SPEAKERS CONTENTS INSERTS
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75–634PDF
2001
THE ROLE OF PUBLIC DIPLOMACY IN SUPPORT OF THE ANTI-TERRORISM CAMPAIGN
HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
OCTOBER 10, 2001
Serial No. 107–47
Printed for the use of the Committee on International Relations
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.house.gov/international—relations
COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
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HENRY J. HYDE, Illinois, Chairman
BENJAMIN A. GILMAN, New York
JAMES A. LEACH, Iowa
DOUG BEREUTER, Nebraska
CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey
DAN BURTON, Indiana
ELTON GALLEGLY, California
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida
CASS BALLENGER, North Carolina
DANA ROHRABACHER, California
EDWARD R. ROYCE, California
PETER T. KING, New York
STEVE CHABOT, Ohio
AMO HOUGHTON, New York
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York
RICHARD BURR, North Carolina
JOHN COOKSEY, Louisiana
THOMAS G. TANCREDO, Colorado
RON PAUL, Texas
NICK SMITH, Michigan
JOSEPH R. PITTS, Pennsylvania
DARRELL E. ISSA, California
ERIC CANTOR, Virginia
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JEFF FLAKE, Arizona
BRIAN D. KERNS, Indiana
JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia
TOM LANTOS, California
HOWARD L. BERMAN, California
GARY L. ACKERMAN, New York
ENI F.H. FALEOMAVAEGA, American Samoa
DONALD M. PAYNE, New Jersey
ROBERT MENENDEZ, New Jersey
SHERROD BROWN, Ohio
CYNTHIA A. McKINNEY, Georgia
EARL F. HILLIARD, Alabama
BRAD SHERMAN, California
ROBERT WEXLER, Florida
JIM DAVIS, Florida
ELIOT L. ENGEL, New York
WILLIAM D. DELAHUNT, Massachusetts
GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York
BARBARA LEE, California
JOSEPH CROWLEY, New York
JOSEPH M. HOEFFEL, Pennsylvania
EARL BLUMENAUER, Oregon
SHELLEY BERKLEY, Nevada
GRACE NAPOLITANO, California
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ADAM B. SCHIFF, California
DIANE E. WATSON, California
THOMAS E. MOONEY, SR., Staff Director/General Counsel
ROBERT R. KING, Democratic Staff Director
KRISTEN GILLEY, Senior Professional Staff Member
MARILYN C. OWEN, Staff Associate
C O N T E N T S
WITNESSES
The Honorable Charlotte Beers, Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, U.S. Department of State
Marc Nathanson, Chairman, Broadcasting Board of Governors
Ambassador Kenton Keith, Senior Vice President for Programming, Meridian International Center
Tom Korologos, Board Member, Broadcasting Board of Governors
LETTERS, STATEMENTS, ETC., SUBMITTED FOR THE HEARING
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The Honorable Henry J. Hyde, a Representative in Congress from the State of Illinois, and Chairman, Committee on International Relations: Prepared statement
The Honorable Edward R. Royce, a Representative in Congress from the State of California: Prepared statement
The Honorable Charlotte Beers: Prepared statement
Information submitted for the record by the Honorable Dana Rohrabacher, a Representative in Congress from the State of California
The Honorable Benjamin A. Gilman, a Representative in Congress from the State of New York: Prepared statement
The Honorable Diane E. Watson, a Representative in Congress from the State of California: Prepared statement
Marc Nathanson: Prepared statement
Ambassador Kenton Keith: Prepared statement
APPENDIX
The Honorable Joseph R. Pitts, a Representative in Congress from the State of Pennsylvania: Prepared statement
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THE ROLE OF PUBLIC DIPLOMACY IN SUPPORT OF THE ANTI-TERRORISM CAMPAIGN
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2001
House of Representatives,
Committee on International Relations,
Washington, DC.
The Committee met, pursuant to call, at 10:15 a.m. in Room 2172, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Henry J. Hyde (Chairman of the Committee) presiding.
Chairman HYDE. The Committee will come to order. As Americans we are justly proud of our country. If any nation has been a greater force for good in the long and tormented history of this world, I am unaware of it. We have guarded whole continent from conquest, showered aid on distant lands, sent thousands of youthful idealists to remote and often inhospitable areas to help the world's forgotten. Our generosity is a matter of record from rebuilding our defeated enemies to feeding tens of millions around the world. Why then, when we read or listen to descriptions of America in the foreign press, do we so often seem to be entering a fantasy land of hatred?
Much of the popular press overseas, often including the government-owned media, daily depict the United States as a force for evil, accusing this country of an endless number of malevolent plots against the world. Today, as we strike against the terrorists in Afghanistan who masterminded the murder of thousands of Americans, our actions are widely depicted in the Muslim world as a war against Islam. Our efforts at self-defense which should be supported by every decent person on this planet, instead spark riots that threaten governments that dare cooperate with us.
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The poisonous image of the United States that is deliberately propagated around the world is more than a mere irritation. It has a direct and negative impact on American interests, not only by undermining our foreign policy goals, but by endangering the safety of Americans here at home and abroad.
How has this state of affairs come about? How is it that the country that invented Hollywood and Madison Avenue has such trouble promoting a positive image of itself overseas? Clearly, this situation has not emerged suddenly or without warning. It has been building for decades, even as we stood and watched. Over the years, the images of mindless hatred directed at us have appeared on our television screens with sickening regularity. All this time we have heard calls that something must be done. But clearly, whatever has been done has not been enough. The question facing us is what can we do to correct this problem?
When I look at the range of programs that constitute our public diplomacy efforts overseas, I see many things of value, but even if the individual programs have merit, can anyone doubt that the sum of our efforts has been insufficient? It is not my purpose to place blame on any person or agency for this state of affairs, for that would be neither accurate nor helpful. Were the problems solvable simply by urging others to work better or harder, I would happily make that call. However, we must assume that the responsible individuals are committed and competent public servants who do in best to perform the job before them.
It appears to me that the problem is too great and too entrenched to be solved by our current efforts. The same must be said about any partial reforms, such as tweaking an agency here or reshuffling a program there. Instead, we must ask ourselves whether or not our public diplomacy effort, as currently constituted, can ever do the job of correcting the damage that has been done to our image and reputation overseas, and beyond that, establishing a positive image of the United States abroad.
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If we ask this question, a host of others follow. How can we use our current programs to better effect? What new approaches to promoting Americas image abroad should we consider? Is there a role for the private sector and does it have any lessons to teach us? How can we measure impact? Who are our allies in efforts overseas? Can we enlist the resources of friendly governments? There are many questions to be asked, and it is my hope that these hearings will be a beginning of that process.
We must open this discussion to many others, to all who have expertise in this subject and who have ideas to offer. This must, of course, include those currently in positions of responsibility, but we must also hear from those whose experience lies in different areas, especially those in the private sector whose careers have focused on the creation of images both here and around the world.
I cannot claim to have a ready solution to this problem, but surely one exists. We must accept there can be no quick fixes. The problem has been gathering strength for several decades and an effective approach will take time to assemble, but we must begin now if we are to win this long overlooked struggle. In so doing, we must remember that we will not only be the beneficiaries of success. As Abraham Lincoln stated, ''Our country represents the last best hope of earth.'' We must reestablish the identity of America and hope among the peoples of the world if we are to merit that description, and by so doing secure our world for the generations to come.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Hyde follows:]
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PREPARED STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE HENRY J. HYDE, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, AND CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
As Americans, we are justly proud of our country. If any nation has been a greater force for good in the long and tormented history of this world, I am unaware of it. We have guarded whole continents from conquest, showered aid on distant lands, sent thousands of youthful idealists to remote and often inhospitable areas to help the world's forgotten. Our generosity is a matter of record, from rebuilding our defeated enemies to feeding tens of millions around the world.
Why, then, when we read or listen to descriptions of America in the foreign press, do we so often seem to be entering a fantasy land of hatred? Much of the popular press overseas, often including the government-owned media, daily depict the United States as a force for evil, accusing this country of an endless number of malevolent plots against the world. Today, as we strike against the terrorists in Afghanistan who masterminded the murder of thousands of Americans, our actions are widely depicted in the Muslim world a war against Islam. Our efforts at self-defense, which should be supported by every decent person on this planet, instead spark riots that threaten governments that dare to cooperate with us.
The poisonous image of the United States that is deliberately propagated around the world is more than a mere irritation. It has a direct and negative impact on American interests, not only by undermining our foreign policy goals but by endangering the safety of Americans here at home and abroad. How has this state of affairs come about? How is it that the country that invented Hollywood and Madison Avenue has such trouble promoting a positive image of itself overseas? Clearly, this situation has not emerged suddenly or without warning. It has been building for decades, even as we stood and watched. Over the years, the images of mindless hatred directed at us have appeared on our television screens with a sickening regularity. All this time, we have heard calls that ''something must be done.'' But, clearly, whatever has been done has not been enough.
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The question facing us is what can we do to correct this problem? When I look at the range of programs that constitute our public diplomacy efforts overseas, I see many things of value. But even if the individual programs have merit, can anyone doubt that the sum of our efforts has been insufficient? It is not my purpose to place blame on any person or agency for this state of affairs, for that would be neither accurate or helpful. Were the problem solvable simply by urging others to work better or harder, I would happily make that call. However, we must assume that the responsible individuals are committed and competent public servants who do their best to perform the job before them.
It appears to me that the problem is too great and too entrenched to be solved by our current efforts. The same must be said about any partial reforms, such as tweaking an agency here or reshuffling a program there. Instead, we must ask ourselves whether or not our public diplomacy effort as currently constituted can ever do the job of correcting the damage that has been done to our image and reputation overseas and, beyond that, establishing a positive image of the United States abroad.
If we ask this question, a host of others follow. How can we use our current programs to better effect? What new approaches to promoting America's image abroad should we consider? Is there a role for the private sector and does it have any lessons to teach us? How can we measure impact? Who are our allies in this effort overseas? Can we enlist the resources of friendly governments? There are many other questions to be asked, and it is my hope that these hearings will be a beginning of that process.
We must open this discussion to many others, to all who have expertise in this subject and who have ideas to offer. This must, of course, include those currently in positions of responsibility, but we must also hear from those whose experience lies in different areas, especially those in the private sector whose careers have focused on the creation of images both here and around the world.
