Transcript: Charlotte Beers and Richard Boucher at the Foreign Press Center on November 9, 2001

Charlotte Beers, under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, and Richard Boucher, the Secretary of State's spokesman, introduced the State Department's newest efforts in the Bush administration's campaign to fight terrorism at a November 9 press briefing at the Foreign Press Center in Washington, D.C.

Web products were chief among those efforts, but people-to-people dialogue remains an important component as well. To accomplish the latter, the State Department has established an advisory group comprising Muslim scholars and academics. The purpose of this group, which meets regularly, is to provide counsel for U.S. public diplomacy efforts and to find speakers to carry that message personally to foreign audiences, Beers said.

"The burden is on us to open a dialogue," Beers said. "By no means can we afford, in these more cynical, completely disenfranchised audiences, talking at them."

Beers, who was a top executive in the advertising industry before she accepted her appointment at the State Department, said her marketing strategy for getting the U.S. government message out to the world "includes all the great disciplines of communication.

"It's not really about advertising; it's about communication, marketing strategy, understanding the audiences," she said.

Although Beers plans to enlist the aid of commercial advertising agencies in getting U.S. government messages out to the world, she cautioned: "You don't want to misconstrue the idea that we're going to run a glitzy advertising campaign."

Following is a transcript of the event, as released by the State Department November 9:

Press Briefing at Foreign Press Center
Charlotte Beers, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs and Richard Boucher, Spokesman and Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs
Washington, DC, November 9, 2001

MR. BOUCHER: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure to be here, pleasure to see you all here. I'm Richard Boucher, the spokesman for the State Department, and with me today is Undersecretary Charlotte Beers, our Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs.

We wanted to come over here to the Foreign Press Center to talk especially to you, the foreign press, about what we are doing and what we can do to help you do your work to report on the United States, and especially about the effort that's under way to fight terrorism.

And what I would like to do at the beginning is to tell you a little bit about how we're telling our story now, the materials and things that are available to you now, and then Undersecretary Beers will follow me and talk about some of the new products we have coming out and some of the things that we might do in the future with you. And then after that, we'll have some of our experts here to talk a little more detail, if you want to, about specific products and ways of accessing them.

The effort that we have under way really starts with you, the media, with the press.

I think, first and foremost, it's telling you the story and talking to you as much as we can. And we've, I think you all know, sort of upped the number of interviews and requests that we're able to respond to since September 11th, and we're now doing something like two per day with one or another foreign media outlet. This involves sometimes me, a lot of experts around our building, a lot of experts on things like humanitarian assistance, as well as Secretary Powell, who's done a number of foreign TV outlets, particularly with the Arab world. He's done a number of newspaper interviews, round tables with foreign wires, and things like that.

Domestic media we're averaging about the same, two and a half per day appearances of one kind or another with our domestic media. And I think the thing to remember is that all this is supplemented by a very, very active effort by our ambassadors and US officials overseas at our embassies. Our ambassadors have written something like 160 opinion pieces around the world. Many of them are doing interviews on an almost daily basis.

We make available to you, as much as we can, the briefings and transcripts and video from these different interviews. I think we've had the briefings over here. We've had the 21 at the Foreign Press Centers, 84 large briefings in total. Videos are sent out on a daily basis to our US embassies overseas, so that they can redistribute them to foreign broadcasters, so that foreign broadcasters that are out there looking for our products, looking for the latest quotes, can find them through our embassies.

We also work directly with many of you here and with other foreign producers to help you do shows, do newscasts, do other information about the United States. And we look forward to expanding that in the near future as well, and especially, I think, with Muslim countries to expand the number of TV co-productions and then TV productions that we do with you.

We also try to put as much information as possible on the Web. I think a lot of people have talked about, particularly in the Arab world and in South Asia, really the popular access to the Internet is not very wide. But we do think that most journalists, most broadcast outlets have some kind of access, so we try to make material available there as well.

