successful negotiation that related to the release of Theo Padnos, who was held by Moussa and Siria, who's a journalist and an author. And in between Arete and Theo is Chris Mellon, who's a researcher here who, thanks to the Jim Foley Foundation and Hostage US, led the report which looked at the question of does a no concession policy, how helpful is that or not, Diane Foley, who of course runs the Jim Foley Foundation and finally Rachel Briggs of Hostage US. So everybody's going to talk for, you know, make some opening remarks of up to five minutes and then we'll open up to a conversation between all of us. So shall I start with you? I came to this work in a very unusual way. I was then the Chief of Staff to David Bradley, who is the owner of a media company that publishes the Atlantic magazine. And I also was the general counsel. And I literally was just in my office one day when David popped by and said, hey, could you come join me to help me with a small project. And I came to his office and he then told me the story of how he had worked to find a freelancer of ours that had gone missing in Libya two years earlier and how through that effort he had gotten to know the family of a wonderful young journalist named Jim Foley and how Jim was missing in Syria and believed at the time to have been held with the regime. And he asked me if I might be willing to help him with a little bit of research to try to figure out who might know someone who might know someone in the regime who might be able to influence Jim's release. And so I said, sure, that doesn't sound too difficult, just a little bit of research. Well, of course, it turned out that Jim wasn't held with the regime and over the course of the many months that followed we did a lot more than research and we got to know the wonderful Foley family and through them the families of a number of other Americans who were held in Syria and sort of went with them on their journey as they tried to find their children and in the end we got to know Theo who came home and we mourned with the families of the Americans that were killed by ISIS in 2014. So that's my involvement but did not come to this through any sort of normal channel. Do you want to come back to me because I have some comments basically about our research. I thought, let's see, yes, I want to take a quick look at where we are now morally speaking with our American hostage policy. But before I say what I have to say, I just I want you to know that I mean to speak now about our hostage policy as regards people kidnapped by Islamic groups in the Middle East. I realize that the taking of hostages is a wider phenomenon but I don't really see what purpose is served by having a universal policy that fits the entire globe because each region is so different and my view it makes sense to have a Middle East specific set of guidelines. So this is what I intend to speak about now. Where we are with our policy is that my microphone is going up. I should sit up like my mom does. Where we are with our policy is that long ago some very dummies in the U.S. government I assume somewhere here in Washington determined that Americans will be endangered less if we make no concessions to hostage takers.  Because of this dumbness we have lost four beautiful promising courageous young people who represent the best in us. Just for the record just so everybody knows Americans are in danger in the Middle East not because we have monetary value which we do and everybody there knows that and not even because there are a few wicked terrorists running around over there which there are but because our government keeps bombing Muslim countries over and over their civilians over there are unhappy about the situation each person of course over there is unhappy in his own way and some people are very little bothered by our bombing but to speak in general terms for a moment we here are in danger when we go over there because the guy who runs the internet cafe or the guy who drives a taxi or shares a cup of tea with you at a tea truck in the street feels he has issues with the drones and the fighter bombers and the tomahawks and the rendition programs and the penal colonies that our government organizes. So he feels that you if you go over there and have tea in the street with them might have a connection to these things that are circulating in the sky. So he feels it's appropriate to investigate this is what happened to me. I think it's what happened to many other people. So now things over there have developed to the point at which this civilian population over there believes in a thousand further horrible crimes against Muslim civilians that our government is committing. Many of these things are like more nightmares than actual facts. It doesn't matter. So why not investigate? The moment you hear this word investigate in Syria it's too late. They've got you and you're in trouble. So in my prisons for their relatively low ranking fighters I saw from day to day I was a high value prisoner. Everybody I saw for two years with Jebaton is a very high value prisoner not because of the monetary value but because these guys don't want to be rich. They want to fight the jihad. I had high value because revenge is important to them. I had high value because setting things right is important to them and they felt they could do that basically by abusing me. They often told me they could not revenge themselves against the entirety of the American government but when they found a representative of the American government as they sometimes tried to believe me to be they could not all together keep themselves from expressing their feelings. Their wish for me to be a walking talking embodiment, the thing they hate is very important and relevant to this discussion. They require a plausible representative of the thing that is droning Muslims across the Middle East but they're very flexible and liberal people when it comes to plausibility and this is the nature of the threat that we face. They can look at you and they don't have to ask too many questions to know that you work for the CIA. So really anyone with the remotest connection to America and there are people with no connection to America can serve this purpose. When they find such a being and anyone in this room with the satisfied requirements they are overjoyed as they were when they got me. Not because they see dollar signs, rather because they feel bombed and invaded. They feel their sacred things are under assault. Now looking back it seems to me that now that I understand the context it's feeling of being under assault and invasion which comes from having drones in the air and having airplanes in the air and being bombed so frequently. Looking back understanding this context better I think that many of those Jebaton Nusrah fighters went easy on me and for this I thank them. Thank you Jebaton Nusrah. By the way you can thank them yourselves because they're on Twitter all day. They really will not... they love Twitter. Twitter is their favorite thing. Anyway, alright the last thing I want to say is that if we really wanted to make things better we would develop a sensible policy in the Middle East which would recognize that we put our own citizens in danger when we attack those countries. And we better have a really good reason and be much... and have more confidence in the technology to kill the people we need to kill. And even if we do kill those people they have so many more people to take their places of the guys that we kill. I really don't see what purpose is served by dropping the bombs and sending the drones and the rendition programs and hopefully we stopped the torture. I don't see what purpose is served because it's going to come back to us as my feelings. Appreciate that. I want to thank the New America Foundation and Hostage US in a big way for this opportunity. I really feel as an American that it is very important that we look at our American hostage policy to make sure it truly protects us. During Jim's captivity I was repeatedly told this policy keeps us safe. But after Jim was held for two years and then brutally murdered I really began to have some doubts and yet realized that it may just be our individual case and that we really need research to see what the facts are. So I'm very grateful to the New America Foundation and Hostage US for undertaking this research. But what concerns me about the results are concerning because what it seems to find is that American and British citizens are being kidnapped just as often as those of our Western allies and the outcomes for us and the British are awful. I mean they're being killed in many cases. So that is very concerning to me. Why are our allies more successful in bringing their citizens home? I feel that our current hostage policy really tied the hands of the FBI and State Department during Jim's captivity. They weren't allowed to directly engage with the terrorists. The group-labeled terrorists which left us alone as a family to figure out how to negotiate Jim's release. The threat of prosecution of anyone assisting us to help raise a ransom prohibits most families from even being able to attempt it. We didn't want any of our generous friends to be prosecuted for helping get Jim home. And I really feel for the average American family, unless you're unbelievably wealthy that would be the case. It certainly prevented us. I'm concerned that the researching about kidnapping of our citizens is very difficult because international corporations that travel and work worldwide, security firms and governments are very reluctant to share their data. I feel this is understandable because of harm, concerns about harm for hostages and the success of quiet negotiation. But it truly constrains research because it doesn't give us real numbers to ensure that our policy is the best. This research we have today is the best we could do. We could glean from cases that are public and from people willing to share data, but we realize that it may be incomplete. And that's concerning too because we don't want to extrapolate that it's not protecting Americans, in fact it is, but it's just that what this data shows is that it is not. So I guess one of the things is I call on all of us to look for ways to confidentially share such data so that we can in fact ensure that our policy works, that it really protects Americans when they're working or traveling internationally. And let us never forget this day that Austin Tice, Bob Levinson, Caitlin Coleman, Paul Larson and hundreds of nameless Americans are held hostage, hoping to be freed. Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity. I just wanted to start with three basic comments about the challenge relating to hostage policy right now. The first is a very basic truth which is that to evaluate anything you need evidence, you don't evaluate based on a gut instinct or a hunch, you can only evaluate based on evidence. And this is why the data here is completely non-negotiable. We need data to be able to say categorically whether one approach is more effective than a second, a third or a fourth approach. And as Diane so eloquently said, the challenge we have here in the hostage space is not just that this is data which at a certain point in time needs to be kept secret. I would argue that it doesn't need to be kept secret after the event. I think there's a national security imperative for that. But necessarily there is an element of secrecy that is required at some point in that data process. But also because this is data that is held by multiple actors, there are different types of hostage cases. As Theo said, there are political and terrorist cases where the data will almost exclusively sit within government. There are criminal and financially motivated cases where that data will be sitting with individual families. It sits with private sector crisis response companies. And there is no sharing of that data. There is no pooling of that data. And I would entirely agree with Diane that it is absolutely vital that we find some way to bring together the data, to share the data, to clean up the data and to create the resource that can then allow for proper, smart analysis on an evidence-based way of the relative merits of the process of different policies in different circumstances. And it's not good enough to say, as long as that is known by somebody in a secret place, as long as they know what they're doing, it's all okay. Because like all policy, we make improvements through scrutiny. And we make improvements by opening things up and having people look at it from a fresh perspective. And so the need to constantly reassess, are we still doing the right thing? Does the thing we've been doing for 20 years still work? Do we need to adapt it? Is it still okay? You can only do that when it's open to scrutiny, which is why I think things like the New America Foundation research initiative are really important. The second point I wanted to make, though, is that it's also vitally important that families have access to this knowledge and this expertise. Because families are necessarily and should be centrally involved in that operational response. Of the many, many, many hundreds of families that I've worked with over 15 years in this space, supporting them, providing access to information and the full range of our services. You know, I know for a fact that one of the first questions that they tend to be asked is would you authorize a military raid, for example? How on earth do you answer that question? I mean, put aside for one moment the fact that your loved one's life is at stake, how do you start to figure out how do I answer that question? Now, if I was in that position, I'd want to know, okay, so in what proportion of cases is a military raid used? What proportion of those cases is it successful or not successful? I would want the data so that I could make that decision for my loved one whose life may depend on it from a position of information and knowledge as opposed to kind of guesswork, really. So it's really important that families get access to that information and it's really important that they are a central part of that strategy, making choices along the way, coming alongside government as partners. And in that view that I really do have to pay enormous credit to the substantial distance that the U.S. government has moved over the last two years. I personally have been supporting U.S. families over a number of years and I can tell you the response that we see from government today is a world away from the response that I saw on occasions previously. So credit where credit is due, absolutely. But I think families always, we will still always be asking for more for families going through this dreadful, dreadful, horrific experience. And then the third and final point I wanted to make just as a matter of introduction, as we're looking at the issue of hostage policy, of course our minds always go to the most critical and the most important question, which is how do we get that person home safely to their family as quickly as possible? Of course that's where our focus always goes first. But let us not forget that this is a human crime and actually it's the humanness of this crime which makes it so effective. Taking a loved one away from their family creates a set of pressures, unlike any others in policy terms. And this is a deeply human crime and it has an impact on the human beings who are affected by it, not just those poor individuals who find themselves incarcerated with bad people in many different parts of the world but also their families at home who need the kind of support that we provide to get them through it and then also that person coming home so that when they get home they can do what one of our board members, Jessica Buchanan, talks about, which is surviving survival. Because that's just when another set of challenges arises. So I think it's always really important when thinking about hostage policy to think about the totality of it and that human care dimension which really is so fundamental to this particular crime. I think there's some really good points raised there particularly some caveats about the data and about the research we've been able to do and I want to emphasize again that what we really want is to have a more complete data set and also not to be relying on open source data. We have great confidence in the analysis that we did do on the basis of the information that we had but this is an issue where virtually every party is actively trying to obfuscate the truth and that is a big problem. Other people have reached similar conclusions to ours notably West Point and Rand but I don't think that anyone has definitively proven any of the conclusions that I'm about to share in sort of a quick digest from our research. So without further ado or for the caveats I'm just going to share that with you. I hope that many of you have read the paper for those of you who have not these in short are conclusions. I hope this will be a valuable context for the following discussion on policy. So our research produced two primary conclusions the first being the hostages. Can you tell us what the sample size was? A little bit of detail about that so people understand what it is. We originally got this data from Hostage US it was compiled from a number of other databases that also compile from open sources so the Global Terrorism Database at the University of Maryland's start program the Aid Worker Security Database and the Combatting Terrorism Center Database at West Point as well as independent work by researchers at Hostage US going back and looking through newspaper reports to add to it. The end result was that once we had cut it down to cases where the hostage takers were designated for a terrorist organization from a militant organization or a Somali pirate group we had about just under 1200 cases so that was our sample size. What was the kind of point? Since 9-11 and from the west you can see our report to check up on who we included in the west for a variety of reasons we cut out certain members of the OECD but we had hostages from 32 different countries in that sample and we were interested in looking at a couple of things we were interested in looking at outcomes and trying to connect outcomes to policy and we were interested in looking at trends over time looking at particularly whether ransom payments encouraged future kidnappings a variety of other things which I'll give some attention to now but our first conclusion was that hostages from countries that do not make concessions which for our purposes will primarily be ransoms those at least are among the two types of concessions that you are