 It's going to be led by Sarah Levinson, Sarah Levinson Moriarty, who is a fellow at New America. She was instrumental in getting the Levinson Act passed, which was named after her father, who was the longest-held American hostage in Iran and who died in captivity. So I'm going to hand it over to Sarah, and she will introduce the panel. Thank you, Peter, and thanks everyone for joining us for what I think is a really important discussion. I'm sure everybody here will agree. Do we have Cindy? Okay. So virtually, we will have Cindy Lurcher, who is joining us from the Foley Foundation. She's the Director of Research, Hostage Advocacy and Government Affairs. I have a little handy note to myself, so I'm going to put the phone away afterward. Don't worry. I'm happy to introduce Roger Carstens, who's our Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs. There's Cindy. I see her now. We also have Ali Soufan, who's the Chief Executive Officer at the Soufan Center, and he's also a former Supervisory Special Agent at the FBI. And then we have Elizabeth Whalen, who's the sister of Paul Whalen, who's currently held in Russia against as well. Thank you all for joining us. I am going to pass it over to Cindy for a moment. I know she wanted to share a little bit more about the Foley Foundation's annual report, Bringing Americans Home. Thank you very much, Sarah. And first, we'd like to give a special thank you to Peter Bergen and Sarah, Levinson Moriarty, both former Foley Board members, I might add, and we're just so grateful for you leading the discussion today, as well as our panelists and our audience for joining today. Just to give a quick little introduction to the Foley Foundation, we are named after James Wright Foley, who was a freelance conflict journalist who reported often in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. Jim was kidnapped on Thanksgiving Day in 2012, then held captive by the Islamic State until his public and brutal murder on August 19th of 2014. The Foley Foundation began three weeks after Jim's murder, and since then our president and founder, Diane Foley, has been advocating for the freedom of all Americans held hostage in roughly to attain abroad and promoting journalist safety around the world. What brings us here today is our fifth annual Bringing Americans Home report. Reports consist of over 250 interviews with hostages, wrongful detainees, and their families, as well as interviews with current former U.S. officials across what we like to call the U.S. Hostage Enterprise. That was stood up by Executive Order 13698 and Presidential Policy, Directive 30, also known as PPT 30, that was back in 2015, which all was later codified by the Robert Levinson Hostage Recovery and Hostage Taking Accountability Act in 2020. This year's reports findings, which can be found on the Foley website, are based off of two Foley data sets, which consists of 215 hostage and 207 wrongful detainee cases, going back to 2001. However, this year's results focus primarily on the 2022, up to July 31st of this year. I should first begin by defining a hostage versus a wrongful detainee, which we adhere to the U.S. government and how they distinguish between the two cases. Specifically, a hostage is an individual kidnapped by a terrorist organization, criminal and militant group, as well as pirates. However, we do exclude criminal cases in our data set. Wrongful detainees, however, are individuals held by foreign governments, i.e. state actors. However, we do Foley recognize the strong similarities between hostages and wrongful detainees, such that both groups are targeted for being Americans, and both are held for the purpose to try to effect change in U.S. policy, force concessions, and or request a prisoner swap. At the time the report was written, there were 59 U.S. nationals held hostage and wrongfully detained overseas, and over 90% of those cases were wrongful detentions. And it's been consistent that way. The majority of those cases, 79%, were U.S. nationals that were held in China, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela. However, 14 other countries either detained or wrongfully held a U.S. national in 2022 and 23. While we have seen historic levels of U.S. nationals wrongfully detained by foreign governments over the past decade, specifically 175% increased in the number of wrongful detention incidents, and a 580% increase of the number of U.S. nationals who continue to be held year after year. However, there has been, which is very good, a 31% decrease since the publication of last year's report of U.S. nationals held abroad. This is due to 25 releases that, at least public releases, that occurred from 2022 up to July 31 of this year, and the year 2022 also contained the highest number of wrongful detainees released overall within our database that begins in 2001. However, while there have been significant number of releases, it's important to note that the number of U.S. nationals who continue to be held remain at historic high levels. At the same time, the number of U.S. nationals held hostage by terrorist organizations, militant groups, and pirates have fluctuated over the past two decades. Overall, there's been a general downward trend since 2016. Since 2022, there have been nine U.S. hostages released, which occurred in Yemen, Afghanistan, Niger, and Burkina Faso. Groups responsible for holding these Americans were the Houthis, the Taliban, the Kani network, and JNIM. While there have been several successes