You have three main websites to check as often as you can. One is the www.state.gov website. And we've tried to make sure that all our transcripts are there in a very timely fashion, including when we travel. So if we say something in Pakistan, chances are that within hours after that, you'll be able to find it on the state.gov website.

We also have started putting on the front page every day a quote from the Secretary or from others, as well as the audio from that, digital-quality audio, that you can use in radio broadcasts are up there every day. Usually a quote from the Secretary, sometimes lesser people, like me; sometimes foreign government officials who come to visit and have something interesting to say when they come to see us.

Usinfo.state.gov is where you'll find a lot of information. It's designed for foreign audiences. It has daily updates on terrorism; has a lot of pictures and has a lot of the new material -- it has all the new material that Undersecretary Beers is going to be talking about. Again, that's available to you directly, to outlets overseas directly, and is used, then, by our embassies to produce their written publications and things like that. And this is the place where you'll find the links to everything the US Government says, whether it's Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary Powell, the President or others. We try to make sure it's all there on the usinfo.state.gov website in one place for foreign journalists and broadcasters.

And finally, let me point to the usaid.gov website. They do a very frequent -- almost daily, I think, every week -- working day of the week -- update on the humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan. So trucks, tons, food that goes in, new programs that are being done to make sure we get food in to the Afghan people during the winter, totals of money we're spending and new programs we're starting. So that's, I think, a very important place to check every day, and I certainly do for my briefings. Anybody who wants to be ahead of me can go and check before I do.

The next thing I'd like to talk about is exchanges, one of the most important, I think, parts of our long-term effort -- inviting people to the United States, sending Americans overseas to talk and to really engage with people in the outside world on an individual basis or as small groups -- journalists, for example, small groups of businessmen -- to be able to work with people who have a role and an influence in foreign societies. We have about 7,000 exchanges a year with countries that have significant Muslim populations, so this is a major effort on our part and one that will continue. And I think some of the people later will be able to tell you more detail about that.

We have, since September 11th, tried to make sure that these people don't just come kind of see the United States, but rather that they get a little bit of direct information from us. So Secretary Powell, couple weeks ago, met with a group of Central Asian journalists who were passing through, and he came down and talked to them. You'll find a transcript of that discussion on our website, at www.state.gov. And I've been meeting with various groups that have come through. So as we see groups like that coming through, we'll try to make ourselves available to them as well.

And one thing that we do see, is people that understand the United States better through the exchanges, people that know a little bit more about what's going on, are now being picked up overseas -- foreign broadcasters who are indeed in some of the programs are speaking out themselves to try to explain things, perhaps even better than we can, to their home audiences.

And the last thing I'd like to talk about as part of the ongoing effort that has to do with cultural programs. And there are many examples of things that we've been doing in the cultural area that perhaps don't get a lot of attention, but we think they're very significant in the longer term for the relationship the United States has with other countries. This is one example. This is a 13th or 14th century Islamic manuscript that was used by the Muslim Ambassadors of Peace, I think from Mali, and we've tried to make sure that's available in several languages and to help with the preservation of that item.

There's groups overseas that we try to work with. The next slide shows, I think, an example of something that one of the alumni of our visitors' programs has done. You know, groups overseas -- Children Against Terror, organized by alumni -- these efforts underway in Kazakhstan, children trying to establish contacts with other children in the United States. And those kind of things build the bridges for the longer term that we need to tell our story directly as we make our efforts to tell it more and more to you.

So without further ado, let me go on to the efforts to tell the story more and more to you and to foreign audiences and introduce Undersecretary Charlotte Beers.

UNDER SECRETARY BEERS: I've been warned that you don't have a high tolerance for long presentations, so I'm doing the best I can. But thank you very much for giving us this extended time where we do a little more talking. And we'll have some question and answer time afterwards.

We have, of course, as our ongoing fundamental communications platform simply to communicate the policies of the United States clearly, credibly, and make them available everywhere. We are now working on some communication policies that I think are necessary in view of what we need to get done in this day and time.

