so as we've learned i think this morning it takes lawyers activists and storytellers to pursue justice but also takes a willingness to share lessons and one of the reasons we brought this conference about was because i had heard about angelina's case against the cia it endured me to immediately even though i had met her and the fact that there was and one of the things i thought of is you know we've got a publicized this week that let people know about her case because the one thing that people who commit human rights violations depend upon this intimidation and i could tell you  intimidated but it was it intimidating and intentional we don't know but could very well been the efforts by the el salvadorian remnants of the right wing dictatorship and all salvador to find out what she knew i am pleased to have met angelina because her center for human rights here at the university of washington is really a beacon of light and truth and it's really remarkable when you think of it that this institution here and what she's done understand that the role of the freedom of information act ensures another human rights which is transparency is talked about earlier so we have in this panel is lessons from the field  off thank you mike for that very gracious introduction and thank you to all of you for what's already been just a tremendously stimulating day i don't even know i think so many things to process from all of the different wisdom that's been shared so far today that i'm just going to try to be coherent and what i present in the minutes i have before you the work that we do at the center for human rights is all conducted through partnerships with front lines human rights advocates and so when i talk about that work i'd like to first let them speak for themselves and i'd like to begin right now by showing you just a very short film that we made featuring the story of one of our partners and then i'll come back and tell you a little bit more about it work i would see him you know the few pictures that i had i would see his babies in people that kind of resembled him so i always felt always felt his presence w and he never came back happened story that so many people share you know i feel like we have this collective trauma we're all dealing with the same kind of thing ten thousand disappeared th documents i think it's the responsibility of congress to put pressure on the u s government to give us answers at the state of the country can no longer afford our silence it's time three thirty five years i was saying before all of the work that we do at the center for human rights is born of partnerships with real people on the frontlines of different human rights struggles whether here in the united states or half way around the world but the work i want to talk about right now is one project where we are working with folks  seek our help in documenting abuses or in creating different types of human rights instruments that would be helpful to them in their work there's many areas of the work and also that are that we are doing but the one i'm going to talk about in just a few minutes i have with you today and in the work that gives rise to our current lawsuit against the cia is our work using sawyer for the freedom of information act here in the united states so as you saw so i needed to be as a child of a disappeared father there are so many people in el salv who are still seeking the most basic information about what happened in cases of disappearance in cases of torture in cases of massacre as well the most basic information has yet to be made public or made available to the victims families themselves and so through our work here in the united states we've sought to help fill that void through a number of means one of them is by using the u s freedom of information act so about that i have sort of some good news to share some bad news and then i want to talk about where we're going from there seventy five thousand people had lost their lives the overwhelming majority of them at the hands of their own government or its aligned death squads a series of salvadoran governments heavily supported by the united states to the tune of about five billion dollars and i want to put all of those numbers in perspective to this was a country that at that time had a population of about four million people so seventy five thousand victims out of that number sadly however only five days after the n sponsored truth commission released its report a blanket amnesty was passed which basically took off the table prosecution for crimes committed by either side in the armed conflict and that was basically the state of affairs in till just july of this year so just a few months ago after twenty three years of state sanctioned impunity what we see now is an opening a historic opening for justice in el salvador for the first time thanks to the ruling of el salvador at the constitutional chamber of el supreme court and the door is open to prosecution in cases like these so it remains to be seen what will happen but it makes it in ordinarily timely moment to be having this conversation or the conversation we had earlier today with more than a  so our work at the center for human rights as i said in part focuses on using tools that are available to us as scholars and researchers in the united states to document what happened in el salvador the salvadoran military and other branches of the government still refuse access to information despite having passed their own version of about three years ago so sometimes the only means to gain access to information other than the survivors testimony itself is through documents in the possession of the us government may be the only positive benefit of the billions of dollars that the united states poured into el salvador is that there was meticulous record keeping about how those dollars were being spent i didn't mean it as a joke but it's true so there was meticulous record keeping and we can through the different tools available to us today access some of those records so as of july first of this year our research team which is really just a group indefatigable students some of whom are here today and myself have filed over three hundred freedom of information act requests of six different u s federal agencies and we are receiving on a regular basis responses to those to those requests we have have had released to us to date a total of one hundred eighty one documents so maybe that's good news right i think it's definitely good news these documents allow us to see information sometimes for the very first time this is one of the documents that was