over the past year or so, I'd like to end with a very stark reminder that we continue to still see Americans held hostage in wrongfully detained overseas. Currently, the Foley Foundation is tracking at least 60 of those cases, and of the current hostage and wrongful detention cases, six U.S. nationals have been held for over 10 years, which is an average of 14 years. Thank you very much. And I think that is a great place to kind of start the conversation and think about it. I think there's a lot of details and statistics that are in the report, and I want to get into kind of the nitty gritty and a little bit of the meat behind it. Before we do, I do think it's important to acknowledge the death of Governor Bill Richardson. The funeral is tomorrow. And so I wanted to take a moment, given the success over the past year, and I know that there was a close partnership with Governor Richardson and a lot of the people on this stage, I wanted to give everyone a moment just to say a few words about his impact on the hostage ecosystem as a whole. I'll go ahead and start if I may. Bill Richardson was a great American. He spent pretty much a good part of his life trying to free Americans around the world, whether their hostages were wrongfully detained. I consider him a strong partner. He gave me a lot of advice, especially when I was just starting out. And I can go back to my time, we're trying to work the Venezuela portfolio. There was a time when the United States government just was not gaining traction in Venezuela, and Governor Richardson was able to get a meeting with the Venezuelans, flew down to talk to President Maduro. And it kind of highlights how, in a way, this is a team sport. And there are times when the United States government can't get the job done for various reasons, and yet were able to work with titans of foreign policy like Bill Richardson, who can still try to get the job done. So he'll be missed. He was a good friend and ally. And my heart goes out to not only his family, but also the Richardson Center and Mickey Bergman and the team. I second everything Roger said. I mean, Ambassador Richardson was the trusted third party before there were any third parties. He definitely will be missed. And it's going to be very difficult to have somebody fill his shoes. And I'll just add in that we really appreciated the help that he offered early on when we couldn't get any traction with the Trump administration. And it was good to have somebody down in D.C. going around and knocking on doors for us. Thanks, Elizabeth. And Cindy, I'll pass it to you. Sure. It's a tremendous loss. And I think for most families that worked with Governor Richardson, he was almost a center of gravity in this space. He was a champion, a leader, a trailblazer for decades, focusing on hostage and wrongful detention cases. And truly, my heart goes out to the family and to Mickey during this time. And he'll be missed greatly. Thanks, Cindy. So great. Let's jump into a bit of the meat of it. Roger, if you could just level set a little bit for people. How do wrongful detention cases come to your desk? Someone finds out that their family member is being held. How did they get to you? And how has the Levinson Act helped to enable you to do your job? Fantastic first question. So first off, I wouldn't mind thanking New America Foundation and my former boss, Peter, for hosting this. I'd also like to thank Arizona State University, also for their part in putting this together. And to thank my fellow panelists up here. This is a team effort. It's not just the government. It's people like Sarah, Elizabeth, and Ali, who actually do a lot of the hard work pie in the scenes to pull this all together. And in a way, you're all included in that, except for Colonel Liam Collins. You are not included in that. And Liam, you'll see I wore boots just in case I have to quickly escape the stage and ex-fill all the way back to the State Department. So I'm ready for it. Looking forward to your panel. Anyway, so wrongful detention has come to us in numerous ways. I've had mothers send me an email saying, Roger, I got your email from so-and-so, my son is being held in country X. The details are such. Would you please look into that? And that's actually a good thing. We take that seriously. And in other words, we have a hunger to get Americans out. And so however it gets to us, that's a good thing. So if we take that, we will go straight to consular affairs and reach out to the embassy of the country in question and start gathering all the facts that we possibly can't. Because at the end of the day, we want to build a file with the facts of the case, take the Levinson Act criteria and apply that criteria over those facts to see if it's strong enough to send to the Secretary of State for recommendation. But we also get them from embassies. You might have an embassy, a consular officer, see that someone's been arrested in a certain country, and they'll say, you know, something looks wrong about this case. They'll dig into it a little bit, and eventually we'll get a cable coming to the Department of State in Washington saying, embassies such and such believe this case to be that of a wrongful detention. And again, it's not a done deal yet. At that point, we still start gathering information. Journalists, by reporting something, I would say Catherine Squadon gave a wonderful interview. I want to say it was in the Houston Chronicle many years ago. And I don't know how I read it, but I read an interview