It is my great pleasure to present the World Affairs Council's 2007 Global Leadership award to Mrs. Alma Powell in recognition of her leadership to America's Promise, the alliance for youth, and for her life long courage and determination to enhance and enable positive social change. Ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming Mrs. Alma Powell. Thank you very much. I always look forward to introductions to see what it is I've done. I am often amazed and say, "I did that?" You have heard all about America's Promise and how it came to be. I come from a long tradition of service to others. As I grew up my role models and mentors who are my parents and grandparents whose lives where involved in service to others and most of all with working with young people. So it is something that comes quite naturally to me. When I married into the army I realized that it was all about volunteerism and service too. There was an old saying that if the army had wanted you to have a wife they would have issued you one. So military spouses became the ones who were responsible for the quality of life in the places that we lived and they did amazing things. And so I learnt at the feet of great people with great experience. Military wives are fantastic; you don't know the contributions that they have made to society. The child-care industry that exist across the land now that serves most corporations began with military wives. Before women went to work we still had the problem in the military of who is going to take care of our children and so through volunteer efforts we formed nurseries and childcare centers and worked constantly to improve them and when corporations got ready to do this they came to us to find out how to do it. In the days following in the Vietnam War military spouses got together and said it's time that the military took notice of us and what we need. And so wives formed symposiums that met for three years in a row and people came from all over the world to talk about what we needed to have good quality of life in the military. And each time the findings were correlated and the discussions went on and they were presented to the defense department and finally they began to take notice. And so there exist in most of the services but definitely in the army, which I know best an entire command that is for family and support services, that is commanded by a general officer based on the needs and concerns that military spouses raise. So I learned how to do things from people who were busy doing them. My husband and I have been quite fortunate in our lives, found each other; we had a life full of serendipities travelling around the world meeting with world leaders. He has served six presidents. And it has been quite an exciting time. When he retired from the military we took a look at what it is we do with the rest of our lives. As I said we have lived a fortunate life, an exciting life. We have had the joy of raising three wonderful children who are successful, productive citizens making their contribution to society. And we have the shared joy of nurturing the new generation. But to who much is given, much is required. And so in our lives we have accepted the challenge of working with America's children. I am very pleased to be a part of America's Promise. It was an answered prayer. What do you do? Here it is; now we can take something and run with it. My husband was the founding Chairman and then when he went into Government I joined the Board America's Promise the Alliance for Youth. The Alliance has grown and developed over the past ten years, this is our tenth year. And as we look forward to what we do we look back at what we have done, there were great successes but you all know that we live in very troubled times with many more challenges than we had 10 years ago. And our children face many more challenges. The problem that existed in 1997 when the American Presidents living Presidents said our children deserve more, in a nation that is rich with opportunity, with resources, there are too many that fall through the cracks. Despite the 10 years of efforts by everybody we still have young people who are falling through the cracks. We live with a astounding statistics in this country. 35 percent of the children in this nation do not finish high school. In a world that is ever more complex and faced with technology there is no future for them without an effective education. This we have to remedy. In a country that has world class heath institutions; many children in this country have no health insurance and no health care. Those of you in Washington remember very sad story a week ago where a child died as a result of a tooth infection because the parents did not have the mother did not have medical insurance to take care of this. This is inexcusable in a country like the United States. And so dedicated people have joined together to say, what can we do? We at America's Promise have set forth in our five year plan to affect the lives of 15 million children in the next five years. The alliance has come together to see how we are going to address that problem. I encourage all of you to stop and think, 'what can I do' to affect this statistics that exist in this country. I applaud the World Affairs Council for your education of young people in the ways of the world because the world is a very small place now and we have to understand each other in order to get along. The work of America's Promise and all of the organizations that work with young people is ever more crucial everyday, because our children will face a world far more complex than we can imagine. Our children will be the adults that face the children of war and violence in other countries, they will be the adults looking at each other and trying to figure out the problems. We have the responsibility to give them the foundation and the strength that they need for whatever comes. My mother said to me when my children were little, she said "you know you need to find a good vitamin or tonic or something because you have got to keep your health. I don't know what challenge is your children are going to face, I cannot imagine". Just as I today cannot imagine the challenges that my own grandchildren are going to face in this ever changing world. So I applaud you as you, the World Affairs Council as you helped to educate young people about the rest of the world and I challenge each one of you in the room to see and think about how you cab help us keep America's Promise to the promise of America, our children. Thank you. It's truly an honor this evening to present the Global Service Award of the World Affairs Council to Senator Carl Levin. Please join me in welcoming Senator Levin. Katherine thank you so much; great introduction, as hear Togo describe your life I was thinking as Alma was given her award in recognizing military spouses that, and very appropriately so, that politicians' spouses probably ought to get some recognitions too sometime for