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I cannot claim to have a ready solution to this problem, but one surely exists. We must accept that there can be no quick fixes. The problem has been gathering strength for several decades, and an effective approach will take time to assemble. But we must begin now if we are to win this long-overlooked struggle. In so doing, we must remember that we will not be the only beneficiaries of success. As Abraham Lincoln stated, America represents ''the last, best hope of earth.'' We must reestablish the identity of America and hope among the peoples of the world if we are to merit that description and by so doing secure our world for the generations to come.
Chairman HYDE. I now ask Mr. Lantos for an opening statement.
Mr. LANTOS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I want to commend you for calling this hearing, and before I make my formal statement, I cannot help but comment on yesterday afternoon when you and Senators Biden and Jessie Helms and I had a lengthy meeting with the President on a whole range of foreign policy issues, but the issue that most powerfully remains in my mind and will for a long time was the President's very genuine, very sincere and very straightforward question, why do they hate us? Why is it that from the streets of Jakarta in Indonesia to Pakistan to scores of other countries, the white venom of hate is oozing in a singularly ugly and sickening fashion?
The President asked properly. There has never been a more generous Nation. We covet no one's territory. We are trying to preserve, or in some places create, a civilized society, and yet the venom is oozing in our direction. And I think the fundamental answer truly lies in our appalling failure to conduct public diplomacy with the seriousness and with the resources that this very important function desperately calls for.
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Mr. Chairman, the U.S.-led international military campaign launched Sunday against Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network and his Taliban protectors represents a first step in a long and difficult and costly struggle against terrorism.
If September 11 was Pearl Harbor, October 7 was D-day, the beginning of the end of international terrorism. Our forceful counterattack demonstrates that the terrorist acts of the last month have not paralyzed us. They have galvanized us. Winning the war against terrorism will require much more than military might. It will also require, among other diplomatic and economic initiatives that we launch, a concerted campaign to win over the people of Afghanistan and scores of other countries around the globe who are subjected to a daily barrage of vituperative misinformation and vicious hate. The war against terrorism will be fought in the air, on the land, on the seas, but particularly the airwaves.
In many respects, Mr. Chairman, we and our allies are losing the battle of the airwaves. We are literally being outgunned, outmanned, out maneuvered on the public information battle field. For years the Taliban has showered Afghanistan with their hateful propaganda, via Radio Shariat. The insidious messages of that radio echo throughout the Middle East and South Asia as fringe organizations and mainstream media alike spread their anti-American venom. The riots we see in the streets of Indonesia and Pakistan, two Nations we have helped enormously since they gained independence, is proof positive that we are losing this aspect of the war. Now, of course the broadcasting of hate is not new.
From Goebbels' Nazi propaganda machine to the hate radio broadcast in Rwanda during the Tutsi genocide repressive regimes have used misinformation campaigns to terrorize, manipulate, and provoke civilian populations. Osama bin Laden himself has taken a page from this playbook, manipulating most recently Arab media to further his evil ends.
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It is time, Mr. Chairman, that we strike back by strengthening and intensifying our public diplomacy efforts. As a teenager in the anti-Nazi underground living in Hungary during the second World War, I recall fondly the inspirational and uplifting and liberating broadcasts of the Voice of America and the BBC, and I can testify personally to the incredibly dramatic effect these programs had in providing hope to captive people. With the proper commitment of resources and energy, public diplomacy can be made to work again. But since the end of the Cold War, Mr. Chairman, the United States has neglected our public diplomacy efforts. International information and broadcasting budgets have been vitiated over the years and the merger of USIA and the Department of State may have further complicated our diplomacy efforts.
After nearly a decade of neglect, we are today suffering the consequences of a chronically underfunded public diplomacy establishment. The United States currently spends in international broadcasting a sum that I can only describe as paltry and shameful. We are spending about as much as BBC spends on its world service, and to give some perspective to our spending priorities, we are spending $2.2 billion on chewing gum, $75 billion on cigarettes and $400 million on the public broadcasting establishment. It is high time, Mr. Chairman, that this Congress and our Administration took public diplomacy seriously.
Last month with virtual unanimity, we appropriated about $40 billion in emergency funds for waging war on terrorism. This morning, I call on President Bush to allocate from these funds whatever is required to increase dramatically U.S. broadcasting to Afghanistan and throughout the Arab and Muslim world. We must not shortchange this vital account and rob the State Department and the broadcasting agencies of the resources they need to carry out this important fight. The time for bold decisive action on this crucial front on the war against terrorism is long overdue.
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Some Members, Mr. Chairman, have proposed a creation of a Radio Free Afghanistan, a concept I support, but establishing a new broadcasting service from scratch will take considerable time. As we build infrastructure, listenership, and credibility for a Radio Free Afghanistan, we must expend upon the current remarkable capabilities of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty which have made important inroads into Afghanistan. Some polls indicate that up to 80 percent of Afghan males listen to VOA through its Pashtun, Farsi, and Uda services. We must build upon this success, not abandon it for a new service that will take months, perhaps years, to establish.
Public diplomacy entails more than broadcasting, however. We must also increase educational and cultural exchanges with the Middle East and South Asia and promote educational programming in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other countries that lack access to basic education. As I have said before, Mr. Chairman, the war on terrorism is like no other war America has ever waged, and it will require all that we as a people can muster. Public diplomacy is one arrow in America's quiver in this war, and it is time we use it.
If you will allow, Mr. Chairman, there is one more observation I would like to make. One of my most unforgettable memories was a day I spent in Geneva many years ago with my late friend, Edward R. Murrow. We both stayed at the Hotel Beauregard. By chance we met in the morning and spent much of the day together. Ed Murrow, who knew more about this incredibly important instrument than anyone, taught us not just the importance, but the absolute essentiality of making our public diplomacy credible.
So I would like to conclude by quoting the great Edward R. Murrow whose contributions to American society are gigantic:
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''To be persuasive,'' he said, ''we must be believable. To be believable, we must be credible. To be credible, we must be truthful. American public diplomacy will have to be truthful. We cannot match, nor should we, the latter day Goebbels in their lies and distortions. Our story sells itself if it is told powerfully, accurately and with credibility.''
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. We will now receive opening statements. I would admonish the Committee to be as brief as possible because we have several witnesses and we'd like to get to them. But I think it is important that each Member have an opportunity to express themselves succinctly and briefly, the first to be Jo Ann Davis, the gentlelady from Virginia. You have no statement?
Mr. Flake.
Mr. FLAKE. Mr. Chairman, I would rather hear the witnesses, thanks.
The CHAIRMAN. We are having a mild dispute about the order of calling people. Some have said when they get here, they ought to take precedence and others suggest seniority, and I have friends on both sides. And I am for my friends. Mr. Leach.
Mr. LEACH. So that there is no misunderstanding, Mr. Chairman, I was the first Member here and I am not making the insistence and there is no argument to that extent. But having said that, I want to just very briefly say I identify with both the Ranking Member and the Chairman in their comments and would only add one modest follow-up, and that is that as we look at public diplomacy, the word ''diplomacy'' is more important than the word ''public,'' and if there is any lesson that this Committee, with its jurisdiction, ought to be taking very seriously, it is that the budget of the United States Department of State should be looked at in the wake of international challenges of this nature just as the budget of the Central Intelligence Agency in the public diplomacy function. The political games with the State Department budget and the multilateral budgets, including the United Nation's, should be looked at in a very professional way. With that, I would yield back the balance of my time.
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The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. Mr. Berman of California.
Mr. BERMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I hardly ever do this, but I want to make a general exception and actually make an opening statement at this hearing because I think this subject is so important. We have a number of distinguished witnesses who we will be hearing from on both panels, and a number of people who have done incredible work in public broadcasting and public diplomacy are at this hearing today. The war against terrorism is much more than a military operation. It is also a battle of ideas.
As an editorial in Washington Post notes, the terrorist enemy that the United States and its allies are facing includes not just networks of fighters and their leaders, but an extremist ideology that has gained a substantial following. Osama bin Laden is doing his best to persuade the world that the strikes on Taliban and al Qaeda facilities amounts to an attack on Islam. It is up to us to convince people, especially moderates in the Arab world, that he's wrong. Fortunately we have the facts on our side, and in the end, the truth will prevail; but the importance of U.S. public diplomacy in the Middle East extends far beyond the current conflict in Afghanistan. At last week's Middle East Subcommittee hearing, all the distinguished witnesses agreed that we have lost the public relations battle on Iraq.
Jeffrey Kemp, a member of President Reagan's National Security Council staff said, and I quote,
''The U.S. has been losing the propaganda war, and it should be a priority to retain the high ground on the matter of who is most responsible for the suffering of the Iraqi people. We know that Saddam refuses to use funds available under the Oil for Food Program to buy food and medicine to sustain his people. We know the sanctions would be lifted if he allowed U.N. weapons inspectors back into the country. We know he uses profits from illicit oil sales to build more palaces for himself while the Iraqi population remains mired in poverty.''
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Unfortunately, these facts have been lost on much of the world, including some of our allies. With anti-American sentiment on the rise in the entire Middle East, with Saddam still at the helm in Bagdad, with no end in sight to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we must intensify our efforts to explain U.S. policies and perspectives to the broad Arab public; but we need to find new ways to do so, because current international broadcasting of the region has not always been effective.
Our shortwave and AM broadcasts are barely audible in many parts of the Middle East, and generally have an extremely small audience, 2 percent or less of the population in most of the 22 countries that receive VOA's Arabic language programming. Much of this has to do with the growing popularity of Al Jazeera and other media outlets in the region. To their great credit, the Broadcasting Board of Governors has proposed a new Arabic service that will broadcast news, in depth analysis, editorial comment, talk and popular music 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in an attractive and accessible format. Unlike current VOA broadcasts, the network will be carried on FM and AM radio stations located in region. It will also provide programming streams tailored to specific audiences, particularly educated young adults in Sudan, the West Bank, Gaza, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf states, and other areas.
The Middle East Radio Network will expose the future leaders of the Arab world to American ideas values and culture, and facilitate the free flow of ideas in countries that still routinely engage in press censorship. It will provide a counter to the disinformation, hate speech, and incitement to violence that are all too often contained in official and private media sources in the region. I strongly support this initiative and hope all of my colleagues will as well.
