New York City, May 18, 2005

The seminar was organized under the auspices of the the Security and
Peace
Institute (SPI) in order to bring before the New York audience the
“Madrid
Agenda”; the conclusions of the “International Summit on Democracy,
Terrorism and Security”, as per conclusions of the Club of Madrid
meetings
of May 8-11, 2005. For further information about the meetings in
Madrid of
the Club of Madrid, please see SustainabiliTank.info ARCHIVE -
articles of May 4, 2005 and May 11, 2005.

SPI, launched this year and led by Executive Director Morton H.
Halperin
(who worked on National Security issues in the Administrations of
Presidents
Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton), is a joint initiative of the Center for
American Progress and the Century Foundation. Its advisory Board will
be
headed by the former Senator from Colorado and Presidential candidate
Gary
Hart, and former Secretary of State, Professor Madeleine Albright -
www.securitypeace.org

The Washington DC based Center for American Progress is a
liberal/progresive
think tank, under the leadership of John Podesta, who worked for
President
Clinton, deals with questions of National Security, Domestic Policy and
Economic Policy.

The New York and Washington based Century Foundation, was started by
Edward
A. Filene in 1919 to conduct public policy research. Now, under the
leadership of Richard C. Leone, it commissions various studies and
operates
eight websites. www.tcf.org

SPI’s intention is to organize roundtables on issues in foreign policy,
including the implementation of the MDGs and, what is most interesting
for
us - on meeting the challenges of climate change.

SPI and the Open Society Institute (OSI) have just released a volume
titled
- “RESTORING AMERICAN LEADERSHIP - 13 Cooperative Steps to Advance
Global
Progress”. Step #10 is - “Meet the Challenge of Climate Change with
U.S.-EU
Cooperation”. Written by Philip Clapp, President, National
Environmental
Trust, it calls on the US to join negotiations to craft a successor
agreement to the Kyoto Protocol, and to support a 2007 goal for
completing a
new global warming treaty. Domestically, “the president should support
the
McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act (S.139), and call on Congress
to
pass it by the end of 2005″.

OSI was founded by Mr. George Soros who writes: “I applaud the Club of
Madrid for calling in the Madrid Agenda for a renewed effort to promote
and
strengthen democratic institutions including through the “Community of
Democracies” process. Civil society has a critical role to play in
infusing
that process with content and action. We must not let the great energy
mobilized and generated by this conference evaporate”. Soros backed
the
Santiago, Chile, meeting of the Community of Democracies, and is intent
in
working help create a “Democracy Caucus” at the UN - “in its linked
mission
to strengthen the UN’s ability to promote greater respect for human
rights
and the principles of an open society”. The Community of Democracies
was
started with the Warsaw Declaration. South Korea took over from Poland,
and
now it is the turn of Chile that held the April 28-30, 2005 meeting in
Santiago. Soros likens the possible process on democracy to the one
that
was started in 1975 by the Helsinki Declaration on the subject of human
rights. Eventually, because of the actions of Andrei Sakhrov, and
others, it
became the basis of a significant movement on human rights. He wants
to see
the same for the Warsaw Declaration and Democracy.

Also, before moving to the meeting itself, let me remark that
activities in
New York, reflecting back to the March days in Madrid, actually started
when
the first trans-Atlantic swallow arrived a week earlier, when Loretta
Napoleoni, on May 10, 2005, at the Barnes & Noble store in Chelsea,
presented her new edition of “Modern Jihad” which SustainabiliTank.info
reviewed on March 5, 2005 (please see LINK). The new version of the
book,
in paperback, is titled: “TERROR INCORPORATED: Tracing the Dollars
Behind
the Terror Networks”. Please link to the new SustainabiliTank.info
book
review. These books give us the introduction to how terror is
made
possible, because we, ourselves, provide the needed funds because of
our
lack of resistance to the addiction to energy from petroleum.

With above in the foreground, we can now proceed to the May 18, 2005
New
York seminar, organized by SPI, with the Club of Madrid, under the
title:

“DEMOCRACIES CONFRONTING TERRORISM”.

Morton Halperin opened by stressing that the idea is to fight terrorism
consistent with American Values.

