going on on the Internet and trying to block what's happening. They are putting the screws to big American and other global information technology companies like Microsoft and Google and Yahoo to control their search engines and make sure that when you go to the site, the google.cn site and look for Tiananmen Square you see people wandering across a peaceful Tiananmen Square. And so there is a challenge that we face and the Chinese example while it may be the most dramatic because it's a big important country, they are not alone. Governments are very nervous about information and those that control --have a tendency to want to control information feel that in spades when it comes to the Internet and new technologies. The third challenge we face is in our own society and elsewhere and Samantha talked about this too but I'll mention it briefly that when --in an environment where national security becomes higher priority, we flip traditional notions of openness and government and personal privacy. The history of this country is built on the notion that government is as open as it can be. Madison said popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is a prologue to farce or tragedy or both. The Freedom of Information Act that Samantha says very much --talked about is very much in the spirit of Madison's comment. We have always believed that an informed population and an informed Congress make for better government. And on the flipside, we've always believed that government ought to stay out of the way of people in their private lives. And this administration in what Vice President Cheney calls the new normal has flipped those two propositions on their head and said in effect that government ought to control as much information as it can when it relates however tangentially to what they consider national security. So there's been a dramatic scaling back of the Freedom of Information Act, particularly in relation to military and intelligence law enforcement. And on the other side, there has been a ramping up of government intrusion into individual recordkeeping, the data-mining that was the Total Information Awareness Act, the Patriot Act, the NSA disclosures, et cetera. The United States is not alone in this and lots of governments are following what we do. So there are challenges to us and to governments to --with respect to governments around the world to make sure that governments are open and that personal privacy is protected. Three thoughts about opportunities. I want to come back to the Chinese example. I mentioned Google and Microsoft and Yahoo. What's interesting about that example, and Orville knows this better than I, is that companies, the Internet companies that are doing business in China are basically information providers. They are in the business of promoting a free flow of information. And they are highly anxious about their current relationship with the Chinese government. Some of us are talking to those companies. There is a group called the Center for Democracy and Technology which has convened some sessions between nongovernmental people, technology experts, and these companies to talk about what are the rules of the road, what are the ways in which companies ought to behave with respect to governments like the Chinese that want to limit access to information. I think there is a real opportunity there. These are not companies that are turning their back on us, although I will say that Yahoo in that particularly unfortunate incident handed over the names of a couple of bloggers that were there in their files to the Chinese government and the government prosecuted those people under draconian Chinese law. Part of what we are talking about is how to prevent those sorts of incidents in the future, do no harm. Second example, also relating to companies is the work we have done --and Jim mentioned it, with the Fair Labor Association. We are working with about 20 big manufacturing --mostly American and European manufacturers in the apparel and footwear industry who are outsourcing products in 35 countries. About 3,500 factories among these companies, Nike, Reebok, Adidas, Nordstrom, H&M, companies you've heard of. They have agreed in a multi-stakeholder initiative to allow monitoring of their factories by independent experts and the posting of the results of those factory visits on a website, which if fairlabor.org. That to me is an interesting example and we are going to see more of it as we again try to create rules of the road for human rights, labor rights, environmental issues et cetera where there are means of transporting information and making information transparent to a greater public. We ought to be looking for ways to do that and ways to marry what the human rights community and what companies feel they mutually can benefit from doing. It was not an easy thing to get companies to put their dirty laundry on the Internet. But having done it, they now recognize that there is a value in having that information out there. It provides a sense of credibility. Last point, and in a way, the largest point, and Samantha touched on it, but for the nongovernmental community both in the United States, Europe, but most importantly around the world, the new technology has been absolutely vital in reinforcing and amplifying our mission. It's now possible for a lone human rights advocate in Darfur to get on a cell phone or to get on a computer or to paste something on an e-mail, to videostream information in a matter of minutes to groups like ours or to Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. To get it out to the world, to get it out to the world's news media, to shine a spotlight on what's going on, to amplify the voices of these groups, and most importantly perhaps, to mobilize public outrage and public action. We are now relying much more and it's a great equalizer, on the power of e-mail lists and e-communications, and e-activism as a way to generate publicity, to generate attention, to put pressure on elected leaders to say these are issues you can no longer afford to ignore. So I think there is a sense of popular participation today or the potential for it, which is far beyond what we ever thought of 10 years ago. And it holds in some ways the greatest hope for making these issues more important on the global stage, but also to get results. Thank you. Thank you very much, Michael. Those were two superb presentations. Let me just make one point explicit that I alluded to and the others have as well, but it seems to me any discussion of these issues is not effective without it. Samantha talked about enabling and referred to the wonderful work of Amartya Sen, who talks about institutions of public reason in lots of societies, the Loya Jirga in Afghanistan for example, which although not directly related to balloting are institutions of consensus, of discussion, of consensual as distinct from either balloting or certainly authoritarian decision making. And that the big difference is between societies where you can build on those institutions of public reason and those where you can't. He very movingly talks for example about the decision-making in African villages and the tradition of discussion there. Nathan Sharansky says something, the same thing, along the same lines when he refers to the difference between societies are those where if you can walk down to the village square, criticize whoever is governing, walk home, go to sleep comfortably at night, that's one kind of society. The other kind are very different. What I meant to allude to by talking about how we had gone from 20 to 120 democracies since 1945 is that sometimes it is necessary to use the tools of war or authority or power in order to advance the cause of institutions, of public reasons. Shashi said --I mentioned to him yesterday, very well at one of the seminars something to the effect that one can't impose democracy but what one can do is provide the music and the candles and the flowers. The problem is folks come along who want to scratch the record and silence the music and crush and cut the flowers. They are called dictators, and in the course of the 20th century, there were five huge, powerful empires, one authoritarian, four totalitarian. The German imperialists of the early part of the century, the Nazis, the Fascists, the Japanese empire, and the Communists of Soviet Union --all of those were effectively defeated by democracies in arms. The Soviets defeated democracies in arms happily not needing to use them directly against the Soviets but the containment and the deterrence and did their job. Were any of those five major empires still around civil liberties and human rights in the world would be a far darker prospect than it is now. Those were ended, four of them as I said by force of arms, the other by deterrence and containment very heavily by involvement of the world's democracies in struggling against them. Sometimes they struggled stupidly. Some of the authoritarian regimes we backed during the Cold War we probably didn't need to. Sometimes in desperation we made common cause with them. The United States was a close ally and major funder for four years of history's greatest murderer at that point, Joseph Stalin, because we needed him against the Nazis. And had Stalin invaded Europe after World War II, he would have rolled on wheels made in Detroit. So sometimes one has to do what one has to do. Sometimes one does it wisely; sometimes one does it stupidly. I feel no sense that it is always right to use or prepare to use force against authoritarians or dictators. But I think it's important that sometimes one needs to, and quite frequently when one does, information and holding information, sometimes keeping information secret is an important part of that. It's not always the case. Your moderator today for example, in 1967-1968 was the founder and president of Yale Citizens for Eugene McCarthy for President. I'm probably the only former CIA director who was ever a leader of an antiwar movement. And we all do what we think we need to do at the time but this balance between sometimes secrecy and sometimes force in the interests of moving the world, a 100 democracies closer to freedom, and sometimes self-criticism, sometimes struggle against even a democratic government that is maintaining secrecy unnecessarily is a real tension. It's a real tension which is not a one-sided matter. It's a real tension which we have to work at everyday. We've been working at it in this country every since the Alien and Sedition Acts and we have done it time and again, as I say, sometimes wisely sometimes stupidly, but it's a real two-sided struggle. There is not just one side to it.