likely to find in open source material the other being prisoner exchange people from those countries experience far worse outcomes than hostages from countries that do make concessions and pay ransoms for our purposes we're talking primarily about the United States and the United Kingdom who had large sample sizes big enough for us to compare to some of the European countries that do pay ransoms so our analysis in terms of differentiating between different policy groups largely combined United States and the United Kingdom versus continental Europe or the EU notably Germany, France, Italy, Spain who had the largest samples from that group and the second major conclusion is we found no evidence that citizens in countries that don't make concessions were protected by that policy in other words we didn't see a relationship between making concessions and your citizens being targeted or kidnapped in disproportionate numbers but we did see that once people had been abducted there was a very clear difference in terms of outcomes the US and the UK we had 90 hostages in total who were deliberately killed by their captors who were murdered 41 of them were American and 15 were British 45 and 15% respectively of the entire sample so 60% of the majority from those two countries alone and we concluded further that the no concessions policy didn't effectively deter hostage takers from kidnapping American British citizens and we think that's largely due to the fact that it's inherently somewhat disorganized activity and hostage takers tend to be opportunistic they're limited by the people who are present in the region in which they can operate they're also limited by security concerns a diplomat is hard to get your hands on an aid worker much easier a freelance journalist much easier so in fact they have kind of a limited number of people from whom to choose and we don't deny that there are obvious cases where hostage takers do want to take a hostage of a certain nationality but what we see is a disconnect between some individual examples where that may be the case and the data in the aggregate so there are a number of sort of confounding factors along the way that they'll prevent that that desire from manifesting in the data at large in other words if hostage takers could choose at will people of any nationality I have no doubt that they would discriminate on that basis but for practical reasons they're not able to do that often enough, successfully enough that we see any real correlation in our data and the other major policy consideration here that remains is that hostage taking does play an enormous role in financing terrorist groups around the world and we also see in cases like the rise of Al Qaeda in North Africa out of essentially a criminal trafficking group with some jihadist ties that ransom payments can create a pervasive kidnapping risk in an area that applies to any Westerners who may be present which brings us to sort of the core policy challenge that we see for the US which is you have to craft a national policy to address a fundamentally international problem in other words no concessions policy aims to control variables that are not really ours alone to control especially if concessions made by the Western countries increase the risk of kidnapping for Americans abroad as well as the citizens of the countries who are paying ransoms then there's really no unilateral policy that's going to address that risk in the United States and we have persuaded a lot of our allies and the G8 and the EU to commit publicly to not making concessions and not making ransom payments but the fact is that they haven't abided by those agreements they continue to pay and we're unlikely to persuade them to stop partly because they don't have the military resources to recover their hostages by other means in those cases and also because they have a different set of political pressures that make it harder for them to leave hostages in the hands of the kidnappers or to leave them to die compared to the United States there's just a different level of public pressure on governments so the combined result of these two policies we feel over that period from 2001 to the present is that lots of Americans and Brits have been killed while at the same time these hostage-taking groups have been able to break in hundreds of millions of dollars al-Qaeda in particular, ISIS as well and that doesn't seem to us to be, you know, sustainable it seems like the US is getting really the raw end of that deal and it's questionable whether that has succeeded in terms of protecting Americans or British citizens or in terms of denying a lot of money to these groups who are being paid handsomely by other governments particularly when there are alternative outlets for value for an American or British hostage which may take the form of a propaganda video to aid in recruiting or put pressure on the foreign government it may also include using the death of a hostage to influence the sum that they're going to get for a European who's going to be ransomed and I do want to stop and acknowledge the 2015 policy reforms that the Obama administration carried out which, you know, like Rachel said I think are a really significant step in the right direction not only because they've modified and slightly loosened the no concessions policy by removing the threat of prosecution from certain private parties that pay to designated foreign terrorist organizations but also for creating the hostage recovery fusion cell to improve relations with the families of hostages to improve response times improve negotiations which are also really important variables in determining outcomes, you know, beyond just the policy around concessions and so the last thing I would emphasize is that I think where this leaves us is we're trying to address the international hostage taking as essentially an economic problem to look at it, I would like to see us have the data to look at it as a market so we can apply price controls so we can prevent certain European governments from inflating ransom prices by overpaying and so that various Western governments are not competing amongst themselves without sharing information to recover their own hostages and sort of bidding against one another there's various really bad dynamics to this that don't result in a good outcome for anyone and yeah, so my hope is that if parties can be persuaded this is in their mutual interest if the United States can take a more understanding and flexible tone with its allies I hope that will be a possibility One great question which Rachel raised which I think you know the answer to Chris which is what is the outcome for hostages who are rescue where military rescue takes place if you were to say to answer Rachel's question advising a family what does the data say about the likelihood that things are going to go right or wrong I'm really glad you asked that question in particular because we have an answer and it's an answer that's been arrived at by a number of other groups doing the same calculations of open source information which is that it's fatal to the hostage about 20% of the time but we also have some sort of anomalous stuff in our data that comes from the same sources particularly relating to Germany and their success with rescues so they have the highest percentage of all hostages rescued of any country in our database it's about 20% of all of their hostages I think 133 to say 20% of 133 not 133 rescues and a lot of them personally none is reported as having been conducted by German special forces or police hostage rescue units they're always reported as having been conducted by the local special forces of Chad or Nigeria wherever the hostage may be held and there are no fatalities amongst that group now that is suspicious to me for obvious reasons that's a flaw with open source data collection where if we had the true information we might find that the actual rate of fatality for rescues is higher than 20% maybe it's 30% we don't know so that's not I couldn't give someone an answer with any confidence If I'm a family member and I know there's one in five chance that my family member is going to be killed in a rescue that's a pretty useful piece of information because I think most people would presume based on watching a lot of movies that this is going to go flawlessly and that that's not an issue and a lot of those unsuccessful ones are also with the best special forces in the world I mean that's not amateur operations so Rachel used an interesting term surviving surviving survival Sophia how have you managed that? let's see I didn't they almost killed me but mentally they didn't physically they damaged me but mentally they didn't damage me I understood what they're trying to do mentally I mean during the course of this whole thing they wanted me to have certain beliefs and to believe things about them which I did for instance that they are an inscrutable indomitable power that can be very very cruel and wicked and terrifying and they wanted me to believe that I did really in the depths of my soul I did but now I know that they're not I know that they are scruutable and now I know that they're not indomitable so as soon as I was out I was like cured and happy the release was the cure for the disease I did not need to see any shrink I did see a shrink but I was telling