Kim Campbell said that the CofM was founded in 2001 by people “that
have
been there and were doing that” - former Heads of State etc. - who have
no
other agenda then to reflect on their experiences as democratically
elected
government people, and are ready now to share these experiences.
Further
she said something very valuable - policy makers have to find consensus
were
it exists - they do not try really to invent things - they look at the
reality and try to make it work.

Peter Neuman, Research Fellow at King’s College in London, was the
academic
in charge of the content of the Madrid meeting. He told us that there
were
hundreds of papers written by 250 experts from 52 countries. There
were
working groups, and for months these papers were going back and forth
in a
process of consultation in an effort to find consensus. They also
presented
issues on which no agreements could be reached.

Louise Richardson, Executive Dean, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced
Studies,
said that they found that terrorism was just a tactic and there is not
just
one subject that can be called terrorism. It is unrealistic to try to
eliminate terrorism but we can contain it. We must distinguish between
mass
movements and actions by individuals. There is no cause that justifies
killing of civilians. It is not poverty driven. We need a
multilateral,
multifaceted, approach to fight terrorism and the experts agreed that
the UN
is a place to deal with this.

Neuman said that in the next few months there will be a booklet for
each one
of the 16 working groups. The material will appear on
www.ClubofMadrid.org
Terrorist networks cross borders, so in order to combat them we must
apply
internationalism; nevertheless, in information sharing, to be
realistic,
this will be done bilaterally and then it is possible to work bottom-up
.
Regional institutions like the EU have networks that can be efficient.
At a global level we have institutions like the UN that might be useful
like
in the NPT and international security, but the shared understanding of
what
the phenomenon of terrorism constitutes is difficult.

The first panel was on -
INERNATIONAL COOPERATION AGAINST TERRORISM: STEPS FORWARD.

the participants were Kim Campbell as moderator.
Morton Halperin, Amb. Robert L. Hutchins, a former Chairman of the US
National Intelligence Council, Amb. Javier Ruperez from Spain who is
now
Counter-terrorism director at the UN, and Amb. Bruno Stagno from Costa
Rica
who is the President of the Assembly of States Parties to the Rome
Statute
of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and engaged in lobbying for
the
creation of a UN High Commissioner for Terrorism, as a means to address
the
need for a comprehensive and collective strategy to combat terrorism.
He is an academic, diplomat and was an elected official running as an
independent.

It became clear that the existence of a death penalty in the legal
system
becomes an impediment to international, and sometimes even national,
fight
against manifestations of terrorism - this because it causes restraints
to
the extradition of suspects - or even convicted criminals. The
recommendation for the sake of enabling the legal process, is thus to
eliminate the death penalty. The case was also made that dealing with
terrorism, there is indeed no good reason to apply the death penalty.

There seemed to be an agreement that we should stop wasting our time
trying
to define terrorism beyond saying that all acts of violence against
civilians are forbidden. There is a need to back the process of the
“Community of Democracies”, and a body of States that agree to the
international fight against terrorism can be created outside the UN.
Stagno thinks that “persons” is more inclusive then “civilians”, he
wants
also property damage and damage to the environment included. He
presented
the two proposals now before the General Assembly - the so called draft
comprehensive declaration that is really not comprehensive at all and
the
proposal of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) that its
main
attributes are not what it includes but rather by what they try to
exclude.

In the Q&A period, the present Spanish Ambassador to the UN pointed out
that
the total of the 13 already agreed upon conventions on terrorism
surpasses
what this comprehensive draft has. As one example, it does not contain
hostage- taking. Further comments dealt with the question what do you
do
with oppressive governments when some actions may be justified? Other
comments questioned the time spent fighting for the definition. Is the
priority not cooperation for action? Spain - France - Italy already
have an
agreement on information sharing by the law enforcement arms of these
countries. Do we chose to act together also across the Atlantic?
Halprin added that information acquired secretly is ignored because
largely
the agency does not understand what it got. He questions thus the
concept of
secrecy.

The second panel was on -

PRESERVING HUMAN RIGHTS WHILE FIGHTING TERRORISM

The panel Moderator was Richard Leone, and the members included:
Richard Ben-Veniste from the 9/11 Commission, Mickey Edwards, former US
Congressman from Oklahoma, and now with the “Constitution Project”.
Also, Jenny Martinez, Professor at Stanford Law and Co-Lead Councel for
the
defense in the case of Jose Padilla, and Cherif Bassiouni, with many
years
involvement at the UN and Professor of Law at De Paul University.