what they get through. Nothing like military spouses, nothing quite goes up there. But thank you for the great introduction and it's a real privilege to be with the World Affairs Council as you focus on education and as you do all the other great work that you do. It's a real treat by the way to have dinner with my wife Barbara. It doesn't happen all that often and we just love to get together anyway we possibly can. I was thinking, Alma, you were saying you moved 22 times. In the in the last 45 years my wife and I have moved twice. And my heart goes out to you. Each one of those moves was a real trauma. It's all I can tell you 22 times. Also if you will just excuse me for doing this, I also I want to recognize just a couple of other people here tonight, David Lyles, who's my Chief of Staff who is her and also my former Governor, Jim Blanchard, who is who was Jim and Janet Blanchard over here, not only a great Governor but also a great diplomat, for you diplomats in the room he was our Ambassador to Canada and did a tremendous job in that particular capacity as well. And I am told frequently that, when people run into me at an airport or whatever, a lot of people walk up to me and they see me on television they say something like you are not as heavy as you look on television, sometimes they say you are not as fat as you look on television. But anyway just in terms of my self esteem I would really appreciate you not looking up there, if you look here instead? Let me first thank you so much for the Global Service Award, last year you made a wonderful choice by recognizing the men and women of our armed forces, and I am humbled just to be in their company at any time but in this manner as well. One of the most rewarding parts of my work as Chairman of the Armed Services Committee is spending time with our troops. Our nation is divided on war policies, but we are united in support of our troops. They deserve the finest training, the finest equipment, total family support, and all the medical care that we can provide. They also deserve wise policies that honor their sacrifice. What we are seeing today in Iraq, and I am just going to spend a few moments on Iraq because I want to talk about a different subject mostly, what we are seeing today in Iraq is that there are limits to what even the very best military can accomplish. I have argued for a long time that there needs to be a political solution among the Iraqi leaders, and that the best leverage that we have with those leaders is to end our open ended military commitment, which allows the Iraqi leaders to fiddle while Baghdad is burning. Beginning a phased reduction of American troops in 4 months, as we have urged, would hopefully put adequate pressure on those Iraqi leaders to reach a political settlement, which is the only hope of ending a civil war and maximizing the chances for success in Iraq, which is everybody's goal, whether we supported going in or not, whether we're critics or not. We are united in supporting our troops but we also are united in trying to find or maximize the chances for success in Iraq now that we are there. But even Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki has acknowledged that, "the crisis is political", and the ones who can stop the cycle of bloodletting of innocents are the Iraqi politicians. America's security requires that we use our full strength as a nation not just our military might, so tonight I would like to focus on some other sources of power, the power of our ideals and values, the loss to our security when we violate those ideals and values, and the power for good, which would be unleashed if we regain our standing in the world. I also want to discuss one particular issue, which is undermining our security in a way that no military can make up for, the abuse of treatment of detainees under American control. The hard truth is that we need allies. We need allies to confront the radical leaders of Iran, we need allies to deal with the threat from North Korean and most importantly we need allies to defeat the threat from religious fanatics who despise modernity and the west and who use terror as their weapon. Although we won't hesitate to use force unilaterally if we face an imminent threat, harnessing the power of international institutions, such as the United Nations and NATO, is important to our security. Meeting the threats we face, including international terrorism, rogue nations with weapons of mass destruction, and failed states among others, require cooperation among like minded nations and compromises with nations that we don't like at all. Today the struggle against extremism is being undermined by how America is view the world. Because of the unilateral and reckless policies of the administration and the dramatic and vivid reports of our abusing prisoners America's standing in the world has taken a nosedive since the world embraced us immediately following the events of 9/11. In a 2007 international BBC poll only 29 percent of people around the world said that the United States is generally a positive influence in the world. That number, 29 percent, should be setting off alarm bells in Washington, because we need the good will of the world for our own security. That's not some mushy headed intellectual musing; it is a hardheaded bit of pragmatism. We need that good will to deal with the greatest threat that we face, terrorism. Information is the key to preventing terrorist attacks. One person halfway around the world, overhearing a terrorist plotting an attack, could prevent the mass murder of our citizens if that citizen would report it. He's less likely to do that if he views us as an arrogant bully. Last week I visited with out veterans in a Michigan VA hospital. I stopped and I asked one veteran, who was lying in his bed, what can we do to help you? And he looked up at me and he said, "Win back the respect of people around the world for America". Win back the respect of people of the world for America; that was a veteran of Vietnam talking. He understands that the erosion of support for America weakens us in a way that military force cannot remedy. While the tarnishing of America's image is partly the result of the decision to go to war with Iraq in the way we did, and in the way it's been conducted, the problem goes much deeper. As Steven Cull, the Director of the Program on International Policy Attitude stated, "the thing that comes up repeatedly is not just anger about Iraq, the common theme is hypocrisy. The reaction tends to be, you were a champion of a certain set of rules, now you are breaking your own rules". America at its best is a beacon for human rights and human liberty. And that's how we like to see ourselves. But much of the world sees us in a different way when we fail to live up to the standards that we profess. To much of the world the symbol of American values is no longer the Statue of Liberty. It is that horrific photograph of a hooded prisoner at Abu Ghraib, standing