them these stories and I'm like shrink you should be paying me so I didn't feel that they were damaged me psychologically like they themselves are damaged psychologically like you know maybe we should you can't fix them psychologically no I didn't feel that I was really I survived physically and for that I'm very grateful I had nothing to do with me something more to do with that then I didn't have anything to do with the physical survival just because they didn't kill me however psychologically they didn't really hurt me so I didn't really feel wounded so I didn't have anything to survive I would say to the extent that you can because obviously some of this is not public explain what was the Atlantic's role in getting Theo out I think knowing that that money was not going to be an option one of the things that we did with Theo's cousins and his mom is we all sort of sat around together and said okay what could possibly influence the group that has him to let him go who can possibly bring influence to bear and obviously we aren't a government and so there's a lot of things that we weren't able to offer but we sort of created a network map of who has relationships with Java Telnestra to be able to find out about what they need through research and through contact with people on the ground and eventually it became clear that that one of the supporters of a lot of rebel groups including Java Telnestra was the government of Qatar and we then sort of said okay well who do we know that might know someone there and we eventually found a contact with the foreign minister and David got to know the foreign minister and I think Samantha Power separately also introduced Theo's mom to someone who had a relationship with the Amir and so those two channels in parallel eventually led to Qatar taking a strong interest in Theo's case and becoming very interested in doing something I mean what they said is that it was sort of altruism that they wanted to do it for Theo's mom and it may be more that they wanted to have a good relationship with the United States and sort of be seen as having done something good for an American citizen but regardless of what the reason was whether it was for Theo's mom or for a different reason they intervened and they did not know whether they paid money they insisted that they did not and the US government said that they did not but whatever influence they had to bear they brought in Theo's case and I think so often in these cases when we worked on them where the rubber hit the road was that we couldn't figure out what these groups really wanted and we could not necessarily figure out what we as private citizens could give them to give up what they regarded as a huge piece of leverage so I think that if I had to say what the lesson is in this case if I were a family looking at this anew it would be starting from day one figure out what is it that this group could possibly want and then figure out every possible means that you could to give them what they want whether it's through government action or private we have a very clear case right now of the Akhani network and it's very clear what the Akhani's want which is one of their family members has been held by the Afghan government a NASA Akhani who's a sort of relatively low level player on the Akhani network who's on death row you know that a prisoner exchange as we know that can work so Rachel what do you have do you assess that that potential that case do you sense as an organization we don't talk about specific cases whether we're working with the family or not just because of our position I mean it's you know families finding themselves in that kind of position and let's not forget that those cases are very very long running and we were talking multiple multiple years and you know the point at which we come in with families is kind of getting them through it and you know spare a thought for those folks who are years and years and years into a situation like that and are you know years in wondering well what is the solution here and for a family going through this you know the great frustration is you know what influence can we bear who wants what and what can we do you know the desperate thing for families is that in a case like that there's kind of almost nothing that you as the family can do because this is in the hands of governments or this is in the hands of a kind of an international negotiation process and I don't have the answer to those cases but I can tell you that in particular those long running cases you know really take their toll on the family and it's a really difficult situation to find yourself in and of course the family often knows very very little I mean did your family know much about Yemen or Iraq or Syria the places that you were reporting from and so I mean typically the family's got very little knowledge about the actual place where this is happening and the politics and this... I have to say if I was working in the State Department I would make job offers to any family coming out of this situation because I can tell you I'm supporting and it wouldn't surprise me if they've learnt three different languages so they can follow the Twitter accounts of every last person even six degrees of separation from the people that they think are holding their family members I mean the level of expertise I remember going back 20 years to my own experience of having somebody taken in a family member taken in Columbia and overnight you become the world's expert on Columbia because that knowledge is what could potentially stand between you and your loved one coming home again so it's a really steep learning curve and I know organizations like New America who have tremendous expertise within them are a potential fantastic resource for families as well to quickly have half an hour with you Peter on the situation in Afghanistan can increase your level of knowledge from zero to actually a pretty good, pretty good standard John Foley Jimstatt my one question is what is the difference between the European country and our country why are they able, willing and able to negotiate and make payments in fact that they are made and we are not the difference why are four Americans dead and 15 or roughly 15 Europeans home and I would like to know what policy issues come to bear there they live in the same world that we live in they are aware of the money being going to be used for bad things but they seem on paper to want their citizens home at any price thank you I want to remember the U.S. government so I can't really explain that totally and Chris correct me if I'm wrong but I think this started with the Nixon administration as a policy and I think it's one of those policies that on the face of it seems to make a lot of sense which is we don't want to be funding terrorist organizations and secondarily if we make concessions then we're encouraging other kidnappings I think the value of the research we've done you know it's openly out there and anybody can criticize it is that that is a presumption that is not a you know it's a presumption that doesn't seem to be backed by the evidence now you could make a caveat that well some Americans have just been killed for political reasons and it doesn't matter if we have no concession policy I think that's a very reasonable caveat but it's something that's very hard to sort of disentangle the question of Americans as political targets as opposed to just targets of convenience of being kidnapped and how that affects the outcome Chris do you have anything to add? Yeah I would say it's not I don't think it's entirely a question of policy I think it's partially a question of values and I think that Americans have a different attitude towards accepting risk and personal responsibility and also a different idea about what their government is expected to do for them such that in Europe when someone is taken hostage there is more public outcry there is more pressure on the government it becomes a political crisis in a way that it doesn't seem to in this country and it may also be there might be another contributing factor which is that maybe some of these, if you're the government of Italy you don't worry as much about making a ransom payment to Al Qaeda if it's not quite going to be your mess to clean up in the same way that it would be for the United States that's speculation but I think that's true also in terms of trying to create a unified policy I mean I don't think that the Italians or the Germans or anyone else want to be paying the sorts of sums that they are but one thing that would be interesting to look at would be whether different administrations have applied the no concessions policy differently such that there are different results within different periods of time because one of the things that we heard very anecdotally is that the Bush administration took a different position about what no concessions really meant and while the U.S. government was not willing to pay ransoms under the Bush administration one of the things we've heard and I don't know whether this is absolutely true but one of the things we've heard is that there was more willingness on their part to work with other countries so that other countries other parties could achieve things that the United States government couldn't itself I've heard that but probably for the same anecdotal