released to us it was a dark human about which previous litigation or previous foyer requests had failed to produce release but we were fortunate that thanks to the passage of time when we requested it it did come out and this is the highlighted portion is added by me if you can see that what talking about well i won't read it verbatim but i'll sum it up for you it's reporting a conversation between the archbishop not romero but his successor and the us ambassador at the time in which the us ambassador who's the author of this cable is relating the reports that he takes to be trustworthy reports of over two hundred women and children being killed in a place called villages surrounding a village called look this was one of the many massacre untold massacres that have yet to be fully documented in salvadoran context sadly what this cable and others like it tell us is not news we know thanks to the work of mark danner and many many other researchers and advocates that the united states government had a lot of information about these kinds of atrocities happening in all solve it or that it documented it that they were aware that they continued to keep the money flowing so this doesn't challenge that narrative in any way but it does produce new tools for advocates fighting for justice in this case which prior to these efforts had not been available so i'm very proud of that at the same time these documents every time we have a document we share it with our partners and the families who are seeking access to information indeed is usually on their requests that we're seeking the document to begin with and also in times i've found that to be a very daunting process trade because people come forward seeking information about a lost loved one and often we don't obtain anything or if we do obtain something you have to remember these are documents written in the language of those who were funneling the cash into those million military battalions that were dragging people out of their homes and executing them so sometimes the way that people's loved ones are described in these documents could indeed  about your disappeared father as a terrorist when he was nothing but a literacy promoter demise people or that was a concern i had when we first started to go these documents back another was the documents really you know for all of our hope every time somebody comes forward saying can you file a request on my behalf i think oh this is going to be the time i'm going to find the answer we have yet to see a document that says x marks the spot they're not written that way be very unlikely to ever find such a document and so the documents you get back are not only written in the language of those who are funding the repressive activities but they're also deeply incomplete they don't contain the ultimate answer is that victims are looking for and they're frustrating in that way but what i want to share with you is honor that i have had in being able to hand those documents over to victims survivors and their families i will never forget the first first case that i worked on where we got documents back and we took them and it was a we took them to us all the door my students and we met with a young woman who had requested them both of her parents had been disappeared and the documents we got back were didn't tell really anything new about that case it confirmed the detention of her parents which had been officially denied all that time so that was important  but it's spoke about them in very unkind terms and it didn't offer any guidance as to where their remains may lie and so before handing them over to her i gave her a whole slew of disclaimers and apologies and finally i passed them across the table to her and she picked them up and looked at them and her hands started shaking and she said to me you have no idea you have no idea what this means to me and she said i have a binder where in you know any kind of information that somebody tells me about my parents if they say that my dad were cardigans i write that down and they put it in that binder because i grew up never knowing them and i am so eager for every shred of information and so these are shreds of information this isn't the answer to everything i'm seeking but this matters you have no idea what this means and i have to say and that was the first conversation of many like it that i have had with families who have been so courageous for decades like many of the folks we've heard from today in fighting for justice in these cases and it's what motivates me to continue in this work despite the deep limitations so that's the good news right there something we can do right i'm not only a missing person and me and a bunch of students following these requests there are some things that we can do that can help make some of these struggles a little bit better and the process of doing so i think is oftentimes as important as the product it's not only the documents we seek but the chance to take those stories seriously and let people know that they're not seems like a lot but i could also say we got documents back in only fourteen out of those three hundred cases it's oftentimes a very discouraging search for information not only do we oftentimes have our  requests refused but oftentimes they are refused by citing national security exemptions which are known as glore maher which is when agencies of the united states government tell us we neither confirm nor deny the existence of the records you are seeking but if they were to exist we could not give them to you because to do so would put in danger the national security of the united states we routinely are getting this sort of response especially from intelligence agencies so these overly broad glaum our responses are extraordinarily difficult to challenge we have however had the opportunity to challenge one of them and that's the case that mike mentioned when he introduced me that was a case where we were seeking information about that guy with a coffee cup whose name is he's a colonel his name is up it is he is well known in el salvador as the commanding officer of troops that carried out numerous mass occurrences he himself does not deny his participation in those activities he merely justifies them by saying that all those who perished were terrorists even the babies so we're seeking information about this particular individual and we filed a request for information from five different us federal agencies seeking information pertaining to him as a specific individual and the cia responded to us they could neither confirm nor deny the existence of records because of us national