with this grieving mother and was like, we've got to figure out whether this case belongs in our desk or not. So they come in it in various ways. But once it hits the State Department, it's really the starting point is really SPIHA and consular affairs taking a look at the case and then starting to do all the queries, whether it's going to the CIA, the embassy, talking to reporters, talking to the families. We're essentially trying to vacuum up any bit of information that allows us to build the facts of the case. And when the facts of the case are there, then as I said, we apply the Levenson Act criteria on the top to see if it feels wrongful. And that maybe gets to the, maybe the crux of your question, the Levenson Act has been seismic. For various reasons in that it codified what we do. It's actually put it into law. It's allowed us to garner resources. It's allowed us to write a report to Congress that falsely explains what we've done and what we're trying to do. But I would say the most important part to my mind is that it gives us criteria with which to evaluate these cases. Before the Levenson Act came out, I think we were just kind of winging it. We would try to get a sense of whether someone was held purely because they were an American citizen and a country was leveraging us. And now we can take a look at that criteria and actually take a look at some of these cases and bring them on board. And I would argue that one of the reasons that we've seen an uptake since 2020 in the Mount of Wrongful Detentions is because we now have criteria. And as you probably know, and I'll end on this, when the criteria came out, we sent a cable out all over the world and every single US Embassy and every single consulate had to relook every single arrest. And that was like thousands upon thousands of people. I said, I know you've probably seen all your cases before, but take the criteria, apply it to the facts, and let's see if we've missed something. So I can't thank you enough and for members on Capitol Hill and everyone else who put that legislation together. But again, it's an example of the partnership of working with family members, members on Capitol Hill, their staffs, and such to bring something together that has been of great value to this enterprise. Thanks, Roger. And I ask the other panelists to forgive me because I'm gonna ask the second question to you as well because I think it's at the top of everyone's mind right now is the Iran deal that's happening. Oh, good, no comment. That was easy. I wanted to ask you just a bit because there's a lot of people out there who might be saying things to the effect of this incentivizes hostage-taking. And I wanted to give you a chance to respond to that in this kind of setting. And then Ali, I have a follow-up question but how do you see this deal coming about and what do you say to those naysayers about whether this incentivizes through these different channels? I think on the deal itself, these are things that we hope for and I can't really say much at all because it's something that we wanna wait until it's all over and then we're going to be very open and engaging with members of the public press, Congress, et cetera. But in terms of your question, the United States has made some trades in the last day two and a half years. The Secretary of State and the President have together worked to make some very hard decisions to bring Americans back. They're hard decisions to make. And yet in some of these trades that have gone down range, we've just not seen the bump up in numbers and we're still gonna run the math. But I would say anecdotally right now, despite the fact that we've, I would say I can think of five people that we've traded during the Biden administration, we've just not seen luck uptick and if anything, I might say that the number of wrongful detainees is actually going down. So you'd think that if you made a trade that would incentivize everyone and everyone would be out there trying to grab every American that they possibly could to use this leverage against us and the data is just not showing that. And I do wanna get a bit into deterrence on top of that afterward. But Ali, I wanted to give you a chance to speak from your perspective as a third party intermediary, how you see the Iran deal and how important adversaries or partners in other countries might be helping us and how we should be thinking about that. I think as an outside third party, I just get about the people who are gonna be released and their families. So towards the end, everything is gonna be political. We're in a political year. People will have different view of anything that happens based on their partisan lens. And to the most part, the American people understand the importance of having these folks back with their loved ones and their families. So if a government official can say no comment as a third party, no, no, no, no comment. Other one I said. But third parties play a very important role. And they play important role in trying to help the government sometimes go around bureaucracy, sometimes open channels and it's difficult for governments to open, reach out into regions that's difficult for the US government to diplomatically reach out to or operationally reach out to and dealing with other partners and government partners overseas in explaining the US of you in order to kind of like grease the wheels for Roger and others to get involved. I think it's extremely important for third party to be very well trusted by all players, especially the US government, have the knowledge, know exactly what they are doing because sometimes third party can complicate a case more than it need to be complicated. Sometimes for reasons that has to do, let's say, I wanna say promotion or whatever, it might also create some difficulties in moving forward and solving a case. So I think from the report, the Folly Foundation just put out, we had about 25 cases this year that were solved. 