sources so I can't necessarily substantiate this Thank you Joseph Saliff from the ANN group question for the gentleman who was talking about the numbers and maybe I misheard 35 Americans have been taken hostage and killed 41 41 since when 2001 as of the publication of the paper in January of this year and the number you gave on the Germans was 135 well to be clear the number 41 was the number of Americans who were murdered the actual number in our sample during that period of Americans in total was 225 what's the difference between murdered well many of the other 225 survived what's the question the question was I was trying to check the numbers because the number was large to me to hear 41 I had heard 35 and now you're saying 130 the question was how many Germans because you were talking earlier about how many Germans had been taken had been rescued out of a total sample for Germany of 133 in that period versus I think 225 Americans in that period you have to check the paper I don't have all the numbers in my immediate command lady here hi thank you so much my name is Danielle Gilbert I'm a PhD candidate at GW and I'm writing my dissertation about hostage taking so first of all thank you so much for putting this together Theo and Diane it is so meaningful to see you here and to hear from you I cannot even express in words having read your stories over the past several years and to see you here in person really means a lot so thank you for sharing your stories with us I can second what everyone is saying up there about the difficulty in the data so amen to that it's really really frustrating and difficult for policy to my question I'm sorry I could ask you so many things but quickly to Rachel how do we square US hostage policy that we've had obviously I know it's been lifted since 2015 the review but discussions about prosecution of family members how do we square that with K&R insurance and the fact that those kinds of ransom payments have gone through for a long time yeah well let me just reiterate a little bit about the fact that we're talking about different types of crime here essentially where I think somebody made the point earlier that this is a big old world and there's lots of different types of people who are using the practice of taking somebody against their will and holding them for a period of time there's lots of different people doing that for different reasons and for different outcomes and so to answer your question by detour of sort of going back to the question of numbers our estimates which are estimates there are at least a couple of hundred Americans a year taken overseas now most people's jaws would hit the ground hearing that number because of course we hear about a tiny tiny fraction of them and that's because we mostly hear about the cases which go public of course and they are mostly the terrorist related cases but the majority of cases are criminal and are solved financially and you know you are usually an engineer in South America or you're a banker in Mexico City or you're a tourist in Kenya who gets snatched and taken into Somalia a very broad range of people and I think one of the challenges in this area of policy is this challenge of making as somebody said we have a national policy for what is an international problem it's international problems plural actually and the way in which you go about solving the problem in relation to short term hostage cases in Mexico City that might last a few days or a few weeks and involve a straightforward payment usually quite a high degree of potentially high degree of violence to force the payment quickly the kind of response you need for that is different entirely to the kind of response that you need for a very long term terrorist kidnap where really there are only a very narrow number of options on the table and they're all within the gift of government so I hope that that partly answers your question and I also just wanted to applaud you for doing research in this area because going back to where I started we desperately need scrutiny scrutiny is a good thing in policy terms scrutiny is a good thing in most areas of life apart from my karaoke singing but it's a good thing in most areas of life and having master students like you take this on chip away sorry did I demote you oh my goodness blame it on me being a foreigner we're terrible it's really desperately important and so we as an organization always try to do whatever we can to support that because knowledge is power in this area and knowledge is better outcomes so thank you for your work as well Kevin Barron from Defence One Great for Mike I'm Kevin Barron I'm the Executive of Defence One for disclosure we are one of the Atlantic Media properties so David Bradley is the owner of our publication my boss I also worked for Stars and Stripes when Jim was at Stripes here in DC and he was out overseas my question is on the military options you mentioned with Germany the success of military action and the frequency can you tell me a little bit more about specifically the American success rates what's changed in the last couple years and it seems in some of these higher profile cases the US military government knew where some of the hostages were often different times and neither did not act or acted too late about the difficulties of getting to that decision to send in a force to try to rescue I want to reiterate firstly that on the subject of Germany and their rescues when I first ran the numbers I thought they must really know what they're doing and upon closer scrutiny I'm skeptical that that's in fact happening and most of these European governments do actively try to obscure the fact that they're usually making ransom payments or otherwise negotiating for release of hostages so I would not necessarily look at them as the paradigm for success speaking about the operational considerations on the US side it's not something I've looked at in great detail and it's certainly not something that I'm an expert on. What I have been noticing is that more recently there are jihadist groups that are taking countermeasures a very simple countermeasure to the possibility of a raid which is simply to station people by the hostages to kill them if they hear helicopters or gunshots or whatever the case may be that has only happened a limited number of times so it's not really appropriate for me to discuss it in terms of historical trends but that seems to be on the increase and I don't know what the strategic or tactical way around that is the two countries that are most likely to mount a military operation are the Americans and the British because they have the greatest capacity so the 20% outcomes for where the hostages ends up dead I'm sure you can talk to Kevin offline but these are largely American and British operations that most European countries don't have the capacity to mount a successful rescue shop right? Yeah Tara Mahler Our government knew where Jim was for a good nine months pretty much and we had very good data about exactly where they were and that's why I think this research is so important because there obviously were reasons that our government was constrained from actually going in and getting the four Americans they knew there were four Americans there and particularly as the French and the Spanish came out successfully we were able to very in a very pinpoint way I believe our military was very ready to go do it but there were reasons politically that the administration really felt they could not we have a lot of assumptions we wonder if one of them was that all of these countries had hostages together there were from actually it's unusual that well I don't know if it's unusual but this case there were all of our allies with air we had British and French and German and Danish, Italian, Spanish all together with our American and British civilians they were all captured together at different times during those two years held together exactly thank you so one of the things we wonder about John and I wondered is it appears that our government wasn't in touch with those countries and those countries demanded an opportunity to get their citizens out so one of the things we wonder is if we didn't wait because we knew that the French were negotiating theirs out the Spanish and such because it was interesting that the military operation did not occur until all those countries who wish to who planned on negotiating their citizens out was accomplished it was after all those people were freed that then our government can be okay let's try to rescue ours and all those months when we knew exactly where they were we are hands were tied if you will so I think a lot of that has to do with the policy and with our public feeling about our citizens do our people want our people home is that important to us as Americans that our government really will have you back and bring you home or is it more important that those are things we have to debate as a society because there's a difference as Chris said thank you for that question they're just to add to one point that Diane made at the end there I think in terms of the political will question another sort of interesting parallel issue to study would be the issue of whether there are better outcomes when cases made public or when it's kept private because one of the things that was certainly a trend