security and we said well well first we appealed that didn't work in the way appealed again we want to intrigue the agency mediation and that didn't work either and over the course of this process we came about through our own research we discovered twenty documents cia documents that contained his name or that were about him in fact one of them was sitting right on the cia's own website and the title of the document was his name he said well then that's a little odd how could it be that you can't even give us access to the documents that you have located on your own website without imperiling us national security that just doesn't add up and we went as i said went through the appeals process i was never eager to sue the cia but those appeals were fruitless and so we ended up just about a year ago today on october second twenty fifteen filing suit against the u s central intelligence agency and instead doing become the first university in the united states to do so which is kind of surprising right i mean our universities engage in the search for truth anybody who is a part of the university of washington community should be very proud of this because this isn't something that i did it isn't something that our center for human rights did is something that the university of washington did it was a decision not made by me but made by multiple layers of you double story and authorized at the highest level which is the presidency and the board of regions so this is something a documents or other i'm sorry seventy three of which had never been previously declassified of those that had been previously declassified here's an example of one you can see the process of obtaining  declassification did also enable us to pull more information into the light and in fact that's kind of how i think about this work quite often it's really about pulling information into a light little snippets little shreds of information and that's frustrating and it's slow but it's vitally important for the struggle for justice so all of those eighty five documents that we obtained all pertaining to this specific individual what did they tell us or what do we learn from it well in as regards t specific kernel unfortunately again they confirm a narrative that's already familiar there's ample evidence that he that the united states government believed he was responsible for war crimes and those are documented in these very documents but those documents are interspersed with other documents saying that he's not worthy for his leadership he's a terrific commander in the field and others talking about continuing to channel assistance to the salvadoran regime so sadly that's not a new narrative although again this gives us new tools to understand that specific application in this case but maybe the most important takeaway point for me and again there's we're still litigation because they've given us access to these documents but there are there's a whole other set of documents which they say is too sensitive for us to see and we're still fighting for those so i hope that next year when we have this conference again obvious to put those on the screen but short of that sort of take away points from the lawsuit thus far of the documents that they did share with us they are tantalizing in the level of detail operational detail that they contain some of them contain a level of detail i haven't seen before and u s documents as relating to the case of el salvador i'll give you just one example it's a document talking about one specific military operation where they are saying you know there's different these are the names of the different units that are participating in the operation which for many in specific cases we still don't know that right so th this unit and that unit this one is going to be approaching from this direction that one from that one and they're giving the specific coordinates are no longer to latitude point at which different units are going to be this is close to an x marks the spot as i've ever seen  and talking about that military operation before it even happens so the level of detail that you see in intelligence documents is vastly greater the level of operational detail vastly greater than in department of state documents but the overwhelming majority of documents that have been declassified not only about el salvador but about virtually any other country or contacts in the world our department of state documents in fact the department of state is the most responsive of the agencies involved in these kinds of struggles for access to information and so they they release information it's mostly information about diplomatic discussions if you keep in mind that also during the worst years of the war was effectively governed by its military authorities it's not totally shocking that they would be sharing the really detailed information out what was happening day to day on the ground in the battlefield with their counterparts in the military and in the intelligence communities and those documents contain that level of detail and what they were telling the civilians in the embassy was you know maybe useful but a different kind of information and so to me what this points to is the deep limitations of the foyer process because the cia and other intel it agencies have a very easy out by invoking national security exemptions and the u s simply typically rule over in those cases it's very very rare that a court would ever challenge them when they invoke national security and at the end of the day we are committed and this is shifting towards transitioning towards end of my talk here where we going from here we're continuing to do this work with soy because i couldn't do anything else after seeing the impact it can have on real people struggling for justice it's absolutely vital it's an honor to do it and i'm deeply committed to it but at the same time we've become deeply cognizant of the limitations of form and of the need for other ways to pursue declassification outside of the foyer process so you may have seen a recent op ed by peter kornbluh of the national security agency in the washington post where he talks about declassified diplomacy and efforts that have been successful in brazil and argentina where by decisions of the white house or the state department documents have been handed over to foreign governments seeking information about some of the very same crimes that we've been talking about today that's a vital step what we are now training our energies on is trying to i see something similar happen in the case of el salvador where the u s government was so much more