I'm very concerned that we get our information out in full context. We know that in many of the countries where our messages are sent, that often they're distorted, they're one-dimensional, or they're simply not heard.

Part of that, what we mean by that, will be illustrated in a minute.

We also know that often we are not the relevant voice, and we are searching in many different places for those voices which will be relevant and credible. And while we may or may not activate them ourselves, we will be listening carefully to what they say and occasionally giving forums for those kinds of voices.

One of the things that strikes me is that as essential as our offices are, our policy statements, our people who speak every day in behalf of the United States policies, these tend to be communications that are extremely reasoned and rational, and yet we know that much of the other side of this argument is intensely emotional and comes from a very different place than ration and reason. I think one of the things that means is that we have to put forward something we might have all taken for granted, which is the US values. They're just as important as our policies. Our policies are born of these values. And words like "freedom" and "tolerance" and "diversity of human beings" are precious to us, and I don't think they're very well understood. In this day I would say we must renew our communication on what we mean by such things.

And finally, for me it means that the burden is on us to open a dialogue. By no means can we afford, in these more cynical, completely disenfranchised audiences, talking at them. We have to create a dialogue. I think one of the ways we've started doing that is we've put together a council, an advisory group, which we're calling Dialogue with Islam. And these experts in the Muslim world, they're here in the United States, scholars and academics, are meeting with us now on a regular basis. The purpose of this group is obviously to counsel us as we develop messages for the rest of the world, but also sometime to present and make possible for us to find the speakers that we might need to deliver some of our messages.

May I see the next one?

This is our art-director way of saying dialogue. This is the Arabic translation for what I think is a very beautiful word.

Let me show you quickly this brief history that we've put together of what has happened to our country since September 11th. We're hoping you see it in full context. It includes many audiences that were affected. It covers relationships that we consider to be primary. And it uses, I hope effectively, pictures and people so that you don't see this tragedy and its consequences as just a logical, linear opportunity.

We start with these many pictures of what happened on September 11th. And they are already heartbreaking. But in many parts of the world, these pictures have never been shown. Again, you cannot fail to see that this suffering is -- it's not unique to us, but it's very important to us.

And then we go back and pick up the other terrorist attacks, which are so easy to forget, and are not put in context. And when you read what happened here, in case you haven't seen it lately, and the number of people who died, it's heartbreaking.

We then move into a discussion of the Taliban and its relationship with the Afghan people. This is not a history of progress or anything that you can speak to in the way of good values. The data's there point by point, and it's pretty damaging. We also use in this the clerics, when appropriate, to quote in each page that we can. Here is the best visual we've come up with, which is a web. It's obviously a web of relationships and intrigue. The hijackers are on the left. For those of you who study this material, we've had fabulous presentations and in-depth coverage. But the places we intend to take this, I think very little of it will have ever been seen. And if you care to go through each of these pieces, you tie together an inescapable web.

This is a persuasive piece that I think our embassies will take out as a two-page item. Confessed in his own words, bin Laden says -- it's almost impossible to understand and believe that another human being would say this and recommend it and house it under a religious context or pretext. The quotes are coming from his own peer class, about how they reacted to that first tape. And this is the map of their operations.

We come now to the aid and the relationship that aid has to the Afghan people and what they're suffering. And we move, then, to the coalition. I think the fact that this coalition exists is a most important consequence of what happened against the world on September 11th. And their comments mean a lot to us.

And finally we end there.

Now here's how we're going to take this brochure. It's a -- it looks like this -- I don't have one. John, hand me one. Thank you.

You'll get a copy of this today, and this is the color it's coming in. At the moment we need to print the rest of it in color, but it'll be made available in hard copy. And you can see that the distribution channels here are very aggressive. All of our embassies will get it. We've met and talked with a number of them about this facility. A number of them tell us they think they can print these as full inserts in certain kinds of newspapers and magazines. If we have to fund some of that, we will. We're doing distribution into the usual targets that we often speak with. But we're also trying to link into other websites with something that is more emotionally driven and more in context, hoping we get a wider audience with this experience.