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I also, in closing, want to draw my colleagues' attention to legislation introduced by our colleague, Ed Royce, that would establish a Radio Free Afghanistan. There is clearly need for additional broadcasting into Afghanistan. According to a National Public Radio report that aired on Tuesday, the three things the Afghan people want most are food, water, and information. Hopefully we can provide all three.
I agreed to be a lead Democratic co-sponsor of this legislation with the understanding that given limited resources, the author had no intention of pursuing Radio Free Afghanistan at the expense of the broader Middle East Radio Network. Indeed, as Mr. Royce understands, these initiatives are complementary. I support my colleagues' effort to establish Radio Free Afghanistan under Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, whose effectiveness in this area under its excellent leader Tom Dine, in the audience today, is well known to everyone—not in lieu of but as a supplement to VOA's Afghan broadcasting.
Mr. Chairman, I thank you for your indulgence and I yield back whatever time I might have left.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.
Mr. Rohrabacher.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. First let us note that when people say why are we hated, that there are some major policy decisions that the United States has made that have not made us friends, and during the Cold War we had to make certain compromises in which we sided with some very unsavory characters at times, just as we did during World War II. We can't just say it is a lack of communication, but there are some policy issues that we need to pay attention to as well if we are going to have the hearts and minds of the people of the world.
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In Indonesia, for example, we supported a less than democratic and less than honest regime there for many years. There is reason for the people of Indonesia to say we suffered, we have had this type of regime and the United States bears some responsibility for that. I think now that the Cold War is over, many of the decisions that we made along that line can be corrected, and I think the United States has moved to correct them.
I think that human rights has played an important role in American foreign policy development. Mr. Lantos and I and others have tried to express that on many occasions, make that part of the national debate, and I think it will go a long way toward solving some of the vitriol that is aimed at the United States. However, there are communication problems as well. I see Mr. Berman has stepped out for a moment, but I agree with him totally on his analysis on the propaganda war about Iraq, and the fact is, we have lost that war and there was no reason for us to lose it.
The Iraqi people are suffering tremendously, yet Saddam Hussein has gotten away with it and we have accepted the blame and we haven't made our case. Unfortunately, I will have to say some Americans, Americans of Muslim descent, gave credence to those charges, and I think that the Muslim community in the United States needs to have some very serious soul searching on this issue of Iraq and the position they have taken over the last year or 2 on whether or not they gave credence to this charge that the United States, not Saddam Hussein, is primarily responsible for the suffering of their people. I would hope that they take a second look at this and think about it in the future.
I would like to tip my hat to my colleague, Mr. Ed Royce, who from the time he arrived here understood the importance of communication to the security of our country and to the cause of human freedom and has dedicated himself and made such major contributions in the area of broadcasting to areas in the world that are, in the world, trying to contest the hearts and mind of the people. And I certainly wholeheartedly support his efforts to try to now focus on Afghanistan.
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But one last note. There have been some serious questions in the last 10 years, actually before that, about the job that Voice of America has been doing. Mr. Lantos, I know, quoted Edward R. Murrow and, quite frankly, he certainly is—I am a former journalist—he is one of my heroes. We have to take his admonition to be truthful, but I believe there is all kinds of evidence to suggest that the Voice of America has taken truthfulness to mean that they have to try both sides of every issue. I don't believe that is necessary for truthfulness. We have been paying quite often in these last several decades for the dissemination of information that is basically helpful to some of the dictators and tyrants whom we oppose.
Over these last few years, I have been raising questions many times about the Pashtun service in the Voice of America, feeling every time there is a story negative about the Taliban, they have felt they have had to present the Taliban side to have the other side. I am going to be asking our witnesses about their opinion on this criticism.
To be truthful, you don't need to present the Taliban side of an argument as long as you are trying to be truthful in the presentation of the facts. You don't have to have Adolph Hitler's side or Mussolini's side either, or Joe Stalin's side of an argument. Both sides of the argument are not what we are paying for as taxpayers. We are hoping for truthfulness, but we want to make sure that the interest of the United States is being protected and being promoted during these broadcasts. So with that, thank you very much for holding this hearing, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman HYDE. Thank you.
Mr. Delahunt of Massachusetts.
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Mr. DELAHUNT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. When we hear the concept of public diplomacy, in my mind it provokes the concept of education, and I would even extend it beyond educating those in foreign lands, and I think it is important to be honest with ourselves too. How many Americans had heard of Afghanistan, let alone Uzbekistan or Tajikistan, until recent events? So when we talk about public diplomacy I think it has to also be directed inwardly, and I would suggest that we have got to start to educate ourselves, and I am not just talking about the American people. I am talking about Members of Congress. I would hate to ask my colleagues if a month ago they knew the capital of Afghanistan. I dare say there wouldn't be 100 percent. We would not receive a grade of A.
The CHAIRMAN. Would the gentleman yield?
Mr. DELAHUNT. I would.
The CHAIRMAN. Is the gentleman suggesting, and I hope he is, that geography be incorporated into the curriculum of our schools?
Mr. DELAHUNT. Absolutely, Mr. Chairman. I know you say that facetiously, but I think it is very important. So what we are talking about here is education. I have had the good fortune of being in Prague and meeting with Mr. Dine and seeing Radio Free Europe. I think it is a tremendous operation, and our government is to be complimented and we need to tell them, Tom [Dine], it is good to see you here. It was very impressive.
Again, I also want to share the kudos being thrown in the way of Mr. Royce and support that. But also in addition to enhancing our public broadcasting efforts, have we a policy or do we have an—I am looking for the right words here, and I can't seem to find them. But what kinds of efforts are we making to access those media outlets, such as Al Jazeera to convey and to educate those people, not just about the specific issue, but American values—what we are about? Any Member of Congress who has traveled extensively throughout the world discovers very, very quickly that there are so many misunderstandings and misperceptions about what we are about as a people, as a society.
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The truth is, and I think it was Mr. Berman who mentioned, that we have a radio audience of some 2 percent. I think we have to encourage the efforts that have been taken as we have seen in Qatar, but we need to be on those stations giving our opinions because that is what the people of those nations are listening to. As Mr. Lantos said, none of us clearly are afraid of the conflict of our ideas with their ideas because we will prevail, but we have got to think, I would respectfully suggest, beyond the box, and beyond the traditional effort which is—and maybe I am incorrect—which has been focused simply on the Voice of America and similar kind of public broadcasting initiatives. And with that, I will yield back.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Royce.
Mr. ROYCE. Thank you, again, Mr. Chairman, for calling this timely hearing. By way of rebuttal, it has been said by the Ranking Member that Radio Free Afghanistan would have to get up and running and that that would have to be from scratch. I wanted to clarify that. The individuals who are now at Radio Free Europe who ran Radio Free Afghanistan from 1985 to 1993 are, in fact, in place. There are eight Afghans there in that service. They have the experience and expertise on the subject. I will also mention that currently, those broadcasts are done in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and neighboring Iran, and the reason that is done is those top three-tiered countries were in the former Soviet Union; so they were allowed to continue there on mandate.
What I suggested some years ago when the Taliban came on the scene was that this mandate be extended so they might also continue to broadcast into Afghanistan and put this team in place. Now, I don't know what the lies are that the gentleman from California suggests we might broadcast. I don't think anyone believes the U.S. would be broadcasting Goebbels-like propaganda, but what I would like to point out is that nobody in Afghanistan has had the opportunity to see the vision on the screen of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center, and the reason they haven't is because it is a serious felony under Taliban law to own a television, and the penalty for that is a public beating.
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So if people find it hard to believe in this part of the world how broadcasts could have misconstrued that the World Trade Center bombing was a hoax or was done by the Israelis or Indian intelligence services, the answer to that is, frankly, they haven't had the opportunity to see it. They haven't heard an effective rebuttal and what this bill seeks to do is to go up on the air 12 hours a day in Pashto and in Dari and give the people the facts, give the people the truth. Who is going to do the broadcasting? The same organization that broadcast into Eastern Europe effectively in every country, except the former Yugoslavia, where we blocked their broadcasting.
If you talk to Vaclav Hovel or Lech Walesa they would tell you that the things that changed the situation, changed the minds of the people in Eastern Europe, were those constant broadcasts from Radio Free Europe. So we know what works, and that is why I am suggesting if we are going to have a war on international terrorism, part of that war is going to be on the information and idea front and this is going to have to be carried out in a way that other wars have not been.
The messages we communicate to the world through broadcasting will be critical to our victory over terrorism and critical to our victory over those regimes that support terrorism. The Taliban and the terrorists they are harboring are in power, in my view, for one reason. They use propaganda and censorship to maintain that power. The reason it has been being reported, I have told you that the attacks were engineered by other forces. We are familiar with the argument that there were 4,000 Jewish workers in the World Trade Center that did not go into work that day. That has been repeated.
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Fortunately, through air strikes we have taken out Radio Shariat, but the other side of the coin is providing accurate information to counter these lies. When people are interviewed in Uzbekistan, when refugees are interviewed in Iran, they say why don't you have a Radio Free Afghanistan like you have a Radio Free Uzbekistan, so they can find out inside the country what is going on?
We had hearings here several years ago that I organized in this Committee, and at that time we brought up to testify Hasa Nouri from California, and others in the Afghan community, who explained how important getting information into the community was. I will share with you one of the disinformation campaigns used effectively by the Taliban to take control. They told people as they were moving across that country, via Radio Shariat, that the Taliban was going to come in and bring the king back. One of the reasons they did that is because people didn't know what the Taliban represented. It was, in fact, trained in neighboring Pakistan by the intelligence services there and half of their rank and file were, in fact, not Afghans, so——
Chairman HYDE. The gentleman's time has expired.
Mr. ROYCE. Well, I thought I would lay out the case, and in closing, let me make the point that by the time I talked with Robin Rafael, subsequently with Mr. Inderfurth, former Assistant Secretary, with our Secretary of State, and with the President to try to urge this kind of action to be taken, I would suggest with 33 co-authors now is the time for us to move this legislation and move in a serious way to get the truth on the air.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
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[The prepared statement of Mr. Royce follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE EDWARD R. ROYCE, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA
Thank you Mr. Chairman for calling this timely and important hearing.