17 of them were from the, there's two different ways. There's two different categories here. You have the hostages and you have the wrongfully detained. From the wrongfully detained, I think we had 25 cases, 17 of them were just diplomatic efforts of State Department and the US government and Roger. 12 of them were third party and government. So there is definitely a big space for trusted third parties. They have to be trusted in order to get involved and I think they can help the families and they also can help the US government reach to a good conclusion bringing those folks back to their loved ones. Thanks, Allie. Elizabeth, I wanna ask you a bit about your own experience. So your brother has been held since 2018. You've seen over two administrations how these kind of cases are being handled. What's your perspective on what we can be doing better? How should we be thinking about this and how has the hostage diplomacy as a foreign policy grown from what you've seen since 2018? Well, it has been, it's almost been five years since Paul was wrongfully detained and I actually, I don't like the term wrongfully detained. I consider Paul a hostage because he's being held by a foreign government who wants something for him and that's hostage taking. So I tend to refer to it as state sponsored hostage taking rather than wrongful detention because I think wrongful detention is too soft of a term to describe what's going on. And I would say, I'd like to speak just for a second as part of this response to this whole business about, does giving some kind of trade or whatever incentivize further hostage taking. And I'd like to point out very particularly my brother's case because Paul was arrested, no trade was made for him, but then Trevor Reed and Brittany Griner were both taken. So the Russians were incentivized by their own minds. As to what they thought. It had nothing to do with anything that we have or have not done in response. So what a hostile foreign government decides to do and why they decide to hold Americans. There are a myriad of reasons but it very rarely in my opinion from what I've seen in five years has anything to do with a trade that went before. Now I will say though in Russia's case that we have seen them try to play the US government with their trades. In other words, at least Brittany Griner and not Paul because they knew of the partisan chaos that that would cause back here. And so one of the things that I have been doing recently is pushing to make sure that Paul is not left behind for a third time. We have another case and I feel for any family in this situation and any detainee, but I want to see Paul home. And so my job when I'm here in DC is to go to the NSC, the State Department and such and say thank you for all the work you're doing because we have seen a huge upturn particularly after the Levinson Act has passed and in this administration of people really caring and trying to do as much as they can. But you can't say that every stone is being left unturned if there are some stones that still need to be turned over. If there are some boulders that we've gently pushed against but we haven't done anything more with. And so I have to come down as a family member representing Paul who can't be here and ask the government to push over those boulders to do what it takes to actually get my brother home. It is no good to go 80%. This other 20% that would result in a win is what is necessary. And I look for a winning mentality from any administration. Thanks Elizabeth. And Cindy, I'm gonna ask you to speak for a minute just to build on that some of the big boulders that we see. What information from the report could we take and really push maybe if we had to prioritize one or two of the findings in the report that we should be encouraging Congress and new legislation to build on the Levinson Act? What would you say we should be thinking about? Yeah, to build, you know, I think it's great. Everything that Elizabeth just said because she represents a family's voice and the work that we do at the Foley Foundation may come alongside family members. So we work with them days after their loved one is either kidnapped or picked up in a foreign government. And so we understand the challenges families face as they try to navigate the DC in hostage enterprise. Most families don't even know what the hostage recovery fusion cell is, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs. They're just not aware, but the Levinson Act has been and I agree it's been a lynchpin to the hostage enterprise. But the biggest challenge and I would say this even for wrongful detainee families and for the audience, I think it's important to know the only one that has the authority to make the determination for a wrongful detention is the Secretary of State. So some of these families to be able to get that wrongful detention determination to be able to get access to Ambassador Carson's office there is an enormous challenge. And I think the largest challenge and one of the biggest takeaways is the