deeply involved and therefore has so much more information and where people like saddam hussein on the screen are seeking that information for the basic humanitarian purposes of healing so i conclude by looping back to saddam because the reason we made this video telling you her story is to hopefully to share the urgency of these declassification efforts and to encourage you and others to take action in support of her request which is that the united states government moved to declassify the documents pertaining to the conflict in el salvador and that they do that now foyer is not enough and you can be a part of that by going online to our website where you can view the story that huge about it's i don't know if you can share with others and you can take action directly with as easy as cooking your mouse in support of these efforts thank you very much when we formed the committee for justice for domingo in fairness and got our legal team together including jeff robinson who so we decided that we hadn't attended any seely's on how to implicate foreign governments in the murder of american citizens there was a lot of classes in law school we took that helped us but what we did i think this was cindy's inspiration amongst others is reach out just like this conference is doing and we reached out to the institute for policy studies isabella tell you her and saw landau and brought them to seattle to figure this out and i credit was passed with the statement that when you hear the words national security you know two things are happening one a crime is being committed and second is being covered up southern cone of latin america john doing this as an author as a storyteller as an investigative journalist because as few peers when it comes to covering and digging in to what really happened not only in the orlando the telly or assassination but in other crimes in the southern cone latin america could you welcome john doing  well thank you very much and so there was a very generous introduction in the title of this panel reports from the field i said well what was my  changed my life i stayed there for one year of socialist revolution helping the poor which i identified with stayed for five more years under a dictatorship and really earn chops as a journalist not covering something i sympathized with but covering something that i was so morally opposed to and in which i had this adversarial relationship that all journalists should have with whatever story that they're covering and this also this all set up but no of course the sizes are different chile called up see the government allowed us to do something where we could only talk about international affairs nothing about chile so of course we talked about brazil strong for human rights philippines struggle for human rights strove for human rights every de young in washington she said john there's been an explosion on sheridan circle we traced the license plate it's orlanda little we're the former ambassador to the united states so they had confirmed that it most likely was under the tele or by the way the woman with him was not his assistant it was the wife of his assistant ronny moffet she died her husband who was in the backseat they were  riding to work that day with them he survived with only slight rooms but the rest of his life has been influenced by the fact that he lost his young bride of only six months that case changed my life for forty years forward we have the anniversary a couple weeks ago and you know it was a happy anniversary it was a commemoration of the lives of orlando and ronnie and their families and the fact that these terrible tragedies had unleashed the power of movements all over latin america and in the united states to push for democracy and in fact the president of chile michelle but she lay was there at the ceremony and shared in circle it was actually on the twenty third the murderer's history has defeated them i know that is tough to talk about taking positive messages out of tragedy but i think it's some point we can venice california and is an artist and he spent the month prior to the anniversary doing a mural which i have some pictures of and at american university they inaugurated the mural so there's that sword one on me this is this is based on a picture of one know that his son took on the eighteenth of september which is chilean national day so three days before his father was killed he took his picture with a polaroid camera this is ronnie a wonderful young girl young woman twenty five twenty six years old who had just been married six months before with the symbol of the american rose and the chilean kopi way the national flow or the two countries this is roderigo rojas a young boy who was killed by the chilean military burned alive in  eighty seven roderigo was a friend of our family babysat for my kids he did xeroxing he did any task we wanted him to do when he was fourteen years old twelfth all and i were writing the book so wonderful kid and he was becoming a photographer and he was killed by the military government so i just wanted to if you ever get a chance to go to washington i mean i hope that this mural becomes some plea he finds a home permanently because of course it's enormous and it needs a really big home but it's it has the kind of impact that i had the first time i went to the vietnam memorial partly because you go down below ground level to get into the patio where it's been where it's been held i'm struck today by the parallels between the cases that we've been hearing particularly the parallels between the domingo view and this cases and the orlando little your case and also i'm glad that joyce horman is here today because i've been working on that case as well in recent to this this past year particularly the the the the parallels of the kind of rights crimes particularly in latin america and in countries like like the philippines and that is one of the things that i have dedicated myself to investigating over the years and i want to come back to this in a moment i want to talk about documents and transparency a little bit which i think is the theme of the day and this time it worked i want to go back to to vinces wonderful schema of transparency and accountability trends accountability which is the most important characteristic of a successful democracy is only possible with transparency the defeat of transparency is secrecy and the defeat of accountability is i and so every investigator is working within this with his within this framework within this dynamic so i wanted to steal that from vince and use it in my investigative reporting classes