And as usual, we'll translate the hard copy, I think, in more than 14 languages, and then if you pull it down on the website, the language list gets to 30.

The next one.

We also have a sort of a musical version of what has happened here, not that it's a subject worth music. It's just that you need to use pictures and music and tone. Let me just play a minute of that for you, so that you can see what sort of atmosphere it has.

(Videotape.)

That's four minutes. We have -- we actually do have a lot of Muslim countries that are wired, importantly, and we hope that -- and they're going to encourage the linkage from other websites to pick this up. Where we can, we'll get exposure of this on the television in the local areas. Hopefully, this is a more simple but involving and persuasive presentation of what all of the September 11th and its consequences have come to mean.

In addition to that, we have many other kinds of dialogue. This has been a rather unusual one, in this context. We have a Rewards for Justice program. We've arranged with the Ad Council to do public service announcements. I'm only showing you here a couple of prototypes, because we're still revising this. This happens to be a great idea. It's a stamp that just stickers onto, you know, places where you don't have normal channels of distribution.

The next one is, "Can a woman stop terrorism?" And the thing that's compelling about this is that there are three cases that are in our files about women who stepped up and helped prevent very serious things from happening. And I think that's an encouraging word for those people who don't know how to take information they might have.

For the first time, the Rewards for Justice is going to be US-wide, in normal public media, and then we're going to take this same idea overseas. So that process is continuing.

We also have now a major web presentation, "Muslim Life in America." This will become a printed copy as well. I think that the story about Muslim life in the United States is absolutely mind-opening, and if we can make that statement or get it communicated in any of these countries, I think it does explain a lot about tolerance and diversity and mutual support of one another, without having to turn it into dry words.

It's amazing, there are 1,200 mosques in this country. They're astonishingly beautiful, if you've ever visited them. There are many diverse people in these mosques. You can't make any assumption about who's in there. Their conversion rate is astonishing -- a 30 percent conversion in each year is about the fastest growing religion in this country, and a good number for any sales team.

I thought this was wonderful -- McDonald's has figured out how important this is, and they've already put together foods that are appropriate for the Muslim community.

Quickly, we'll show you a few pictures. The woman in her home, here, in Dearborn, Michigan. This is in Fargo, North Dakota -- these children at a special Muslim school. Praying in Manhattan. Must have been a slow traffic day. This is a stunningly beautiful mosque -- I'd love to visit it -- in Philadelphia. And here, again, is a vigil conducted during the time of our most immediate mourning.

Here's a sales curve any corporation would envy. These are the percent of mosques founded in the US over the last few years. It's obviously a growing, vital religion with some very wonderful people who have a pretty remarkable life here in the United States.

I think that concludes the formal part, and I guess now we take questions.

MR. BOUCHER: You get to point to the first one.

UNDER SECRETARY BEERS: I do? Oh. I'm so excited.

Yes, sir?

QUESTION: I am the vice president of African Correspondents Association. A couple of weeks ago, Mr. Boucher, when you were away from the country, I asked your deputy, Mr. Reeker, right here in this room about why the U.S. message was not getting down to the Muslim -- I mean, the countries in Africa with the dominant Muslim populations. And he gave me the standard response, which is, we are fighting terrorism and not Islam, not religion. But yet, the Muslims in those countries are up in arms supporting Usama bin Laden's cause. I'm not aware whether that trend has subsided at this point.

So my question again is, why is the message not getting down? Is there a problem with the content of the message or the way it is delivered?

If it's on the World Wide Web, most of those people don't have access to the World Wide Web. Therefore, I'm saying that there must be some kind of new direction.

But before I let you answer that, I have a question, a second point. And that is, recently we all read from The Washington Post the connection between elements of the RUF in Sierra Leone and Burkina Faso and Liberia, which at this point we understand are tied to al-Qaida. My question is, what is U.S. doing in that area as far as identifying those elements? And since we know that diamonds from Sierra Leone have supported this cause of al-Qaida.