fact is to identify the fact that there's a gap between how the State Department might view a case versus how a family views their case. And a family can have a lot of information, a lot of intelligence, but it's unclear whether or not that internal process in the State Department before it reaches the State House office if they have all of that. So it's really an opaque process for a lot of these families. So one of the things that we would like to do and it builds off of our recommendations as well is to help try to close that gap. So it's less of a opaque process for the families so they know what they're fighting for, what they're fighting against, they really just don't know. And it can take a few months to get the designation or it can take a couple of years and it would just be advantageous and helpful for families so they can know, they wanna put that right foot in front of them, they've made the left step, they wanna make the right step. Which direction does that need to go? And I think there's a lot of room within our US government to be able to close that gap to help make that more of a transparent process for families. Thanks, Cindy. And I think that there is work being done on the Hill in that regard. And I'd love to give you a chance to respond but I'm conscious of time and I really wanna get to deterrence because that's where my passion is right now because I think that it's great that we're bringing so many people home but we need to stop this practice. So I wanted to ask both of you and I'll have you guys weigh in in a second but the secretary had in 2021 been part of the Canada Initiative, the Declaration Against Arbitrary Detention and State-to-State Relations. What's happened since then? What should we be looking to? I know the secretary is very big on deterrence. How should we be thinking about this both from a government, non-government and private corporation perspective? I'll try to be very tight on that. By the way, I should say thank you to Cynthia for that great report, another wonderful report that you've put out and also to the Foley Foundation. I see Ellen back there scribbling notes but thanks for all the work that you've done and this report is actually very important to us so thank you. In terms of deterrence, the secretary, I think within the first 14 days of his time here he put his hand on my shoulder and said we've got to get this to where this problem goes away that we put it on the dustbin of history and this may take 10 to 15 years but we have to start it now. And since then we have been working with the Canadians. They're up to 74 signatures at this point. You may or may not know but at the UN General Assembly in New York next week the Canadians are hosting a gathering to talk about the declaration. The United States is co-hosting along with Costa Rica. So the secretary has stayed right on top of this. He's kept it front and center. And I would say is I just want to make sure that everyone else has a chance to talk here. We try to look at this very holistically. I think right now something happens in the foreign policy arena and the United States feels they have to go for a deterrence effort. They'll quickly reach in their bag of tricks and pull out sanctions. And it's probably it might be an overused tool by this point. We would like to take a look at this more broadly across the all elements of national power, what you might call the dime bill. Diplomacy, information, military, economic, legal efforts, economic, financial, informational aspects. What can we do across the entire elements of U.S. national power to start using tools to make a country not do this anymore? To raise the price of this so that a country like Iran, for example, will say, you know what? We used to do this, but now if we do it again, the U.S. is going to raise the cost. But in a way that's not the entire answer. This has to be a multilateral effort. Right now the Iranians are gonna take hostages from the Swedes, the Belgians, the French, the United States, country X, country Y, country Z. And then they'll make their separate deals with each. We wanna get it to the point where a country suffers one of their citizens being arbitrarily detained in Iran and 10, 20, 30 countries all band together and tell the Iranians, you've done something wrong. We believe this person's wrongfully detained and we're all getting together to use these tools across all elements of our national power to raise the cost of this. If we can successfully do that over the next 10 to 15 years, we can take a practice which is essentially 4,500 years old and put that away. Thanks, Roger. And I'm just gonna weigh in here as an active moderator and say that I think there's a couple of things that you and I have talked about that would build on that and the U.S. can lead the way in terms of making wrongful detention officially a crime as part of Title 18 or opening up the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act to allow for private litigation against wrongful detention. I also think from an American perspective, we need to stop having people travel to these countries and build more awareness so the State Department has a website for do not travel to certain countries or the risk of wrongful detention but making more awareness of those risks so that people don't go to these countries. Ali, I know you had some thoughts on the declaration. I wanted to give you a chance to add it and I think we're wrapping up on... Oh, okay. Well, I think the Canadian