Ben-Veniste paraphrased Benjamin Franklin - “those that are ready to
give up
essential liberty, to obtain little safety, deserve no liberty and no
safety”.

Mickey Edwards told the audience that he is a proud conservative
republican
and it became clear what he meant when he said that he feels that the
government intrudes on his life when he goes to renew his driver’s
license.
He also said civil liberties that are enshrined in the Constitution are
harmed by enlarging of government - the creation of watch-lists, ID
cards.
I hope his views are those of a tinny minority and not of the majority
of
Republicans. He also mentioned, and this is clearly correct, that when
he
gave his oath in his 16 years in Congress, the oath was to the
Constitution
and not to the President - from here - his conclusion - the Congress is
thus
the principal defender of our liberties - is it also the guarantor of
our
security ?

Jenny Martinez reported basically about Padilla’s case and Cherif
Bassiouni
delved into the dichotomy between peace and justice in post-conflict
attempt
at justice. He spoke from his experience in Yugoslavia and
Afghanistan.
He described how in Afghanistan there are three mercenary contracted
forces,
on the pay of the US, but not under the rules of the US government, and
outside the jurisdiction of the Afghanistan government. These are the
anti -
terrorism and anti-narcotic forces. There is the feeling of
bounty-hunting.
Besides there are the Special Forces and the CIA which are also not
fully
accountable. There are 14 bases kept close, where people from
Guantanamo
are sent, eventually they reach other two secret bases that are
mentioned in
the press. Bassiouni feels that more could have been achieved with the
involvement of the Afghan government and a fully built up
Afghan law structure - with libraries and law schools. He mentioned
his
effort for the Iraqi Law Library in Baghdad. Ted Sorensen, the
Kennedy
Administration official and presently with Paul Weiss law firm in New
York,
asked about the “rendition” from the US. Bassiouni, in his answer
spoke of
the long standing practice of bringing someone to the Mexican border
and
simply make him cross over to be taken into custody, he then said that
sometimes, like in the Eichman case, when extradition could not be
obtained
in order to bring him to justice, by any means, then it was decided to
kidnap him, this Bassiouni accepted. What he does not accept is the
secret
torture that does not produce valuable information, but only a lot of
anger
on the other side. This he called plain stupid.

The lunch treats, chaired by Richard Leone, included a presentation by
George Soros who expressed his interest in the Club of Madrid and the
SPI
projects. Then Gary Hart made his presentation that included one area
that
left me speechless. I tried nevertheless to ask a question, but did
not get
called to do so.

The problem with the Gary Hart presentation was that among the many
topics
he touched upon, seemingly his main objective was to blame the US
Administration for going it alone in order to guarantee the supply of
oil to
the US and to other countries in the name of the world economy. Mr.
Hart
made twice lip-service remarks while talking about multilateralism to
the
problem of climate change, but in all of this he did not realize that
his
intelligent suggestion could have been - let us start using less, not
more,
energy and let us bring in new sources of energy, from such sources
like the
sun , the wind, the sea waves, geothermal etc. (as one reference
please
link to SustainabiliTank.info on Ceara, Brazil May 8, 2005) Instead,
he
advocated the “internationalization” of the war for securing the
sources of
oil in the Persian Gulf zone. He was worried about the US taxpayer
being
called to pay for, and the US citizens being called to fight in these
wars.
He said there were already two wars, the second without end in sight,
wars
three and four to follow. Mr. Hart then said he wants the US, in a
multilateral way, to get others to join in so they will participate in
all
those miseries that are falling on us. Seriously, I am not making this
up,
he actually did make this sort of presentation. Later, Mr. David Unger
from
the New York Times told me that in Madrid Mr. Hart developed this
subject
much better, and introduced also the need for an energy policy, but I
can
not report on what I did not hear, only on what I heard. I hope that
this
lunch presentation will be regarded as a mishap, and the Club of
Madrid, as
well as SPI, will take a much more reasoned and informed look at the
subject
of the place of Middle East oil in the mapping and execution of
terrorism.
An obligatory reading of Loretta Napoleoni’s book is a good start for
those
that may not have read on the subject.