The war on international terrorism must be a war on the information and idea front in a way that few other wars have been. The messages we communicate to the world will be critical to our victory over terrorism and regimes supporting the terrorists. Public broadcasting must be an effective tool in this effort.
The Taliban and the terrorists they are harboring use propaganda and censorship to maintain power. In the region it is being reported that the attacks on the World Trade Center were the work of the Israelis and Indians, and that Osama bin Laden is innocent. Fortunately, we have taken out Radio Shariat. The other side of the coin is providing accurate information to counter these lies.
This is why public broadcasting is so important. As we look at the broadcasting services, we must always remember that serving U.S. interests is the primary rationale for public broadcasting abroad. This mandate should color all broadcasting decisions.
I've been calling for Radio Free Afghanistan for several years. I think it's fair to say that the previous Administration had no interest in broadcasting to Afghanistan. If we had had Radio Free Afghanistan up and running for several years now, the terrorists would not have had the fertile ground they have found in Afghanistan. We certainly would not be behind the curve, running around to ramp-up broadcasting to the region now.
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I believe Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is the best organization for broadcasting to Afghanistan. I now have over 30 co-sponsors of legislation to give Radio Free Afghanistan responsibility to RFE/RL. This is a significant congressional endorsement—I'm not aware that VOA has this type of support for this mission.
Besides its outstanding impact behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, RFE/RL ran Radio Free Afghanistan from 1985 to 1993. It has experience and expertise on Afghanistan. It was successful in rallying the Afghan people against the Soviets. I think it will have the best chance of rallying the Afghan people against the Taliban now.
RFE/RL is also what is called a surrogate service. It broadcasts news about Afghanistan, as if Afghanistan had a free and vibrant press. The Afghan people rightly care most about what is occurring in their country. It is the voice of Afghans talking about the radicalism of the Taliban that will be our best ally. RFE/RL is the best-positioned service for this task.
I look forward to hearing from our witnesses Mr. Chairman.
Chairman HYDE. The Chair regrets that we are going to have to curtail further statements because the witnesses have other commitments, and we do want to hear their statements. I will recognize Mr. Kerns for a brief statement, and then we will go to the witnesses.
Mr. KERNS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to begin this morning by thanking the Chairman and the leadership for putting this important hearing together, and I look forward to hearing the testimony of the panelists and a meaningful discussion of our policy and diplomacy. After having the opportunity to spend the last week traveling abroad with my colleagues through Russia, Turkey, and Italy, I was able to witness public diplomacy at its finest. I found there was no better way to promote our country, our culture and government through the people and people exchanges. There is no better time to do so than now, but we must also promote America via other means in, and in the wake of events on September 11 public diplomacy has been challenged. Coverage of the United States and our policies have expanded greatly to an international audience, and we must question how effective our efforts are in promoting a positive image of the United States and our foreign policy goals. There are new measures that should be taken to make sure that our messages are effective and purposeful, and I look forward to hearing our testimony from our distinguished panelists as they share their thoughts and provide their insight on how we promote our great country. With that Mr. Chairman, I will yield back.
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Chairman HYDE. Thank you.
The Chair announces that any statements that have not been read or delivered may be included in the record without objection. I would like to welcome Mrs. Charlotte Beers, the newly sworn in Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy. Secretary Beers comes to the Administration from the private sector. Most recently she served as Chairman of two of the top ten worldwide advertising agencies, Jay Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather. Her experience in international advertising should provide the insight and energy so important to the U.S. public diplomacy. As only the second person to hold the Under Secretary position, she has an opportunity to shape a strong coordinated and effective public diplomacy profile.
I would also like to recognize Richard Boucher, the spokesman for the State Department and the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs. Mr. Boucher was acting Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy prior to Mrs. Beers's confirmation. Mr. Boucher has served as Chief of Mission to the U.S. Council General in Hong Kong and U.S. Ambassador to Cyprus. He has also previously been the spokesman for the State Department and brings a strong background to this area of domestic public relations and the counterpart public diplomacy for international audiences.
Secretary Beers, please proceed.
STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE CHARLOTTE BEERS, UNDER SECRETARY FOR PUBLIC DIPLOMACY AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
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Mrs. BEERS. Thank you. Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee, you have made some very important opening comments that give us much to think about. Provocative questions have a lot to do with defining the problem. Defining the problem well is a long way toward making a solution. I am delighted to appear to you today just 8 days after being sworn in. It was just 2 weeks ago that is Senate acted on my confirmation, and I am grateful for the vote of trust and confidence. As you just indicated, Mr. Chairman, Richard Boucher is here and I want to thank him for the exceptional job he has done of stewarding our public diplomacy work. It is also an excellent time to thank the very talented men and women in public diplomacy who have been working some exceptional hours in these exceptional times. Like every other Department in State, we have been galvanized by the terrorist attacks of September 11 and the great challenge that President Bush posed for all of us. I can assure you we are working carefully with our colleagues at State, the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, and other entities to wholeheartedly focus on our number one priority, fighting the international war on terrorism.
As Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, I am responsible for the overall planning and management of this global effort. We have been developing a communications platform that is based in part on these four tenets. The attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacks not on America but on the world. In many places particularly, in our IIP capacity, we have worked around the clock to make sure that the world understands that this was an attack on the world starting with a very important graphic that showed in one picture how many members of the world were influenced by those attacks. In addition to that, U.S. News and World Report has indicated that our Web site is one of the top five in the country. This has given us a much higher profile than we have ever had before. The hits on our Web site have gone from 1 million to 2 million, doubled, and in many times, certain pages are nine times the reader rate they used to be, something to think about as we discuss different distribution channels. Let us all remember that the Web and the Internet are a third important point to radio and television. We also have, as a major tenet, the war is not against Islam. This piece of communication will take a long time and it has begun now. I was very interested in our ability to use articles that are in the press—The Washington Post had a very good series of articles about America's generosity to other Muslims in our country. We made sure that such articles were available to all of our embassies so that many times we are making the message about where we stand on this through the voice of others.
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American supports the Afghan people, which is why President Bush is providing 320 million in humanitarian assistance. Here it is very crucial that we act in a timely fashion. We put a note about our Afghan assistance program up the very day the President announced it and 3 days before the raids started. We had great cooperation with the Voice of America in putting speakers on the air who constantly brought forward this message of humanitarian aid. We wanted it to be parallel with all the necessary news about the raids.
Finally all nations must ban together to eliminate international terrorism. This is not a job for America alone. Here comes into play something you also supported for over a long period of time, and that is our exchange programs. It is significant, I think, that 50 of the world leaders with whom we are trying to develop a coalition have been members of and participated in our exchanges over the long number of years that you have supported them. Dialogue that we set up so long ago is not only going to help us build a coalition, but to sustain it.
We are working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in a special task force team within a task force at the State Department. We do constant monitoring of reactions, and hopefully we can develop responses just as quickly.
We just reported yesterday all of the response of the Muslim clerics and the headlines from around the world so we can send these into our embassies, and hopefully mount positive and important corrections on misinformation. Our embassies are given daily cables and information and newspaper clips and speeches and pieces of material and talking points that they can quickly put in place with host media.
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It is interesting that we just put together a video teleconference with Arab journalists who all gather in London. It has been kind of a gateway to communication to the Arab world, and we are doing weekly digital videos with not only these journalists, but Arab scholars, so that we begin a more constant dialogue. As well as doing more immediate turnaround tasks, we are in the process of doing business as usual.
We conduct our Web site in six languages. Our embassies translate material into many other languages. The Fulbright academic exchanges and other professional exchanges must continue, and are doing so in 140 countries. It is interesting how we quickly jumped on opportunities. We had a woman who was in Syria for the purposes of developing an art show called Cityscapes. She arrived there on September 8, she put her Cityscape up, everyone in the community came and applauded her. They learned so much about more about America that it was one moment of major diplomacy.
In Damascus at the time of the strike of the attack on America, we had a Syrian Muslim American cleric who was quickly sent to meet with everybody in the area and had a dialogue with local clerics. In small ways like that, happening in incidences all over the world, we have these exchanges and dialogues taking place.
Now we are using the context we learned over the years—with many of the communities that came as part of our exchanges and scholarships—to develop a whole new level of dialogue between moderate Muslims and the United States. While some issues do require instant turnaround, we have to be mindful that we are in a long-lived engagement to reach new audiences in different ways, exactly as so many of you have said this morning. We will activate our ability to engage in dialogue.
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One of the most painful disciplines of the communication process is that it can never be one-sided. No dialogue takes place without a comprehensive understanding of who the audience is, which means whether we agree with them or not, we are bound to comprehend, to understand, and to walk in their shoes so we know how to draft those messages back to them. We must constantly put a picture of humanity on the rather sterile words that the government sometimes uses for communication.
If you think of the September 11 attack as a big building going down, you haven't gotten it. If you think of it as how many orphans were made that day and how many people are still weeping and mourning, you will remember. It is part of our goal to put those pictures in the communication process that is so active now in all forms of public diplomacy. We need to become better at communicating the intangibles, the behavior, the emotions that reside in lofty words like democracy.
When we say it, we think people know what we mean. It's not what we say. It is what they hear. So now the burden is on us to act as if no one has ever understood the identity of the United States, to redefine it for audiences who are, at best, cynical.
Here is a quote that I thought was fascinating. After we put out on the Web site the Afghan humanitarian aid information, this is the report we got back from one of the newspapers in Qatar:
''The irony is the first humanitarian aid came from the Americans. The food bags have USA written on them. When I saw the Afghans running toward the American bags of flour, I smiled and for the first time in my life, I did not curse America.''
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So our goal is to take that kind of response and magnify it many fold so that we have our story in front of such unlikely candidates. This is a war about a way of life and fundamental beliefs and values. We did not expect to ever have to explain and defend concepts like freedom and tolerance. We have to prepare our people for an era of vigilance for nearly invisible enemies with goals that are quite unfamiliar: to destabilize, to make radical, to hate all that we hold dear. We must redefine what is success in this new uncharted territory.
I consider this hearing a special opportunity to ask you to take part in the communication that we make to the American people. After all, you are on the front line of a more intimate dialogue with people in your constituencies than we can really reach. You do, in fact, embody the brand—the United States. You have a more intimate daily dialogue and you hear the questions back. In our public affairs bureau we are going to be fielding even more speakers, making them available to you in all parts of the United States. Our town meetings are going to double in number, and we are even going to give you if you should desire, PowerPoint presentations of which the advertising business would be proud.