from here on the first set of documents that i was chasing down somebody called pulling out i kind of see him as chasing down because the f b i saw the extradition of the head of the  secret police and sent down my sources told me that they sent down for the first time the evidence that they had proving the end of the involvement of the secret police in the and ronnie that f b i extradition packet contained about three thousand pages of documents and i wanted to see it and so i got on a plane i just left chile in may and i went back in september and tried to chase down the documents and finally got somebody to give me a detailed briefing on what those documents contain and for the first time i was able to describe it first in the war in the miami herald because the washington those didn't have space in the front page that day so they publish to the day later i was a freelancer you know we do it however we can and so i was able to describe for the first time the evidence that the united states had gathered implicat reveal the inner workings of the secret police of the dictatorships of the actual perpetrators of human rights violations that's what's so important about the i the cia the state department because they are on the inside so as much as we have an adversarial relationship with those institutions as as angeline was pointing out we have to keep after them and we have to keep extracting more and more documents from them after the f b i documents went down there was a trial in washington more documents were revealed basically along the same lines the first document with the word contour on it was revealed during that trial operation condor was the six country alliance that participated in the preparations for the telly or moffit killing and of course in the killings of many other people in latin america the f b i documents were followed up by an investigation in rome of another killing of a chilean of the attempted killing he actually survived but he was crippled renard to late and in gonzales who found them in the archives of the argentine federal court and they were the correspondence between the chilean agent out and c b a club and his superiors in deano the secret  chile the actual correspondence he violated the rules he saved carbon copies of his correspondence and the letters that came from chile and these were discovered in the in the bowels of the archives of the federal court and the next big set of documents was in paraguay one nine hundred ninety two a wonderful corky guy named martino mother of a lawyer decided he was going to find out what happened to his wife because his w he was in prison being tortured and his wife died while he was in prison in paraguay and he wanted to find out what happened he thought that they had killed his wife and so he went after these documents after the strong government had fallen and there was a kind of democracy for a while i mean i guess it's still a democracy of sorts in paraguay and he went after these documents and somebody told him where the police the secret police documents were actually kept and he went with a judge and they broke  and they came upon a room full of documents and they put them in a truck and they took him to the supreme court building we asked to meet nobody is counted and we had to meet there are three hundred fifty thousand pages of documents in that collection those are the paraguay documents called the archives of terror in those documents are many of the documents that are most important to document the international connections of the dictatorships operation con and then in the ninety's later in the ninety's bill clinton decided to help out in the way that the united states often does an ambiguous way but nevertheless a real help he declined when pinochet was arrested in london in one nine hundred ninety eight clinton decreed the declassification of documents on human rights and a list of other topics peter kornbluh who was just mention works at the national security archive was one of those who helped set up the terms of reference for the document declassification and because of him they included in it operation condor not just human rights and generalities but actually specific names and among them operation condor twenty three thousand documents were declassified and then later for another four thousand words he classified in argentina these documents as i said take us to the other side of the victims narratives they take us into the bowels of the people who are doing the killing the torturing and the disappearing and they're incredibly important no no doubt the u s role in all of this is ambiguous the role of the foyer law itself is one that is fraught with controversy and we always have to push back as julian was pointing out they will hide not things that support national security but they will hide whatever it is that shows their own failures the  the stupidity and particularly the complicity in the crimes those are the things that when we finally get the documents most often those are the things that had been previously kept from us the things that were most embarrassing to the u s government nevertheless we have to keep pushing and pushing because the law is a good one one of the problems is that the documents and i know i'm working with i don't know i mean the collections of documents all of these that i mentioned plus new ones that are being declassified  are in the know in the hundreds of thousands and the only way you can possibly deal with these is by having them as o c r optical character recognition so you can do searches in the documents and then you can create catalogs of the documents it's an enormous task but it's the least it's possible when i started out in one thousand nine hundred and my first book it was i had maybe three two or three thousand documents and i could kind of handle that but without a computer with just with paper remember when we used to read everything on paper and now the computer tools make it possible to go way beyond that i call many times people special request it refers to these are documents that have been the most recently declassified documents on chile notice that there are words that are cut out now many people say oh that's hiding you know that's a bad thing you know for me those reductions those things that are covered up those i call these redactions of the fre because they're my friend and their main enemy of course they're hiding something but because they are doing the reader action i get the document in many countries the transparency laws say you can declassify the document unless there's something that is legitimately