Thank you.

MR. BOUCHER: Let's do the first things first, on getting a message down to people in Africa.

UNDER SECRETARY BEERS: Well, I think we have the system that we've been using, which is our embassies, our embassies' ability to get coverage, to press op-ed pieces, to have dialogues, to visit schools, to organize. Longer term, we're going to try to get a different set of messages that will have a wider audience, that will begin to address some of those people who are acting against us, who have a lot of anti-West point of view. And that comes, in my mind, in the longer strategy with the people we're working with in advertising agencies and other experts.

You had the second one.

MR. BOUCHER: Let me address two things, one about this, and the second part of your question too.

I think in many ways we rely on you. We rely on African correspondents to describe what's going on in America and to make sure our story gets told. And that's why a lot of the presentation you're hearing from us today is what we can do for you to help make sure that you understand that you have access to the information.

Yes, we know that most people in sub-Saharan Africa don't have an Internet connection in their home, but we also know that broadcasters do, the professors do, the universities do, the governments do, the newspapers do, and that our embassies are actually very active in helping people with Internet access. Throughout Africa we have programs that establish public Internet access points. There's something like 125 Internet access locations and programs that we run in the former Soviet Union. This has become one of the things.

The access to information in this modern age has been critical. And we've seen it as part of our aid programs, as part of our outreach programs to help people with that.

So we do know it's available to people who can then take the information, take the message, and then send it onward into their societies, and we look to people to do that.

As Undersecretary Beers described, we do look at the message, we do listen to the voices that we hear from advisers, Muslim Americans who give us advice, from our embassies overseas who are in close touch with the populations overseas, and try to make sure that we tailor not only the vehicles for distribution, but also the message in a way that people understand more readily.

If I can go on to West Africa and the Liberia-Burkina Faso situation. For a long time, the United States has had a major effort underway, with other governments, working in the United Nations, to deal with the problem of conflict diamonds. Conflict diamonds are the diamonds that get out and are sold on the market, and frequently they're used to finance guerrilla groups, rebel groups; they're used to finance purchases of arms and weapons. We've seen that kind of smuggling in West Africa and elsewhere.

So the United Nations has a process going forward. We've dealt with the issues in the U.N. of the smuggling of weapons, the sales of weapons illegally. We've dealt with the issues in the United Nations of small arms. We've supported efforts of southern Africans, particularly in that region, to ban some of its trade and small arms. And even more than that, there's a process, called the Kimberly Process, that's under way with diamond producers and diamond sellers, to make sure that we have a certification for diamonds, so that the diamonds that are sold in the market have some certification, we know where they came from; we know who produced them, who sold them, and we can know when you're buying a diamond or selling diamonds in the world markets that they didn't come from these sources where they're used to finance violence and terrorism.

QUESTION: I've got one question that's got three parts, but I -- sorry --

MR. BOUCHER: We can't have two questions at the same time.

QUESTION: No, no, no, no, no. It's really only one question, but it's got three separate entities to it. I think you can address very briefly.

The first -- the beginning of it is -- I mean, you were selected for this job, among other things, I'm sure, among the other fine qualities that you have, but because of your experience in the advertising world. I'm wondering, from that perspective, what was lacking or deficient about the U.S. message or the U.S. attempts to get its message out before?

The second part, which would lead into it, is how confident are you, and why, that your new campaign is not going to end up like, you know, "new Coke" or the Edsel? (Laughter.)

And, third, and a third part of it is, do you envision at some point having kind of a -- you know, the French have a national symbol, "Marianne." Is there a poster child -- a poster man or woman that you envision to be set up for, you know, to represent -- a symbol of America abroad?

UNDER SECRETARY BEERS: And I've been told to answer this briefly. I think that Secretary Powell and I first had a conversation about joining the State Department well before September 11th. You may know it takes a while to get confirmed. And so, at that point, we were simply talking about the aspects of marketing -- just good communication and marketing, and not anything like the crisis environment in which we find ourselves.