Finally, I am working with the Ad Council. This is a group that collaborates with all the advertising agencies in the United States, all of whom have world capabilities. They have offered us their services, and we are now working with them on what messages can we put together that will work not only in the United States for these kinds of issues that we must address for our own people but also around the world. We will have to be prepared to prepare these messages in almost every kind of channel of distribution.
I thank you very much for this time and we look forward to hearing any questions you might have.
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[The prepared statement of Mrs. Beers follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE CHARLOTTE BEERS, UNDER SECRETARY FOR PUBLIC DIPLOMACY AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee:
I am delighted to appear before you today, just eight days after being sworn in as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. It was just two weeks ago that the Senate acted on my confirmation. I am grateful for this vote of trust and confidence.
With me today is someone you all know, Richard Boucher, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs and Department spokesman, and, for the past several months, the official in charge of Public Diplomacy. I would like to thank him for his stewardship of the Department's public diplomacy efforts. Additionally, I would like to take the opportunity to salute the dedicated men and women who work in Public Diplomacy here and in our embassies overseas.
Public diplomacy, like every other part of the State Department, has been galvanized by the terrorist attacks of September 11 and the great challenge that President Bush posed to all of us, as citizens of this great nation and as public servants. I can assure you that Public Diplomacy, in concert with our colleagues at the State Department, the NSC, the Department of Defense and other entities, is wholeheartedly focused on our number one priority: fighting the international war on terrorism. As Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, I am responsible for the overall planning and management of this global effort.
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And this is our message to the world:
The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were not attacks on America but were attacks on the world.
This is not a war against Islam. The war is against terrorists and those who support and harbor them.
America supports the Afghan people, which is why President Bush is providing $320 million in humanitarian assistance to the Afghan people.
All nations must band together to eliminate the scourge of international terrorism.
Public diplomacy has delivered these messages beginning September 11 and every single day since then. Let me tell you what we are doing to enlist foreign publics in the campaign against terrorists and their supporters, to magnify these key messages, including that of our support for the Afghan people:
The State Department has established a 24/7 team within its task force dedicated to public information programs in our campaign against terrorism. State is monitoring the full range of public and media reaction around the world to ensure fast response by US officials.
Our public affairs officers in our embassies around the world work every day with their host country media outlets—TV, newspapers, radio, publications—to ensure that our anti-terrorism message remains front and center.
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Public Diplomacy's main international web site, Response to Terrorism, is updated daily and features dramatic visuals, including a map showing the 81 countries that lost citizens in the World Trade Center attack. This information is featured in six foreign language sites—Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, French and Portuguese, as well as on scores of sites in local languages at individual embassies around the world.
In times of crisis, we see the benefits of Public Diplomacy. For example, over 50 world leaders are alumnae of our exchange programs. These long-term relationships help us deal with international challenges at a time when the United States is seeking to build a coalition of nations against terrorism.
We are bringing exchange participants to the U.S., giving them a first-hand view of our democratic institutions and how Americans from many backgrounds pulled together in the aftermath of the attacks. Journalists in these programs now receive special briefings on our anti-terrorism policies from high-level U.S. officials.
Fulbright academic exchanges and other professional exchanges continue in 140 countries.
While the Broadcasting Board of Governors will go into detail, let me just say that the radio services have increased their broadcasts in 53 languages, with special emphasis on the key frontline states in Central and South Asia and in the Middle East.
We continue to program speakers all over the world. Whether they are addressing civil society or economic reform, they find themselves discussing the crisis we now face.
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In our outreach effort, one of my priorities will be to identify the words and pictures that will make people around the world understand that the Osama bin Ladens of this world act not out of a religious impulse, that terrorists are not martyrs or heroes, but criminals and cowards.
I met with the Ad Council last week to discuss a series of public service announcements, here and overseas, that distill the values and virtues of American democracy and the many good things we have achieved on the international front.
I thank you for this opportunity to report to you about how public diplomacy is supporting the President's call to war against terrorism. I would be happy to answer any questions you may have.
Chairman HYDE. Thank you very much, Secretary Beers. Tom Lantos.
Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Chairman, I withhold my questions. I would like to hear from Secretary Boucher.
Chairman HYDE. Secretary Boucher will not testify. He is just here to balance the podium.
Mrs. BEERS. And to answer the really tough questions.
Chairman HYDE. So if you want to ask him any questions, go ahead.
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Mr. LANTOS. Let me commend our new Under Secretary for a very fine presentation and let me publicly pay tribute to Assistant Secretary Boucher for the superb job he does, day in and day out. We all admire not only your knowledge, but your unflappable approach to horrendously unpleasant people.
If you had a free hand, Madam Secretary, what kind of a budgetary request would you make of the Congress?
Mrs. BEERS. Well, I haven't done too much budget work yet after 8 days, but I can tell you, in principle, I would like to reach the young. I would like to be able to reach wider audiences. I would like to have a different set of skills available to the Department, communication skills that are a little more sensitive to the emotional context of messages. I might ask for different kinds of research to help me deal with the beliefs and the myths and the legends as well as the facts.
I can't answer for you that we are planning to ask for extra money in certain areas, but these are the broad-based goals of what would be an extended effort in public diplomacy.
Do you want to specify more than that, Richard?
Mr. BOUCHER. Just to say one thing, and this is also in reference to comments you made before about the oozing venom and the comments that Congressman Delahunt—about education and other things that people say.
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We do have some support in the Arab world. We have people cooperating with us on overflights and on the various efforts that are being made against terrorism. We have leaders like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and President Musharraf in Pakistan who have spoken out very clearly in support of what we are doing. But we also have a group that seems to be pathologically opposed to the United States, that grow up in schools where they are taught this sort of venom every day, that grow up with information that is controlled, distorted and often just patently false.
Some of the things that we need to do more and better in the future are reaching that younger and up and coming audience, people who want to be part of the world, who want to see what the possibilities are. And that involves everything from expanding our exchange programs, supporting this proposal for Middle East broadcasting—the President's budget I think had some money in there for the Board of Broadcasting Governors to establish that service—getting out with, as Charlotte said, ads around the world that can reach different audiences in different places. So I think a lot of that sort of long-term building needs to be done, because there has been long-term building against us.
Mr. LANTOS. I would like both of you to respond to my next issue which I think is to some extent central to this controversy that surrounds us. Compromise is the currency of a free society. And, of course, the fanatic fundamentalists who oppose us reject the very concept of compromise. Compromise, by definition, is evil.
If you accept these assumptions, what specific conclusions do we draw from this in terms of dealing with fanatic fundamentalist movements and leaders who are totally disinterested in reaching an accommodation and are publicly hell-bent on total victory, however unrealistic that goal might be?
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It seems to me that much of our public diplomacy is predicated on the assumption that we are dealing with the Midwest, when in fact we are dealing with the Mideast and these are entirely different universes. And my question to both of you is: Is it feasible to conduct the rational and patient and compromise-prone approach which has characterized, obviously, all of our domestic dialogue, but which is so totally inappropriate in dealing with a virulently hostile segment of the world which views us, all of us, as infidels and has a very clear formula as to what should happen to infidels?
It has been very customary in recent weeks, and very proper—and we have all engaged in this—to say that this is not a war against Islam, it is a war against terrorists. And I certainly subscribe to that notion. But at the same time, we must understand that Islamic fanaticism is engaged in a war against free and open Democratic societies. Irrespective of their policies, fanaticism hates us for what we are, not for what we do. And since we cannot change and choose not to change what we are, what policy recommendations do you draw from these assumptions, Secretary Beers?
Mrs. BEERS. Well, I think the reason I put the emphasis on the emotional context on which our messages will be delivered is because so much of the fanatics' message is grounded in that kind of extreme emotional environment. I think we have to be students of exactly what these fanatics claim, and debunk them piece by piece, point by point.
There are a number of ways to talk about Islam and the beauty of that belief and the significance it has in being so close to so many other religions in the world with common ground. We can address those messages to moderates who are found here, as spokespeople, through clerics who might be willing to talk to us, through supportive community leaders that we do have around the world. It is not necessarily true that we are always going to be the one carrying the message. And I think that, you know, the fanatics have to have devoted followers and a number of those followers will be vulnerable to hearing another message. I doubt that we are in a position to convert a fanatic per se. But I think there are people surrounding them and people who are extremely open to the kind of message that we can prepare for them.
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Mr. LANTOS. Secretary Boucher.
Mr. BOUCHER. I think the follow-on to that answer is some of the things that were said earlier. First of all, it is getting our voice out there clearly, getting the facts that do sometimes speak for themselves; that we are the people who have been feeding the people of Afghanistan for many years, and that the people of Afghanistan have suffered enormous hardships under the Taliban as well as suffered from drought and winters and other things.
The second is to get ourselves on the outlets, not only that we control, but the ones that people watch and listen to. We are making people available more often to Al-Jazeera, for example, to make sure that we get our point of view on that airwaves. And they have been, I think, taking in recent weeks, more Americans, former Administration officials and things like that, in getting the voice on those airwaves that the people are used to listening to.
And the third is to do what we can to amplify the voices that are out there, the credible voices from people's own communities. The Muftis in Saudi Arabia have spoken against terrorism and these kind of groups. The Organization of the Islamic Conference had a statement right at the beginning, saying that this kind of terrorism was anti-Islam; and they are issuing another statement today that I haven't actually seen yet, but it probably reiterates that point. But to the extent we are able to pick up and amplify and draw people's attention to the voices from their own communities, I think that provides a credible way of getting the message across.
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Chairman HYDE. The gentleman from Iowa, Mr. Leach.
Mr. LEACH. I will be very brief and I want to make several quick observations. One, I think there is real consensus on the Committee and within the government on the knee-depth grade public diplomacy. We had an incident a week or so ago about the question of how independent are our realms of public diplomacy. And I would only stress—and I think Tom Lantos in the citing of Edward R. Murrow was absolutely on target when he talked about integrity—but I would be very cautious of the censorship from the Department's point of view. I think the greatest strength of our public diplomacy is open the news as we can, recognizing that we want to emphasize the kinds of themes that are sensible. But let us be very cautious of censorship. Thank you.
Chairman HYDE. Mr. Berman.