secret so it's all or nothing if there's anything secret you don't see anything the u s law allows you to see everything that is de classifiable and the things that are still secret they just cover it up and man i've got a really good at figuring out what those things say because i compare the documents with other documents and very very sometimes it isn't and usually you can figure out most the time it's some kind of a source and often you can even figure of at least where the source would be so we should support transparency laws for the type laws not only in the united states but all of the other countries because of these document the classifications that i've been mentioning have led in latin america and that's the only place i really know about so i'm not excluding these things happening in the rest of the world they these documents have been used in the prosecutions of literally hundreds of military officers who were involved in the killings and the torturing in latin america these us documents the paraguay documents of course and some documents from the countries themselves so it's incredibly the they have had had an incredibly important role in bringing to justice many of the perpetrators of the evils in latin america transparency laws are spreading throughout latin america one of the best laws by the way is in ecuador but of course ecuador no has a quasar authoritarian government doesn't respect  laws and so forget it they just don't follow their own law doesn't mean we shouldn't keep pushing for these wherever we can get them as democracies improve as they become more genuine the transparency laws become more important not less important and it is functioning democracies that use the use the transparency laws to the most effect it's having sort of the essential for the functioning of a democracy not just for things like prosecution of human rights crimes we mentioned cover up in this in this panel so i put down a list of the coverups that i know about in the cases that i have been involved in and the claim the one saw landau and i when we did our investigation we looked very very hard because we wanted to see whether there was any role of the cia in the killing of or lundell the tele or and we we did suspect that they might have had because of the because of the close relationship between the cia and the secret police in the pinochet government obviously we've always suspected that there might have been for knowledge possibly even complicity we investigated that as much as we could we can the conclusion that no there was no complicity it was an intelligence failure perhaps but that there was no evidence showing cia involvement in the assassination itself but there was one thing that they didn't tell us about back then in the d in the trial in the prosecutor's notes in anything that was revealed to us by the f b i and that was that the united states the cia and the state department and this was reported to h kissinger knew of the existence of operation condor and knew that operation condor ahead three phases one was intelligence exchange two was capturing and killing people inside the countries of the alliance and phase three was carrying out assassinations of dissidents outside of latin america specifically they had discovered a plot to kill people lisbon and in paris they didn't tell us that in one thousand nine hundred seventy eight nine hundred seventy nine they said oh we only knew about the intelligence part of it and so obviously we couldn't have known that these governments pinochet particularly because pinochet was the one who was the founder of operation condor we couldn't of known that they were plotting killings outside of latin america twenty five years later in the clinton d classification we find the documents that showed the contrary one document particular by any kissinger shows that he was very concerned because they were plotting murders of dissidents in nato countries right i found forty other documents prior to the assassination of le tellier that showed the existence of that show that the united states knew document for this one report to the state department establishing their conclusion from nineteen seventy eight and this is a document given to george schultz in one nine hundred eighty seven because he requested it in which they say yes we concluded we had evidence that pinochet gave the order and that he organized the cover up visa v the united states in other words he remember we're it was not revealed in one thousand nine hundred seven when chile was pushing for democracy and this would have had tremendous impact if they had said publicly that the united states believes and has concluded that pinochet was carried out an act of terrorism in washington d c it wasn't revealed then it was finally revealed in one thousand november nine hundred fifteen in this document which is the actual cia report was released just two weeks ago so twenty fifteen story and the final cover up is the one that is still being covered up and that is the one that we have made reference to in various times the training and of collaboration between the united states and many of the governments of latin america and of course elsewhere in the world in the case of of charles horman there was there were documents showing that frank to ruggie at least and possibly charles horman were under surveillance in the for their activities in the united states and we have f b i documents that show that they were that  identified in more than one document as in a subversive investigation in other words the united states investigating its own citizens characterizing them as i surveillance of u s citizens may have led to the murder of those citizens because of their activities either in the united states or abroad which other governments but those u allied governments were opposed to those that that investigation that the investigation of what the f b i was doing and the implications and the impact of the surveillance of u s citizens  vs has never been fully investigated and i probably should wrap this up with my appeal that i make many times which is that many countries have had truth and reconciliation commissions except for the united states we have never investigated our own complicity in the human rights crimes all over the world and until we do we won't really be able to come to grips with our own legacy as a democracy and we are a democracy and because we're a democracy we have to investigate our own role in undermining other peoples democracies and  governments to it to hard to say it but to kill and torture their own citizens and disappear them so