But I should just say that marketing includes all the great disciplines of communication. It's not really about advertising; it's about communication, marketing strategy, understanding the audiences and bringing to bear those kind of disciplines.

The resources of the Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Bureaus have been, over eight or nine years, pretty much reduced. And so we are now determined to take what has been a very efficient, but necessarily narrow channel of distribution, forcing us to deal primarily with governments in the first order of communication, and now we know we are in a battle to broaden that communication.

I did a Harvard case study on what happened to New Coke, and if you'll pull it up and read it, you'll get the answer to that.

And "poster man" -- well, you know, in a way, our poster people are President Bush and Secretary Powell, whom I think are pretty inspiring symbols of the brand, the United States.

In the search for messages, which is a longer-term prospect that we have working now, we may occasionally find ourselves tapping into someone who is charming and important, such as a great athlete, or possibly a celebrity or singer or someone like that. But often, we're going to have something that you -- that I would say is not so glamorous - simply a forum where an Arab Muslim or an Afghan group talk to one another, and that dialogue begins between them, rather than, necessarily, among us. And so I think it's unlikely that you're going to see anything quite as dramatic as a Coca-Cola spot.

You -- I'll let Richard do this one.

QUESTION: This is for Ambassador Boucher. Am I right in understanding from your comments earlier that you're really looking at this Internet campaign as spearheading your outreach efforts in the Muslim world as being your sort of first line of communication? And if so, can you characterize for a bit whether you're aware that Muslim journalists and other outlets in those countries are making use of your Internet resources?

MR. BOUCHER: You may want to say something, too, but let me say -- let me say this first. I'd say the first line is our direct interaction with the Muslim journalists, with the broadcasters. It's Secretary Powell, Secretary Rumsfeld, Dr. Rice on Al-Jazeera TV, Middle East Broadcasting, Lebanese Broadcasting. The Secretary did an interview with Egypt TV the other day, said some things with Al-Hayat newspaper. Our ambassadors overseas, our ambassador in Pakistan does things with television, radio, and newspapers almost every day out there. So, if you're going to talk to people, the face-to-face talk with journalists is probably the most important aspect of things that we do.

The web materials -- because of the Internet, it's not just people that we can hand things to anymore. It's people that can get access to this from tens of thousands of miles away. It's the journalist who wakes up in the morning in Kazakhstan and has an Internet connection and says, "I'm going to see what the State Department's doing today." And we try to make that material available to him so that he can then pass it on to his audiences almost as if he was here with us. And I think that's the advantage of the Internet. It gives you an incredible ability to distribute to people and to make things available to people without having to see them face to face.

But, as always, it's that direct interaction with people -- journalists, exchange visitors, people that our ambassadors in our embassies go see -- that really tells the story better than anything else.

UNDER SECRETARY BEERS: The other part of that is, often our Internet -- we have a separate embassy Internet channels. It activates the embassy in many ways every day. They take the material and use it, they modify it, they put it in different pieces, they get it exposed.

The thing we're doing now, though, is recognize that we've got to play in the marketing game. We're doing banner ads on other websites so that we can tap them and tease them into coming into our website. So for instance, this Muslim Life in America, I think is going to have a big chance of getting linked in and passed along on other web pages.

QUESTION: (Inaudible)

UNDER SECRETARY BEERS: No one question.

QUESTION: Well, how many local journalists do you know are aware or are using your web resources at this point? Or are you -- have you seen any sort of anecdotal evidence of that?

MR. BOUCHER: Anecdotal, yes. I've talked to people who have seen the material. I don't know -- John, if -- maybe later we can talk a little more about -- (inaudible).

UNDER SECRETARY BEERS: You'll have a chance to ask John Dwyer that question.

QUESTION: I have a question. How difficult does it make -- Nick Simeone from VOA. How difficult does it make your campaign to win the hearts and minds of Muslims when you're constantly -- the U.S. Government is criticized -- the President is, for not meeting with Yasser Arafat?