Mr. BERMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. An observation and a question. Secretary Boucher mentioned the fact that we do have friends in the Arab world. But part of the problem for some of our friends in the Arab world is that those friends aren't necessarily a product of internal democratic process. And part of the way that they maintain their support and their control is by allowing, tolerating, promoting, encouraging, the kind of incitement through government-sponsored media, and that makes the case for our public diplomacy so much more compelling. They have their own reasons. In other words, it is even in the areas where we have friends that kids are hearing from a very early age as part of official curriculum, facts about their part of the world and the United States that are not accurate and are not justified, so this becomes particularly important.
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The fact is, the situation is very different right now in many ways than it was even a year ago when the whole Middle East broadcasting initiative first came up and when the Administration decided to support it. As a result of what happened on September 11, the resources are there. Congress appropriated $40 billion. There are many claims on that $40 billion. But in some of these initiatives, we are talking about sums in the millions of dollars, very, very small percentages of the total appropriation that can make huge differences in our public diplomacy and in our message.
Part of the test, I believe there is bipartisan support here and I believe we can find that in the appropriators as well, for the kinds of increases needed. It will be a very small percentage of the total sums that Congress appropriated for this purpose, and part of what I believe the way to take your great testimony and make your vision happen is to go through that interagency process and get a little bit of this money for these initiatives that Mr. Royce and so many others here have been talking about.
The question I have, when the merger came between USIA and the State Department, if you call that a merger—some thought of it as a takeover——
Mr. LANTOS. It is like the merger of Jonah and the whale.
Mr. BERMAN. One of the concerns, Secretary Beers, your vision is a compelling one and it is an exciting one, but your support staff to implement that vision is now dispersed into the regional—the geographic agencies as Assistant Secretaries. So many of the people utilized in the old days to try and implement the public diplomacy message are not now directly under your control. And maybe it is unfair to ask you after 8 days. Frequently these Assistant Secretaries have their own government-to-government relationships, the kinds of things that may want to make them a bit shy about doing some of the things that are being talked about in terms of effective public diplomacy. They are getting hassled by heads of state and foreign ministers in these countries. How can you grab ahold of that support staff, which has been dispersed through the geographical regional assistant secretaryships and regional bureaus, to implement that vision?
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Mrs. BEERS. Well, it is not as simple as the organizational chart at Ogilvy & Mather. It is not simple, but it was easier to be CEO. The matrix organization that I see and understand at State I find to be very collaborative, and I don't think there is any choice but that we all work together in these diverse reporting systems. It forces us to be constantly in dialogue with one another. I can't imagine trying to do this job unless the USIA was in the State Department—because we literally need to be in daily contact with all the traditional diplomacy efforts. When we hear back from the field, as we do daily, we learn a lot more about everything that is going on because we are forced to be in constant collaboration. It is occasionally clumsy, but it is almost always more informed and more productive.
Mr. BERMAN. I would just like to hear Secretary Boucher's diplomatic way of handling this issue.
Mrs. BEERS. He will tell you how it really is.
Mr. BERMAN. No, he won't.
Mr. BOUCHER. I will tell you how it really is. I lived through the merger. Largely I was overseas. And I think what we actually did in the merger was to take a system that worked very well overseas and tried to make it work that way in Washington as well. Overseas, public diplomacy is part of the country team. Every time we discuss an issue, every time we discuss an event, public diplomacy people are there working with it from the start.
All too often in Washington and in the past, we have been in separate bureaucracies and separate buildings, and we were making policy, and then we would sort of hand it off later and say, go out and publicize this; and not always well done.
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I think now we have a much more integrated approach. Each of the Assistant Secretaries does have public diplomacy people involved in their bureau and their planning and their policy decisions and this works quite well. We have the piece of the department for which Under Secretary Beers has direct controls. I am among that, and several other bureaus are as well. And then we have public diplomacy and public affairs officers in the different bureaus that support the Assistant Secretaries and work with us. I depend on those people every day for the information I need for my press briefing. They are often the ones that come up with the more targeted and focused ideas.
So we have a situation, for example, where we have assigned one officer to sort of follow Al-Jazeera; what are they saying about us; what are we doing with them; how are we getting our people out on their air, making sure we are doing everything we can to get our point of view, or people who share our point of view, on their airwaves.
That happens to be a person in the Near East Bureau who really does understand broadcasting in that region. That is just not somebody who works directly for either of us. But it is a collaborative process, and that is where we found the best person. I look at these people more as resources that we can draw and people who give us particular expertise, people who can handle a part of the world either with the answers to questions or with the contacts that we need to make. And I think the system does work very, very well, in addition to having everybody together so we work together.
Chairman HYDE. Mr. Flake of Arizona.
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Mr. FLAKE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Under Secretary Beers, what problems are we having in the Middle East in terms of countries that scramble the radio signal? Do we have a problem with that?
Mrs. BEERS. If you are willing to forward that to the next panel, you may have better information. If not, I will get it back to you.
Mr. FLAKE. We do have problems elsewhere in the world, TV Marti, for example. And I will save that for the next panel. Thank you.
Chairman HYDE. Mr. Delahunt.
Mr. DELAHUNT. Yes. Let me join with others, Madam Secretary, in saying that I really welcome your vision. And I for one, along with what has been implied by other comments, really see this public diplomacy as a critical component, almost a centerpiece at this point in time in history as a—like I said, a critical part of our foreign policy effort.
I have been receiving calls, as I am sure other Members of Congress have, from the Arab American community that oftentimes feels frustrated, that wants to participate somehow given the events of September 11. I was impressed with the appearance on Al-Jazeera by Tony Blair. I would be interested in the impact and any feedback you might have on that.
But again, thinking out of the box, has there been any consideration given to utilizing the human stories and the experience of Arab Americans in this country given, in frequent cases, their ability to understand both cultures, to communicate?
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I also want to say that I really think that the point made by Secretary Boucher in terms of speaking to the young people is so critical. We really have to understand that this has to be a permanent component, well founded in terms of our relationships all over the globe. It just cannot be a crisis-provoked ratcheting up of our efforts; it has to become something that is permanent, is sustained, and understands how to communicate to different regions in the world.
We continually hear about the Arab street. Well, let us get on the street. Let us talk to those people that have these misunderstandings of what our intentions are and really what we are about as a society. It is so ironic to think that this Nation that has—you know, when we think of the United States and private enterprise, we think of Madison Avenue, our ability to communicate and to market and to be candid, but I think we have failed miserably.
So again, welcome, Madam Secretary, and I would be interested to hear your impressions in terms of accessing those modalities and those media outlets that really at this moment in time resonate with the Arab street.
Mrs. BEERS. Well, the point you make about can Arab Americans help is something we are very interested in. The data that we are collecting is so mind-opening. In this country, the Muslim religion is the fastest growing. They have a 30 percent conversion rate, which suggests they are perfectly free and very successful at proselytizing and they have a great deal of spirit and energy and true American enterprise working in all of their communities.
We are considering this in our work with the Ad Council—activating them to be spokespeople with us, considering them in exchanges that we are going to develop, and definitely tapping into their ability to have another person overseas understand the American experience in a very special way. I think we will be able to put them to work.
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I think you said something we care a lot about, which is the battle for the 11-year-old mind. It is important to see how long ago that education and that indoctrination was started. And education, as you pointed out, is very important. It has to become part of our program. At the moment our resources don't allow us to reach much more in communication than the elites or the governments. But it is a definite goal.
Mr. DELAHUNT. With all due respect, we can't afford not to find the resources for that effort or we will allow future Osama bin Ladens to walk across the stage. That is just unacceptable.
Chairman HYDE. The gentleman from California, Mr. Rohrbacher.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Thank you very much. I would like to submit for the record, Mr. Chairman, a letter by Ambassador Peter Thompson. He is a longtime specialist in Afghanistan, analyzing the IBB report and, what I would say, whitewash of the Voice of America's treatment of the Taliban government for the last 5 years.
Chairman HYDE. Without objection, it shall be made a part of the record.
[The information referred to follows:]
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Mr. ROHRABACHER. I understand that there have already been steps taken to deal with this problem. But let me just say that I think it is a bit embarrassing that our government, after having been warned about this biasness in the Pashtun Service toward the Taliban, that it had to take an attack on the United States of America for us to get around to doing something about it. Let me note that Peter Thompson suggests that one third of all the Pashtun Service reports over Voice of America—one third of them—were basically pro-Taliban reports. And this is not acceptable.
Voice of America, as I mentioned earlier, should be always truthful. Being always truthful does not mean that you have to present the other person's opinion, balanced opinion. You don't have Adolf Hitler, Mussolini, and Joe Stalin over here giving their side of the story every time there is a negative story about them in Voice of America.
And so I would hope, Madam Secretary, that you are aware that your job is promoting America's interest in being truthful and not necessarily providing both sides of the story when we are dealing with good and evil.
Mrs. BEERS. Well, thank you. I have no trouble with the charter of the Voice of America. I think it is properly balanced and allows us to work very well together. My understanding of that investigation about a situation of bias was that after some careful independent scrutiny, there was no bias. There was some clumsiness and inadequacy in some of the language.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Well, I would suggest that you take a personal look at it yourself. I can assure you that having been on this Committee and begging and pleading people to pay attention to Afghanistan for the last 5 years, and having been in Afghanistan numerous times, it was bias. You know, you take a look at the number of stories and interviews with Taliban leaders, it is a disgrace. Our government either stands for democracy and freedom, human rights, maybe market economy, or we stand for nothing. And when you have dictatorial and fanatic regimes like the Taliban regime, we should not be providing them airtime as is indicated by the number of minutes on the air being spent interviewing Taliban leaders and giving them access to our airwaves.
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Again, I am not suggesting that we all ever compromise the truth. That is not what I am suggesting, and no American would suggest that. But I would hope that you look at that. In fact, I would suggest, Madam Secretary, whoever told you that, you should start questioning their opinion. And I am serious about it. I have looked over this International Broadcasting Bureau report on this and it is totally unacceptable. This is just another example where bureaucracy covers for bureaucracy which covers for bureaucracy.