on a box, strung up with wires. In 2002 the administration decided to permit the use of aggressive, indeed abusive, interrogation techniques that had previously been considered inconsistent with our laws, our international commitments and our shared American values. On August 1, 2002, the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Council issued what's now known as the Torture Memo, which stated that for physical pain to amount to torture, it "must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death". That in turn led the Secretary of Defense to authorize military interrogators to keep detainees naked, deprive them of light and auditory stimuli, place them in so-called stress positions, and exploit their fears, such as the fear of dogs. Although the Rumsfeld authorization was later rescinded, the President himself has acknowledged that the United States maintained secret prisons outside of the purview of international monitoring, and he has made public reference to a, "alternative set of procedures", used by the CIA to interrogate prisoners in that secret program, which tactics, the President himself characterized as, "tough". And just in the last Congress, the administration successfully persuaded a majority of my colleagues to do the following, narrow the accepted definition of cruel and inhuman treatment, authorize the administration to unilaterally redefine its obligations under the Geneva Convention, allow the use of hearsay and coerced testimony in criminal trial of detainees, insulate senior administration officials from accountability for detainee abuses, bar detainees from ever bringing any legal action challenging any aspect of their detention, and prohibit the courts from providing legal relief for detainees who are found to be improperly held. Now in pursuing these tactics, the administration overruled the objections of top military JAG officers about detainee treatment. It fought the Supreme Court's ruling in the Hamden Case, which declared that the administration's military commissions at Guantanamo Bay "violate both the uniform code of military justice, and the four Geneva Conventions". And it opposed and successfully derailed the original bipartisan version of the Military Commissions Act, which we drafted in the Senate Armed Services Committee, and which met the Supreme Court standard in Hamden, and the Geneva requirements for trials. For America's standing to be restored, we must adopt policies and procedures that reflect our values and international law. We must also insist on some accountability for abuses that have occurred. The standards for humane treatment in the revised army field manual are a good first step, but they're not enough. Some of the legislation over the last two years, and the regulations written to implement that legislation failed to provide a fair process for detainees. For example, and listen to this because it's so fundamental and basic to all of us, a person could be detained for life as an enemy combatant without ever having had a lawyer or knowing what the evidence was against them, since that evidence can be totally classified. That's a life sentence without ever being confronted with the evidence upon which your status as an enemy combatant was based. We also need to get to the bottom of what went wrong at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and elsewhere. The investigations to date of detainee abuses have left significant gaps. For instance there has been inadequate accountability for the authorization by senior officials, both military and civilian, of inappropriate interrogation and detention techniques and as Chairman of the Armed Services Committee one of the first actions that I took was to create a new investigative staff, and that staff is building from the work that we did in the last Congress, the best that we could, to fill in the missing pieces of the detainee abuse story. And the new Secretary of Defense, and I give him credit for this and a lot of other things, has pledged that the department will cooperate in this investigation. As part of the committee's oversight on detainee issues, I traveled recently to Guantanano with Senator Lindsay Graham to observe the hearing whose purpose was to determine the status of a man named Khalid Sheik Mohammed, known as KSM, to determine, in other words, if he is, or was, an enemy combatant. We viewed the proceedings on closed circuit television from an adjoining room. In the course of the proceedings, a personal representative for KSM, not a lawyer, read a statement of his behalf, acknowledging, indeed proclaiming, his leadership in planning the 9/11 attacks and many other terrorist attacks. KSM was asked by the tribunal President if that statement was accurate and replied in English that it was. It was clear that he wanted to record for history his part in a war on terror that he excuse me that a war of terror that he has unabashedly waged. KSM also presented a written statement alleging that he was mistreated and tortured during his captivity by the CIA in his years prior to his arrival at Guantanamo. Unlike his confession this statement alleging abuse was immediately classified. Now, it's hard to care about due process for someone like KSM. But as Senator Graham has said, it's not about him, it's about us. Senator Graham and I issued a statement on our return which committed us to review the hearing processes and to explore possible ways to improve them through Congressional action. There are many reasons not to tolerate torture, it's morally wrong, it produces unreliable information, it violates domestic and international law, and, of great importance, it jeopardizes our own troops, if they're captured. But there's also this, people are less likely to believe that a confession was freely given if there have been abuses of detainees. Even with an admitted terrorist like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, I am afraid the world will focus too much on how we treated him, not what, by his own words, he did to us. It is essential for our security that we and the world focus on understanding what KSM did and what he would do if he were released. What motivates the KSMs of the world, and what methods and capabilities they have and use. That focus gets blurred when serious allegations of torture get thrown into the mix. America can be and must always strive to be, the shining City on a Hill that President Reagan described. But the sheen is gone in the eyes of much of the world. By understanding the great credibility that can come to our actions when we work through international organizations and alliances and by returning to our highest ideals we can regain that luster, we can, as that veteran in the VA hospital in Michigan urged me, win back the respect of the people around the world for America, and that is something that we must do for our security as a nation. Again my thanks for all the great work that you do and thank you so much for this award.
member. 