that we saw is that the United States government at the time took a very strong position with all of the families that they should keep their cases private and I don't know that there's actually data that supports that as a position either and it's another thing that I think is something that we really should get data to support if it's going to be a policy and that's another one that I agree it's enormously important and also for obvious reasons is absolutely not going to be resolved until certain parties decide to make that stuff public and the sort of open source analysis that we're doing is by definition not going to catch a subset of cases that are not reported and the spokesperson and policy advisor for counter extremism project and a fellow in the security program at New America you just took part of my question with that response but I was going to ask we focused a lot on the policies around hostage release and we focused a lot on the payments which is part of policy and I was going to ask if you see looking across countries and or even within the US case itself a difference in the level of the private versus the public nature that inhibits potentially raising the profile for public support and I was also going to ask on the second part of that do you notice I mean we're speaking sort of monolithically about countries but are there differences in the actual this is a very human thing so in the people who are actually in touch with the group when they're doing the negotiation or making the decisions sort of looking at the types of people as a variable in and of itself whether that's happening through a media organization whether that's government or agencies and do you notice differences across countries or domestically based on those variables public, private and the actual people and not just ransom payments or poor US policy that's a big a lot of parts of that that's a MIT PhD question you have to remind me of parts of that I'm not sure if we got it already I think the answer is like generally yes there are differences there are lots of different types where everything from which countries appear to be better at developing local connections or using intermediaries in a given region to get their people back how closely they work with local government whether they go about these negotiations in a way that's thoughtful and with regard to how much havoc they're going to cause locally by paying huge amounts they differ in terms of their stated policies even with regard to ransoms and I think that certain governments try are very concerned with the perception that they pay they're very concerned potentially with the repercussions of their payments and they try to hide it others are through more cavalier but all of this I have to stress is stuff that I don't feel that you know I wanted to write about this in the paper I wanted to do that without getting direct access to people to discuss it because I'm making inferences from reading reams and reams of sort of cases and journalistic reports and occasionally you get something good from WikiLeaks which has a bit more meat on the bone but I wish I could give you something more substantial than that just like a brief point about the media question like all areas here we need evidence right and what is right in one case may be completely the wrong thing to do in another but I just wanted to to make a point about the media from a very human perspective and I can say from having worked with hundreds of families over 15 years it is one of the most painful issues for families to deal with because in most cases as a family you are relatively helpless to bring your loved one home and it is one of the very few proactive actions you could take as a family and in many cases families that we are working with are asking themselves this question every single day and we are having a conversation with them multiple times a week, multiple weeks a year should I be doing it because every single night a family member has to their head hits the pillow they have to ask themselves the same question and that is did I do enough today did I do everything I could have done today and I can tell you from experience right it is a torturous, torturous question to ask yourself as a family and our position is not to advise them one way or another this is a decision that in our view as an organization has to be informed by the negotiation strategy the answer to the question is if I go to the media how am I intending for that to have a positive impact on the negotiation process but I can tell you from experience it causes so much pain and so much distress and is playing on families minds every single day I can't agree enough with that because I really feel like I guess one of the reasons that one of the things that compelled us as a family to go public was that I knew I could just tell people just didn't know I mean I think one of the problems here in the United States is that the average person has no idea that hundreds of Americans are taking captive every year and because of the valid reasons there are valid reasons I'm not saying they're on but because of a lot of this secrecy people don't know so I mean it just becomes a non issue for the average American oh that's unfortunate that one person got taken or whatever but they don't realize the scope of that they don't realize how it threatens so many it threatens humanitarian efforts in the world it threatens press freedom and democracies in the world it threatens so much that could create peaceful societies in the world but this question is difficult and one of the reasons we went public was because nobody was listening I mean nobody we were frantic as a family please help us you know and we knew that early in the search for Jim that that was a time when we really needed the help of journalists and any experts who knew and so part of our public outcry was help us you know we knew we needed help and at that time there was no hostage recovery fusion cell there was no one whose job it was to even listen to us really we were kind of pushed along oh go talk to the FBI now today talk to the State Department it was very very difficult and yet in hindsight I think we did increase the Jim's value in the public eye so it may have worked against our son I do feel that Jim would have wanted us to do all we could in that regard but I do think it may have been the wrong thing well I don't know but because the captors threatened us they threatened that they would do something to Jim if we were public and that's when we started to quiet right down our government kept advising us be quiet don't talk to anybody but anyway I have my wonder what you had to do in that situation but I would just like to say one quick thing which is that something new has emerged in the world namely Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS and the fact that they control this large swath of Syria and Iraq we don't know how much of those countries particularly Syria we don't know how much of Syria we underestimate I think the journalists and everybody else underestimates the degree to which Jabhat al-Nusra controls the places they control and the extent of the geography that they control this is the factor that is driving the kidnappings they have so much space within which to work so I think that it would have been helpful for Diane if we had better understood what it is these people want we still don't understand that it's not just cash I think that a successful negotiation could have freed Jim if we had been better able to measure psychology and we cannot do that because we just don't know what these guys are dreaming of at night we don't know who they are and they're on twitter all day every day like we could examine their tweets this isn't relevant data for you we could like engage them in conversation while my Arate was looking for who could we contact to get the idea out the shakes were in the room that I was sitting in twittering so I was like you could have answered their tweets but they're talking about like me or whoever it is so it's hard it's hard to negotiate with them however a deeper and more powerful understanding of what they want will help us in our negotiations with them and will obviate the need for a military thing which is like way just crazy risky and not necessary because they are contactable and they are understandable human beings that have desires and they can be met should be met because we're talking about beautiful lovely promising young Americans who don't deserve to live with these people lived through they didn't do anything wrong and look at the look at the treatment that they got it's not that the jibbeth and this was not mad at me like they basically knew I didn't do anything but they were mad at the American government the American government must at some point like understand that it has a history in these areas and that those areas are now way on the dark side of the moon so we need to deeper and better more powerful understanding of what's happening on the ground so thank you again to New America for what you're doing so my question kind of ties together your question Denise Dr. Denise almost Diane D. got it and what you were saying with regard to monetizing or turning it into a economic model applying demand and setting rules and regulations maybe Adam Smith could help us through