I applaud your goal of reaching out to the younger people of the world. That truly is where we need to put our emphasis. And I think we reach them with America's ideals. I think we reach them with the fact that young people want to be free. Young people want to have democratic government. Young people want to be able to control their own destiny and have a better standard of living for their families. We have the greatest message there is to provide. And I would hope that again—some people might call this censorship—well, it isn't censorship. You are not compromising the truth, but you are making sure that something we are paying for as taxpayers is being used to further our ideals, and there is nothing wrong with that.
Chairman HYDE. The gentleman's time has expired.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman HYDE. Thank you, sir. The gentleman from Pennsylvania, Mr. Hoeffel.
Mr. HOEFFEL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think all of us understand the need to get the truth into Afghanistan to make sure that people understand what America is doing, what our coalition is doing, whether it is the food drops, whether it is fighting the Taliban. All of this is very important. And while I am very sympathetic with what Mr. Rohrabacher said, I am not sure it is always wrong to put the other side on the Voice of America. But I think it would always be necessary to counter it, to take issue with whatever misinformation their spokespeople might be offering, because, as he said, we are not for censorship. We want the truth to come out. We want a balance.
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I am sure that the citizens of Afghanistan can smell propaganda or spin very easily, whether it is coming from us or coming from the Taliban. But certainly all they are getting from the Taliban is spin and a lack of balance and certainly not the truth and certainly not any representation of a tolerant society. What troubles me is there seems to be a turf war, I hope I am wrong, between the VOA and Radio Free Europe. I am a supporter of Mr. Royce's bill to restart Radio Free Afghanistan. That seems to have rubbed some people the wrong way. It shouldn't. We should be united on this. We all agree on what we want to accomplish, but there seems to be some backing and filling and disagreement on our side. And if we have that going on, how can we get the truth out to the rest of the world.
In your 8 brief days, what have you picked up? What can we do to deal with this? Everybody is well-intentioned, I don't challenge that. But I would hate to see us use up resources or energy disputing each other about the best way to go forward.
Mrs. BEERS. I think the better answer for the issue, if any, that exists between Voice of America and Radio Free Europe will be better answered by the next panel. My sense of our relationship with the BBG and Voice of America is that we are mightily dependent on one another. I am going to spend this afternoon taking my first seat at the board of the BBG. I am looking forward to that. I know that they, too, are undergoing a transition as they take in new officers who will be appointed by the Administration on President Bush's team.
I would just like to say that I am going to be very sensitive to our ability to create a sum larger than its parts, and that is what I would like to dedicate myself to doing. I can't imagine starting over and inventing any of these resources that we now have so successfully at play. So I intend to be a very constructive participant. And if there is other detail, I think the wisdom you have in calling for the other panel is a good place to ask that.
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Mr. HOEFFEL. It certainly is. But clearly, the State Department is the major player here. And until, I guess, 2 or 3 years ago, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe were directly within the State Department. I think there has got to be—we need a lot of guidance here to make sure that we have unity and that we are speaking with one voice. There is certainly a lot of institutional history with Radio Free Europe that used to do Radio Free Afghanistan, as Mr. Royce pointed out. I hope we can get this thing rolling quickly. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman HYDE. Mr. Ed Royce of California.
Mr. ROYCE. Thank you. I wanted to start, if I could, by thanking you, Secretary Beers, for your testimony and ask you about a particular problem that we are seeing that is growing exponentially, and that is the anti-American sentiment in the Middle Eastern media that we have seen over the last few years. Sometimes it is simply a request by government-sponsored media to boycott U.S. products. But sometimes it runs to anti-American statements that appear in the government-controlled media.
I just wanted to share a few of them with you because they should give us pause. The Egyptian government-sponsored newspaper, Al-Akhabr—this was 2 weeks before the World Trade Center bombing on August 28:
''the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor must be destroyed because of following the idiotic American policy that goes from disgrace to disgrace in the swamp of bias and blind fanaticism. The age of the American collapse has begun.''
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Then we have from the television station out of Qatar, Al-Jazeera, they quote the Mufti of the Palestinian Liberation Army:
''My blessings to those who carried out the USS Cole operation. And it should be known that Cole was the greatest product of the American mind and it was destroyed by two people only. The two prayed to Allah, penetrated this destroyer and sent all of its passengers to hell.''
I am sure they broadcast that in the interest of balance.
My concern is that these repeated broadcasts by government-sponsored radio and television in Saudi Arabia, certainly in Qatar, in Egypt, need to be countered. And I just wanted to say that that is why Congressman Howard Berman and myself and other Members here over the years have tried to organize support for a counterbalancing media program in the Middle East.
I just would like to know of your commitment—not just in concept for the program, but for the resources—to go forward and see that this is done effectively so that people in the Middle East and people in south Asia begin to hear a coherent explanation from us on a full-time basis, or actually from their own people, from people in the Middle East, from people in south Asia, who will explain and put things in context.
Secondly, I wanted to ask you about Radio Free Iraq, how things are going there, who is running that program and if you have any observations on that.
Mrs. BEERS. We see these headlines ourselves every day. The one you just referred to is devastating. And it was, as you pointed out, before the attack. Even before the attack, we too had been trying to work with Al-Jazeera on balance, and we had Secretary Powell on and we have had a number of Administration officials. After the bin Laden tape, we waged a furious response with them and did get them, I think, to move toward balancing by having a number of previous officers of the Administration on, including, as I think someone mentioned, Tony Blair.
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Those are balancing acts. Under the circumstances, I think our job is to constantly weigh in against that powerful network to give us balanced time.
I certainly would consider buying time on Al-Jazeera to run advertising that we are trying to put together with the Ad Council. So we are not done with trying to get equal voices in there. None of us are in a position to deny the opportunity for something like Radio Free Afghanistan. I am just concerned that I must deal now with the resources and the allocations that we have toward Voice of America. It has a very important role in our present diplomacy effort, and I am just anxious that that not be diluted. I think you understand that yourself in your dialogue. In that case, we can only support that effort.
Mr. ROYCE. Let me lastly explain what Mr. Rohrabacher was trying to share with you with respect to the issue of some of the broadcasts over the last 5 years. We hear it more than you do, because we in southern California have a large Afghan population there.
The reason that they have been so concerned—and I will just tell you the word on the street among Afghans in the United States, they call it ''voice of the Taliban,'' or had in the past—and let me tell you why. The feeling has been that the recruitment of the particular Pashtun speakers that were chosen was not balanced. And I understand your internal evaluation.
Let me just read briefly from Peter Thompson's—from the University of Nebraska—from his sort of rebuttal to that as maybe something that you should take into consideration. He says,
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''I would like to differ with the IBB evaluation. In my July message to you, I sought to indicate the importance of ensuring that the Pashtun-speaking evaluators you chose are objective and fair. Unfortunately, in my personal judgment, the Pashtuns who played key roles in the evaluation cannot be considered fair and objective. Here is why. One is the former head of the ultranationalist Afghan Milli party. Afghan Milli members almost always support the Taliban because of the Taliban's Pashtun's nature and its attempt to dominate the Tajiks and other Afghan minorities inside Afghanistan, even though Afghan Milli members may not subscribe to the religious views of the Taliban. This intense Pashtun nationalism translates into Afghan Milli support for the Taliban and opposition to the mostly non-Pashtun opposition to the Taliban.
''Further, there is no doubt that there is a great lack of balance in the VOA Pashtun Service reporting. Interviews with members of the anti-Taliban opposition inside Afghanistan are as rare as hen's teeth,''
he says. No knowledge of Pashtun is not an excuse. Then he goes on to explain——
Chairman HYDE. The gentleman's time has long expired.
Mr. ROYCE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman HYDE. I would suggest a private conference.
Mrs. BEERS. I will look into this.
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Mr. GILMAN. I would submit my opening statement for the record. I am being called to another meeting.
Chairman HYDE. Certainly. Without objection.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Gilman follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE BENJAMIN A. GILMAN, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF NEW YORK
I appreciate the Chairman's holding of this hearing.I welcome Under Secretary Beers and Assistant Secretary Coucher and the others who will be testifying here.
We are obviously doing something wrong to be disliked so intensely by so many people in the Arab world—to have so few people willing to believe us. But it is not only what sort of public information program we have, although we certainly have to do a better job. We simply cannot do it all by ourselves.
Most importantly, we are not making it clear to governments in the Middle East that blaming the United States and Israel for all the ills of the Arab world is inappropriate, to say the least. The atmosphere of anti-Americanism that pervades the region is fostered by most of the governments which cannot seem to find anything good to say about the United States, no matter how much we do to secure their borders or their economies.
If the Arab governments talk about ''Israeli terrorism'' when discussing Israeli policies, they cheapen the language; they are left with nothing to say when real terrorism hits. The Arab governments put themselves into a vicious cycle:
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In an effort to retain power, the leaders focus the attention of their people on America and Israel, rather than to their own needs.
Anyone who complains is labeled a Westernizer or Zionist. This leads to more unrest, and that unrest can only be dealt with by more and harsher rhetoric. And, eventually, that rhetoric will boil over.
When we ask for help, the Arab governments claim that they cannot do so because of public opinion—the very same public opinion they have created.
The fact is that our diplomats do not seem ready to take an ''in your face'' attitude toward anti-Americanism and toward promoting our values, even if it makes them unpopular. A senior American official in an Arab country told a member of our staff, before September 11th, that we ''talk to host country people about things we can agree on.'' That is not good enough, certainly not today. We need to engage the Arab public at all levels about things we and they will be uncomfortable talking about, if we are to get anywhere.
We need to focus more on results. What results exactly do we want, especially in terms of ''outputs?'' Do we want the credibility of our spokesman to increase as measured by polls? How exactly are we going to get from here to there? Who is willing to be held responsible for achieving our goals? I hope we can get clear answers to these questions from today's witnesses and I look forward to hearing from them.
Chairman HYDE. Mr. Faleomavaega.
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Mr. FALEOMAVAEGA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would be the last person to try to raise any questions with you, Madam Secretary, given the fact that you have only been in office 8 days. I think that there is tremendous relevance and concern, as expressed earlier from my good friend from California, Mr. Rohrabacher, in terms of how do you define truth.
We always are wondering what is truth. I have heard it said that truth is knowledge of things as they were, as they are, and as they are to come. I knew when I was an elementary student it was the absolute truth that Columbus discovered America, only to find out later he got lost. I learned in my youth that the truth was Captain Cook discovered all these islands in the South Pacific. And I learned later, how could he possibly discover these islands when people have been living there for thousands of years?