Today the Saudi Foreign Minister said this is not an even-handed policy. Aren't you facing an uphill battle when politically we have this sort of attention?

UNDER SECRETARY BEERS: Yes. But since we do have the whole cloth as the brand of the United States, which includes policies that were derived for very important reasons, we still have to offer a dialogue. And I think that every time you open a dialogue, you have a lot better chance of understanding the context in which the policy is developed.

And that's why we're so concerned about defining and communicating what we mean by "freedom," how tolerance works. What kind of picture of a life is in front of you is an interesting and important communication we need to make for these countries that often wonder what kind of future they might have in front of them, not for the sake of saying, "Be like us," but rather to say, "Here are many ways you can choose to live, and these are affirmative and productive." And that's a really different picture than anything like the Taliban or the al-Qaida systems offer people.

QUESTION: I guess what I'm asking, though, is --

MR. BOUCHER: Let me take the second half of that, if I can. What we're trying to do here is tell our story, finding different ways to tell our story -- tell our story to journalists like you, tell our story to visitors who we invite to come, tell our story to people directly overseas.

That story has a lot of parts. As Under Secretary Beers said, you know, we have the whole United States and U.S. policy to tell about. And we're going to tell that story. Part of that story is our efforts on Middle East peace. And we want people to understand that the activity that we have going on, the effort that we make on a daily basis, and the movement that we're trying to set afoot, to get implementation of things that can make lives better for Israelis and Palestinians, and get them back to a negotiating table -- that is part of the story we have to tell.

What we're doing in Afghanistan is part of the story. That fact that we've vaccinated 5 million children over the last three days against polio in Afghanistan without any interruption to the campaign to vaccinate children that's very important -- that's part of our story to tell.

American Muslims and life in America, what America is and is about -- that's part of our story, too. So we'll keep looking for is all the different ways we can find to tell this story as we go forward.

QUESTION: But Richard, I guess what I'm asking is, is this -- what you've presented here sort of being held hostage to this notion that we're not evenhanded in dealing with Israel and Palestinians, when headlines surface like this, where, you know, Bush is criticized because he didn't see Arafat, he has no plans to see Arafat, and your close ally Saudi Arabia is now criticizing you?

MR. BOUCHER: I don't think so. I mean, I'll say something very fundamental about this whole thing, and that's we believe in the truth. We are going to tell our whole story about U.S. policy. We're going to stand up for U.S. policy, because we do think we're doing the right thing in these various areas.

And we're going to tell the truth, and we're going to try to make sure that people understand that we're going to tell them, you know, the whole thing. We're not going to downplay this in order to maximize that.

UNDER SECRETARY BEERS: Somewhere in the back. I can't -- you. Please.

QUESTION: The rewards for terrorists that you talked about --

UNDER SECRETARY BEERS: I'm sorry. I can't hear you. Can you get a mike?

QUESTION: The rewards for terrorists program that you talked about-- can you give a little bit more detail of what you want to do in the United States, how much the rewards are, as well as what you want to do overseas?

And you also mentioned at some point that you're doing banner advertising. Can you talk about who's doing that? Is the State Department actually doing that, or did you hire an advertising agency?

UNDER SECRETARY BEERS: We're doing it ourselves. These are in countries -- where are we actually doing each one of those, John? All around the world, basically. We're capable of doing our banner ads ourselves and placing them. But we wouldn't hesitate to use a different talent to do that sort of thing.

The Rewards for Justice will be presented more comprehensively in a couple of weeks, so I'd really like to hold for it. And we'll have, then, a media plan for the U.S. and all the ads and what kind of coverage we're going to have in terms of newspapers and what kind of regions we're going into. So let me just say to you, this is where we start. In two weeks, you'll get a much bigger and more complete report.

MR. BOUCHER: Time for two more questions.

QUESTION: The President, last night, acknowledged that many people abroad have an image of America as a rather shallow and materialistic society. Is there a danger that the more you use the techniques of marketing communications, and so on, the more your communications are perceived, if you like, as part of the problem, that you reinforce negative understanding, negative images of America in the Muslim world?