this process but how do we square that then with the reality of the swath of people who become kidnapped victims whether U.S. or not a portion we recognize to be truly commercial to which your market forces may well apply but then we have what we've all recognized as well situations like Jim and others in which it is about unmeetable, undefined and possibly irrational sorry Theo but I think possibly not totally irrational demands that they're asking for economic model but how do we really apply that when the circumstances are well beyond that and it's not about supply and demand of money I would maybe challenge the premise that it's not about supply and demand of money I think most often it is there are obviously ideological cases but you have to look sometimes in the case of ISIS my sense is that they're more rational than the common public probably believes and that at least some of those hostages could have been rancid the American and the British ones I would point to the fact that they were willing to release French hostages for ransom and they don't have a particularly high opinion of the French and the French were also well militarily against ISIS I think they didn't begin bombing until after the French hostages were released I mean in terms of the market forces stuff I'm not either an economist or sort of like an evangelist for capitalism to solve all of the problems market forces but I think there are sensible things that you can do to prevent ransom values from escalating in the way that they have been over the past 15 years and there's really good research and reporting on this from the community of Kalamaki talking about how the ransom for a European held by al-Qaeda has gone from a couple hundred thousand dollars to five, maybe ten million dollars now there were really large ransoms paid figure range for Europeans held by ISIS and I think they have there's kind of an information asymmetry that happens there where I think that a lot of the hostage takers understand the market value of a western hostage sometimes better than than we do and there are countries that have tried to take a sort of hybrid position I think Australia is notable for doing this where they don't have a no concessions policy but they have a cap for the amount they will pay, just a flat cap and over which they will not pay that might be an example of a sort of market solution to try to minimize the damage that's done while still recovering your people and they have their sample in our data is quite small I think there's 33 hostages in total one of those was murdered so their results seem to be quite good sorry I the piracy has given you a subset to study in which that's very much the case so you saw ransoms increase to a point of whatever became the tipping point and ironically I believe that probably insurance markets responded to a way that actually applied a market force that drove some controls the insurance industry is quite good at doing this they have a lot of experience doing it they understand the markets pretty well they understand the resources often times overwhelmingly criminal and so there are different ideological forces at work but I think that you would definitely be who any government at least in terms of understanding the dynamics of these situations you know to have all this data and be doing similar kinds of analysis I really don't think it's all about money and I really don't I guess it concerns me when we always I recognize that's how a lot are resolved but I guess to me as an American I think the fact that we are not allowed to talk to terrorist captors it's a problem I mean how can we resolve cases if we cannot interact with people who are holding our citizens I think that to me this ability because I think that is how we can learn what do they want we are allowed to talk to them negotiate we are not allowed to in our case they couldn't even talk they couldn't they don't know what to say to them hello Howard they would advise us what to say but they weren't allowed to directly email these people people who spend their life are FBI experts who know how to negotiate their things they were not allowed to because they weren't allowed at least in our case and maybe those variances but in our case they were not allowed to directly interact with the captors and I know that in the case of Caleb Mueller the captors for months interacted and wanted to negotiate wanted to find a way to let Caleb go but that's just to me that was just horrific for them but I feel that our policy is saying that no we can't we can negotiate with criminal captors but we can't negotiate with terrorist captors they couldn't do it so our government was not able to use their expertise to interact and to find out what did they want in the early days when they were willing to consider it I mean as the time went on they became less and less interested and found other ways they were getting money from other countries and they were not as interested but I think there's a time in a captivity where a captor may be interested in talking to trying to figure out what they can get but if we can't I feel that's a huge problem but I think just two notes on that point I think this is a place where we heard that anecdotally the Bush administration was a little bit different than the Obama administration pre hostage recovery fusion cell at least in that under the Bush administration our understanding that there was a little bit more willingness to interact and to negotiate in the cases that we saw not just the Phillies but others as well there was a reluctance by the government either to take over the negotiation directly or to advise the family on what to say so there was this oddity that the government was saying don't tell anybody keep this private keep it quiet, we'll advise you we'll help you and so there were a lot of families that didn't go out and get outside advice from the government and then when it came time to negotiate the government said sorry we can't help you negotiate but you have these conversations if you feel that you're comfortable having the conversations and we can't pay ransom you probably shouldn't pay ransom but maybe we'll look the other way maybe we won't and I think it was very confusing very confusing and I just really feel that we just need more research on this and I really feel our country wants to people kept telling me that Jim was the highest priority I think in one's head and hard as Americans we like to feel that but our policy and the way it's administered in different departments and everything that wasn't the case they weren't allowed to do what their work could have done in terms of using our expertise to bring our son home anyway can I say one more financial motive for the kidnappings I mean I think that the in my case and I just think generally speaking the danger to us is the young men who are wandering around on the street who have grievances against the U.S and they want to surrender us to the appropriate local authorities our problem is with the appropriate local authorities as soon as I was caught 24 hours I was in front of a judge I could plead my case but this was an Islamic court and you know it was in terms of my trial we're not necessarily according to the modern standards of criminal justice in this country so I don't think I'm certain that those people who got me did not have a financial motive they were and the problem cannot be addressed by somehow coming lower in their ransom thing and diminishing their hopes of a financial reward because they have so much emotional desire to come after us and we gotta understand this emotional desire more we understand the emotional desire the better we will be able to negotiate with these people once we understand what's going on in their heads but I don't even think the best of our officials they had no clue as to how to talk to them that's why when the Caleb Mueller thing started saying what's going on they were so frightened they were just like get me away from this you don't know what to do you don't know how to talk to these people in your case if I could ask do you think that Cutter knew how to talk to them is that you think that's what did it Cutter is great, very good I love those people they're very good talkers we're beginning to run out of time so what we're going to do is we're going to take three or four questions together and answer them and I think that was Albert and do you have a question and this gentleman's been very patient and he's gotten back hi Albert Ford I work with Peter and Chris here at New America's international security program I'm curious about successful instances Erotide, Chris, Rachel where international cooperation between aid organizations based in different countries who have different people who are held hostage in different countries and then foreign governments we've looked at the case of Pierre Corky and Luke Summers in Yemen in 2014 and in a two hour time span the South African aid organization had negotiated a $200,000 release for Pierre and then in two hours a US special operations raid ended up killing or ended up resulting in the death of both Luke, Pierre and eight other civilians so Chris you talked about this but I'm curious to know if any of you have dealt with circumstances where international cooperation or integration between multiple aid agencies in foreign