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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 phe

nomenon.

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 going to have influence over the media, it needs to be responsible influence. You can't let people ride herd and poke the Americans with a stick every time they want to. We have done that in this Administration and done it in the past as well.

Part of what we are talking about today is not just true facts. There are facts that are wrong that we can counter. There are facts that we can complain about when somebody says 4,000 Jews were absent from the World Trade Center that morning. We can make the case that that is just plain wrong. We are right, they are wrong. But beyond that, we are talking today about reaching people, and particularly the young people, at a more fundamental level. And that is a place where foreign leaders don't need to extoll the virtues of the Bill of Rights, but they can make the case that their cooperation with America is important, is good for their own society. That is where we need to encourage and we do encourage other leaders to speak out on our behalf.

Chairman HYDE. Mr. Kerns.

Mr. KERNS. I thank you, Mr. Chairman. After considerable efforts over decades, it appears that we have not done the job that we would have liked in communicating the message of American people and our way of life. And most recently, after traveling to Russia, Italy and Turkey, it was suggested by other governments that we have not done an effective job, and even made specific recommendations on ways maybe we can improve that, even including that when we participate in humanitarian efforts, marking such relief given that it is the compliments of the American people by the

United States Government, so they in fact know what we are doing and participating and trying to communicate a positive measure.

Do we have a way of measuring our effectiveness and progress in communicating a positive message and tying that directly to some means? Are we performing properly in the right way? Do we need to take a look in another direction? And I do share the concerns of Mr. Rohrabacher, Mr. Chabot, and Mr. Royce. So with that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.

Chairman HYDE. I thank the gentleman. Ms. Watson.

Ms. WATSON. Mr. Chairman, I would like to extend my opening statement forward, submit my opening statement for the record please.

Chairman HYDE. Without objection, so ordered.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Watson follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE DIANE E. WATSON, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for holding this hearing. U.S. public diplomacy programs have for decades been an effective means of enhancing mutual understanding between the United States and other foreign countries. Many programs in our public diplomacy arsenal are highly regarded and widely known, including the Fulbright and International Visitors Programs. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) have not only effectively made the transition to a post Cold War world, but have remained highly relevant and well respected among their listening audiences and a model to many countries that are still struggling to establish an independent press. Similarly, Voice of America has retained a diverse and loyal base worldwide who regard its broadcasts as factual and even-handed. It is not surprising that a majority of males in Afghanistan listen to VOA.

Despite the successes of our public diplomacy programs, I am concerned that we now live in a world that truly is more accessible, diverse, and will require Americans to be more conversant in their knowledge and understanding of foreign languages and cultures. I appreciate that many of our public diplomacy programs also allow U.S. citizens to travel and study abroad. However, I am also mindful that we as a nation have been parochial and sometimes cavalier about world affairs due, in part, to what we perceived to be our relative geographic isolation. Perhaps this attitude explains in part the Committee Report of the Intelligence Authorization Act, passed by the House last week, which notes that one of the intelligence community's greatest needs is for greater numbers of foreign language-capable personnel and that it is a deficiency throughout the intelligence community. I would be interested in finding out whether the State Department's public diplomacy programs are sensitive to the fact that we as a nation need to more than ever acquaint a growing number of our own citizens to the various cultures, languages and regions of the world, and in so doing solidify the future credibility of our public diplomacy programs throughout the world.

Ms. WATSON. I would just raise something you said, Mrs. Beers, that we have to work with youth. I took groups to South Africa during the apartheid, and I found that the youth were ready to embrace the globe. I also found that they were compelled by the music and the artists that they heard from America and Great Britain, and I would think that this would be a very effective way to start our message, through our music makers and to the youth.

Also, athletics. When I think about the Goodwill Olympics, there is a way that youth relate to youth across their countries' boundaries in pursuits. So maybe you would want to consider using some of these games to also send the messages from our country to other countries. I think we have got to start with those whose minds are still developing, and we have to use the airwaves. It is really important that we speak their language, very important to know their customs and traditions.