So what is truth? I think this is always a constant problem when we talk about public diplomacy. As you had mentioned earlier, you said dialogue can never be one-sided. I think at the same time, I do express a very serious concern. How do you measure the truth of the opposition or people expressing at least in their opinions, very biased, to say then that should be permissible on our airwaves, paid by the American taxpayers?
Let me give you an example, and maybe it is not a good example, but I think most Americans have heard recently on television Osama bin Laden making the claim that one million children were murdered by the Americans, or something to that effect, and his appeal to the whole Muslim world that this is jihad. These are opinions. And I suppose that you might say that they are intangible, because he claims to be a very religious man.
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How do you sift through the process saying that Osama bin Laden's statement was just as truthful as some of the things we have claimed? The question I want to ask concerns the reports that the Committee has here, and the seriousness of having people who are very biased against America—for what we stand. I think what Mr. Rohrabacher and I agree with is as long as what we say through our airwaves, paid by the American taxpayer, should be the truth.
What disturbs me is that if we allow the same opportunity for the Taliban to express their opinions that are not necessarily truthful, at least in terms of maybe the evidence or facts that are given to the contrary, how do you measure this? What process do you follow to say that this is the truth and we stand by it, especially if you give opposition people like the Taliban, the opportunity to say—what credibility are we going to give them—to say whatever they say publicly to the world. Should that be acceptable at the American taxpayers' expense? I don't know.
Mrs. BEERS. That is a pretty far-reaching philosophical question: How do we communicate the truth? But I will say in the communication disciplines that I have had to practice all my life, that it is possible to communicate to another person, with respect, your beliefs. And since an individual's beliefs are borne of a number of experiences in an interior landscape that they have, there is no one that can deny you the right to your own belief set, your value system.
I think we are on very good ground when we speak about the beliefs and the value system of the United States. We are very fortunate in that our country can actually speak with one voice about such things and we have a common vocabulary. When it comes to understanding what the fanatics' view as their truths, I think all we can do is weigh the consequences and point out the end results of such a belief system.
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Mr. FALEOMAVAEGA. The problem, Madam Secretary, is that in our country, there is always a constant process of reviewing, analyzing, even among the journalists. Even the journalists disagree. Even the journalists are very opinionated. Some conservatives, some liberals, and all of that.
But how do you do it with an extremist like Osama bin Laden or those who are of the very, very strong and extreme view that America is the father of evil; that we must bring this Nation to its knees, destroy them, and his appeal goes out to the world that it is to be done in the name of Allah—excuse the expression. Where does the State Department come into focus to say that maybe we'd better not air this kind of so-called opinion, or how do you say that this is the truth?
Mrs. BEERS. Are you talking about the particular interview that was an issue, Mullah Omar's interview?
Mr. FALEOMAVAEGA. That one, and the highly publicized statement that Osama bin Laden made to the whole world, where our country got to learn a little more about the man's——
Mrs. BEERS. Well, I think it's bin Laden's tape you're referring to, that ran in such a timely fashion. The best way I think we have to counter that is to place our communication efforts toward those who surround him, those we judge to be vulnerable, those we judge to have even a little window of openness. I don't think we intend to make, nor would it be very productive to send communications directly to the fanatics. I think anything and everything we do will be disavowed. I believe it is possible over time to brand this fanatic as a false prophet.
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I think that they have rested themselves, in a perverse way, on the religious beliefs of the Koran, and there are a number of Muslim clerics who are beginning to really speak out about this. If we can help them find voice, we can magnify their capacity to do that. And as time goes by, their willingness I believe will get higher, and through those people I think we can make it clear that this is not grounded in honest religious edicts of Islam.
Chairman HYDE. The gentleman's time has expired. Mr. Chabot.
Mr. CHABOT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just a couple of points. Mr. Rohrabacher had earlier raised the issue about that we shouldn't be so quick to perhaps give the Taliban's side on some of this stuff. I just happened to have the experience of listening to NPR the other evening and they were talking about the Secretary of Defense and generals talking about the first couple of days of the air campaign and emphasizing that we are trying to reduce civilian casualties, of course, and just talking about the campaign. Then they talked about the Taliban side of this and saying that essentially we hadn't hit any military targets, there had been no damage done, no military people killed, but we killed a lot of civilians. And then the NPR's comment was something along the lines like they had no independent verification to verify which side was telling the truth, or something along those lines. That may not be the exact terminology, but I was pretty personally incensed when I heard that.
Now, that is for domestic consumption as opposed to what we are talking about today. But it is just an observation that I will make.
Secondly, I have heard a number of comments from my colleagues, some of which I agree on, and one that concerns me a little bit is just the idea of spending perhaps a significant amount of additional dollars, and I think that is certainly something for us to look at. I really think it is not how much we spend, but how we spend what we do spend.
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This war on terrorism that we are involved in is something that is absolutely deadly serious, and we as a Nation have to take it very seriously. We have to be very careful that we don't look at it as an opportunity for spending considerably more dollars than we ought to and therefore hurting the economy and hurting our overall national security.
My final point would be, I would be interested to hear your comments relative to—one of the problems that I think we face in our public relations campaign is that some of our friends—some of our friendly governments in the Middle East may oftentimes be—well, let me just do this. Let me read a quote here. This was from this past week's Meet the Press. And Tom Friedman was commenting, and here's his quote:
''In the Arab world where the press is controlled by the governments and the governments have adopted a very deliberate strategy and the strategy being''—
and he quotes here,
''you are free. You are free to criticize America. You are free to criticize Israel. You are free to criticize the Jews, as long as you don't criticize us,''
meaning the moderate government itself.
They basically unleash the press as a steam valve for all this resentment that is really about the government, or at least in part about the government, and deflect it on to America and on to Israel. And as a result, you basically have a generation that has grown up with absolutely no room for any other attitude.
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And then Tim Russert's comment was, ''And to avoid any real scrutiny of their lack of democratic government?'' and Friedman's response was, ''Absolutely.''
So the point being, it is free to target the United States and Israel, but to deflect any kind of animosity on that so-called moderate government. Would you comment on that particular observation made by Mr. Friedman?
Mrs. BEERS. We are acutely aware of these things now, and we really weren't in an earlier period. And we have to now be about the business of finding distribution channels that we haven't had available before, and put messages across on them that speak so that the young impressionable people in those communities can hear us. And we just have to get started. They are such isolated worlds.
The point of entry into those worlds is something that we work now through our embassies, through the Internet, our Web sites, through speaker programs and exchanges.
But, you know, a number of those facilities were not available to us in countries close to Afghanistan. Now the problem is to open those up and to get a communication in that is sensitive to the fact that we are talking to an audience that has been largely engrained with one message, from one point of view. We haven't been able to carry the kind of communication power that we do in so many countries through our brands, through our movies, through our marketing, through the dialogue we have with business and all those other natural moments of exchange that take place in so many parts of the world. We start every day with the recognition that we are dealing with people coming from a different point of view.
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Chairman HYDE. Mr. Schiff?
Mr. SCHIFF. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just wanted to reiterate one of the points that was made. We spent a fair amount of time talking about how do we talk to the fanatics. As one of my colleagues likes to say, ''With reasonable people I will reason; with unreasonable people, there is no opportunity to reason.''
And I don't think we should even try. There is no reasoning at the point of a gun. The people we need to reach are those who don't know anything different. They have been raised and educated with a certain point of view, who aren't necessarily closed to other things, but have never had any reason to question what they have been taught, and in particular those that are too young to have even been indoctrinated. Those are the groups that we need to target.
I think probably the least effective spokespeople are Americans of non-Muslim origin. And while there is probably a marginal value to having American spokespeople on Al-Jazeera, it is probably only marginal, targeting those two critical populations.
American Muslims, I think, would be more effective spokespeople. The most effective spokespeople are probably Muslims from around the world—Muslim leaders from around the world. And the challenge—and I know you tried to address it, but I still can't get my arms around how we are going to accomplish this, and I don't envy the task—how do you reach these young children that are taught in schools that you cannot really penetrate?
This has been a problem in Israel in trying to reach the Palestinians who have been educated in schools where Israel is not on the map in their textbooks. This is a microcosm, I think, of the larger problem. How do we reach these young people? And how do we also, if the most effective spokespeople are Muslim leaders from around the world and some of the leaders of these moderate governments, how do we rely on the leaders of nondemocratic regimes to be extolling the merits of democracy? That is a difficult dilemma for us.
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Some of the criticism that we have received is that we have a double standard on democracy. We support it at home. But when they are friendly to us around the world, we support them even if they are not democratic. How do we use those nondemocratic regimes to help make the case for democracy or express our point of view?
Mrs. BEERS. I think that we all recognize that, over time, we have to reach the young people of what have been very isolated governments. I mean, this is partly a war of small victories at a time. For example, we put together a fund to save the music of Afghanistan. This was out of ECA. I consider this very typical of the face of America, to care so much about a country's music that we will preserve it for them when the Taliban had vetoed it and they were not allowed to hear it.
Now we want to get the music into all the many refugee camps so that we will be offering more than food. Part of what I hope we can offer, as we begin to work on these programs, is also a kind of education, because there we have an opportunity to reach people in difficult conditions. It is a beginning.
The second thing is how do we reach these somewhat tentative nondemocratic leaders. And I think that even though some of them are so-called nondemocratic, they have had exchanges and dialogues with the United States, and we have ways of knowing them and being in contact with them. We are going to have to be extremely skillful in helping them find the words they can use as opposed to just assuming they are going to take the kind of position that we would like them to take.
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We see this happening. When our embassies and our Ambassadors sit down with some of these people, we talk about what would be appropriate for them to say and what we can help them identify. We give them a lot of information that doesn't do them any harm in their own marketplace. That is part of what we are doing.
Mr. BOUCHER. I think the only thing I would add is that we know that even nondemocratic governments are sensitive to public opinion to some extent, and sometimes that leads to what Congressman Berman and Congressman Chabot were referring to—the say what you want about America, leave us alone kind of phenomenon.
Our Ambassadors, embassies, and leadership do call other governments on those kinds of things where they have influence and it is not being exercised. We will raise it with foreign leaders, our embassies and Ambassadors in Arab countries, in the Gulf, and frequently make this point to other governments that if they are g