countries or multiple foreign governments have yielded a successful outcome or if any of the three of you have by yourselves thought of any solutions where those kinds of interactions cooperations among foreign entities to Chris's point that this is an international problem that can't be solved with one country's independent solution I'm just curious if either of the three could comment on that Thank you Hi I'm a freelance reporter living in Kabul and our house moved last fall because there were two and a half kidnappings on our street alone and since then we had another friend who was kidnapped and the thing that really stunned me was tasks that I thought should go to men and women in suits and uniforms fell on the shoulders of three 20-year-olds sorry I'm not a 20-year-old people in their 20s and that really truly stunned me and the thing that we kept asking was we didn't even know what would be a reasonable ask to various government agencies and also the employers of the people my friend who had been kidnapped and I was just wondering if there were some consensus that are being built now on what the ask should be Thank you I'm a Canadian and Canada has a policy like the US and Britain of no concessions and two related questions one do you believe that the captors actually believe that these countries do not make concessions because they certainly seem to carry on long after they've been reminded these countries don't make concessions and related question and I think Dan Foley touched on it I have trouble thinking of any other circumstances where if somebody has something I want I'm going to go out of my way to tell them I won't talk to you so is it even a good idea to have this policy much less to keep restating it so boldly so blankly without any nuance to your first question quickly I mean Canada is another country that has a stated no concessions policy recently there were two Canadians who would be headed by Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines after they were not ransomed I don't know whether that signals a tighter adherence to that policy by Canada than they had been pursuing prior or whether that is to do with the new regime in the Philippines and the way they're treating Abu Sayyaf and interacting with western governments who have hostages held there but certainly I've seen a lot of reporting identifying their ransom payments made by Canada in the period that we have studied I think notably Robert Fowler who is a diplomat in North Africa who is ransomed so that in case you were probably wondering is why we didn't include Canada in the group the no concession group It wouldn't matter if they have stated no concession policy but they do make concessions I'm saying that recently we may be hitting an inflection point where that is changing but I can't So the other question I've come in on two of them and then there was a final point I wanted to make if you'll entertain that On the international cooperation point actually my family's case is a great example of that My British uncle was taken with a German, a Dane and a Colombian and there were certainly complications in the case in that they weren't all working for the same company and there were obviously a number of different governments involved but they ended up with one crisis response company responding on behalf of all four men and they all came out safely I think that kind of cooperation is I see it certainly in the private sector I'm sure it happens at a government level we as an organisation don't get involved in the same way in seeing stuff that's happening behind the scenes so I'm not sort of qualified to answer that question from the perspective of government led cases but I've certainly seen it first hand in the case of my own family and it can definitely work I thought the question about the reasonable ask was really really important and it's part of the reason that we exist as an organisation because for almost every single family friend or neighbour going through this this is the first time you've been through it and it's almost certainly going to be the last time you go through it and your learning curve is very very steep well we've been through it a million times either first hand or second hand and knowing what it's okay to ask for I mean I've worked with families who for 18 months haven't put anything in writing to the government because not necessarily this government by the way but because they thought it might seem a bit aggressive I mean listen you don't get anything done unless you put it in writing with governments you know there's a language that you need to learn to speak there's a bunch of acronyms that you have to come to terms with very quickly you don't know whether it's okay to ask for assistance to pay your psychological counselling bill or whether you should be saving the stubs from your flights to DC because will we be able to claim it back later let alone the most important stuff which is how the hell does this get solved and how do we solve it as quickly as possible so I think you're absolutely asking the right question there is most families going through this do not know what it's reasonable to ask and so I'm just pleased that in our own small way we can at least give them the list of questions that it is okay to ask so that they can find their way through it and say one last thing which is that we've talked we've talked today over and over again all of us complete consensus on the need for data research, analysis, scrutiny and my plea as an activist working in this area is let's do something about it you know why are we not let's just go home and start sharing data and I will certainly commit that we as an organisation will make sure that every single family that we work with every single returned hostage that we support through surviving survival will know that this data set exists and that is an option for them to add themselves to this data set and I think the ask back to government and to risk consultancies is give us your data and I think it can be done in an anonymised way it can be done in a way that does not compromise national security and doing it could save lives so please let's just start let's just do it as Nike would say let's just do it and I'd just like to add that I really feel international cooperation is vital that as Rachel said often in the private sector and with the hostage who are working with doctors without borders I mean a lot of times different countries have found ways to work together to get their people out I've also seen a situation like the French non-profit acted who had Federico Motca an Italian and David Haynes a British both working for them taken hostage and in that case the governments interfered because the Italians you know felt good about their ability to get Federico out but the British did not so it was to me that's the hope is I think we do particularly when they're all western our western allies when people are taken together we need to find out together how can we help get our people home and I often think the answer is that collaboration that we're going to generate if we don't turn it into political will or change in feeling around the country I mean nothing's going to change so this isn't all about finding the right person the government isn't all about finding the right organization to go get our son or daughter I think changing will I'm so struck by the fact that we are so different from our European allies without any real change in will I'm not really hopeful that we're going to make a whole lot of change well I'm hopeful that getting evidence that shows that we that there are our citizens are being captured all the time and we are suffering very bad outcome is this what the Americans want do Americans not care I mean I think some of it is people needing to know our citizens and that's why I think this research is hugely helpful in terms of informing and bringing the evidence to bear Diane, just so we leave on a slightly more positive note perhaps how would you characterize obviously in 2015 our administration made a lot of changes and how would you characterize those changes and how effective they've been I feel it's been a sea change Peter when Jim was in captivity it was no one's job to bring him home it was on everybody's list mind you, they meant well but it was no one's job this interagency group that brings the best of our intelligence State Department FBI to the table together and they are listening to families to me it's a sea change however I feel that our policy constrains what some of them are able to do they still we still need to let our experts do their job and without the will as you said John without as a country us wanting this for our citizens and without us having policy changes that are more amenable to I love what you said about when did you hear that someone has something you want and you are not allowed to talk to them about it I mean you know how are we going to be able to get our citizens home without a way to interact and use our expertise I feel it's a huge change good things are happening and that's why I'm grateful for this research to continue this momentum so we can free our young men so Austin Tyce can come home and these other incredibly wonderful Americans doing very valuable work in the world I'm feeling more hopeful thank you thank you to our brilliant panel