UNDER SECRETARY BEERS: Well, consider the alternative, which is silence, or letting other people speak for us. So I think we have no choice. But I do think that you don't want to misconstrue the idea that we're going to run a glitzy advertising campaign. We are working not only with the advertising agencies to develop in this longer-term communication, we also have experts on how to deal with translating any message locally. We're not necessarily going to be doing everything in terms of advertising or five-second IDs or radio. We may very well create forums, or join with a partner to do that sort of thing. We may work somewhat in education. We may be partnering with anything that helps the world that we're working in create its own dialogue.

So I think that we are concerned about that and careful. And that's why we have this advisory board of Muslim Americans, so that we can understand what we're doing. And some of those people will become spokespeople, and maybe they're in the process of doing this now anyway, and we just make sure that they have access to the audiences they need.

MR. BOUCHER: Can I add one thing to that? If you look at what we're doing, it's not just sort of advertising. There's information, a lot of information that we're making available. There are images, certainly, in the brochures and on the websites. There are exchanges and direct dialogue and discussion with people who come, who go, who we send out, and visitors and things like that.

And I think more fundamentally, a lot of these educational and cultural programs -- I mean, the fact that we're preserving traditional Afghan music, the United States is paying for that. Right?

UNDER SECRETARY BEERS: Yeah. Yeah.

MR. BOUCHER: Things like that that we're doing that on a more even fundamental level have to do with people and their cultures and how we deal with them. So it's not just glossy.

QUESTION: Thank you. One of the things that people seem to be particularly concerned about in this context is whether the bombing campaign is achieving its objective. And I haven't seen in any of your material anything that addresses that directly. Are you hoping that your campaign people will come to understand the basis on which that bombing campaign was launched, or do you intend to try to get out a clearer message about, you know, the casualties being smaller than the Taliban says they are, for example?

MR. BOUCHER: I think what we're talking about today are vehicles and some of the materials that we're presenting that are on a more fundamental basis. We deal with the questions of what we're achieving on the legal side, what we're achieving on the financial side, what we're achieving on the military side in daily briefings and discussions.

That material goes through these websites, goes through these video channels and things to get out to the world. So some of what we've been talking about today in terms of voices and images is really things that underlie the programs we deal with daily on a daily basis, of course.

In terms of doing that, we have actually enhanced our ability to do that. We've set up some information centers in Washington and London. We'll have a team on the ground in Pakistan within a few days to try to make sure we're out there responding quickly, getting the word out on the true facts, as we call them. We've had, I think, to deal in recent weeks with a whole lot of claims from the Taliban that turned out to be just totally untrue.

You know, they claim to have shot down B-52s and helicopters and captured people and found Americans, and, you know, two or three days later, people find out this stuff's not true. So I think dealing with those issues on a quicker basis and getting the information out through all these channels is going to be more and more a part of what we do. And we think we're a little better organized to do that more quickly and more widely.

UNDER SECRETARY BEERS: We're putting quite a team together on Islam, Bob. Kenton Keith, who is an ambassador who was actually at one point in Qatar, is joining Ambassador Chamberlain. He's going to be often on the press and shaping stories. We have a much more frequent dialogue with that press, so we should be able to respond.

I also think our impression is that the latest bin Laden tape was received with considerably less fanfare than the earlier one. We know the Arab press did not cover it as extensively. I like very much what Ambassador Chris Ross did. He was there. He's comfortable, in fact eloquent, in Arabic. And after the rather overheated and nervous-sounding presentation by bin Laden, he answered calmly. He does not mention him by name. And in the process, he was drawn into a two-hour panel discussion following the airing of the tape, and very few questions were even covered on bin Laden himself.

So I think that lies and exaggeration have a shorter shelf life than the truth.

MR. BOUCHER: Okay, thank you very much. If I can introduce Peter Kovach of the Foreign Press Center, and he will help with the next part of the program.