initiative is a very important step. As Roger said, there is, I think, more than 74 co-signers. I think we need to have a common definition between all our partners and because what's happening, like for example, I'll give you an example instead of talking around it, Geoff Whitkey was kidnapped in a Sahara region but he was kidnapped because they thought he was French and they know the French policy in giving concession but when they found he's an American, they kept him for seven years. Same thing with sister Sue Allen. So every country, even from our allies and partners and Western partners have a different definitions in dealing with these things. You know, constraining the liberty if any individual is illegal according to international law and according to UN laws. However, they always define it as a hostage, not wrongfully detained. So states are using this, like states like Iran or Russia or China and many of the entities that's using the wrongfully detained just to use that term for the sake of argument, they are using it because they are trying to get something and those individuals or these countries are heavily sanctioned anyway and they are pariah states, some of them anyway. So just putting additional sanction on the regime is not gonna affect the people who are making these decisions, probably affect the people. So we need some kind of an international coordination with the international community in dealing with these two issues, not only from a hostage perspective, but also as a nation states using detention as an international relation tool that they have. So this is essential. This is important to have something like this and hopefully that down the road can be an international love and sin act, right? Codified all these things in international law and international treaties. The other thing is prevention. I think I would love to see, for example, if you're buying a ticket even online from any of the platforms, something comes up that it explains to you the danger of going to that place and you have to say, yes, I agree or I read that and understand the complication of what you're gonna put your family through and what you're gonna put your country through. So I think that can be something the travel industry and state department hopefully can work together on something like. The third, I think, is pre-deployment to training. Journalists, I think the Foley Foundation, they have a course for journalists to independent journals, especially who go overseas. Also, this pre-deployment training can be done with coordination sometimes of the US government or by independent third-party experts for NGOs, faith-based organizations, individuals, groups of people who are more at risk, students and so forth to go for research to these areas. So they know what's gonna happen if they get picked up. They know what their families need to do. They prepare themselves just in case. So these are things that can happen and I can see them happening, but we definitely need to do it in order to create prevention and also to create deterrence. Thanks, and I'm gonna go to you in a second. I just wanna say for the record that I've been trying to get in touch with the ad council. I really think we need some public service announcements around this and I think when somebody goes to search for a location in Google, you should get targeted ads as a result of travel to Iran or travel to Russia so that you see some of these risks and have more of that awareness as well as the hostage flag being up at passport agencies or I understand that Congress is putting in the passport book some legislation to have information in your passport book about the risk of wrongful detention. Elizabeth, I know you have some thoughts on this. Well, I had wanted to throw another sort of entity in there that I think could play a part in helping with hostage taking a wrongful detention. We tend to look to the government and to NGOs to solve these situations but we are letting corporations, large corporations who already operate globally and have contacts and connections in different countries, we're letting them off the hook. They are allowed to not participate in helping bring Americans home. And I feel very strongly about this because my brother was a corporate security director for BorgWarner Automotive and would travel around the world doing business for them. And so he was not in Russia on business, he was there to help a friend with a wedding but they had contacts and the ability to potentially help Paul in those early days. And instead what they did was they made sure that their investors were protected and they eventually a few months later terminated him so that he was no longer an employee. He hadn't, at that time, there was no Robert Levinson act so it took him almost a year and a half to be declared wrongfully detained and it was just the biggest blow to him that not only was he the global security director but he had created a process for dealing with hostage taking and kidnapping and his own corporation didn't apply it to him. Another case that I only know of of course as an observer is the Citgo corporation when the Citgo 6 were taken and they did not do what needed to be done for their employees. So we see on the other hand the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal are doing what they can't, for Jason Rezaian and now for Evan Gershkovich, they have a bully pulpit and they're definitely able to weigh in but is that at the expense of some of these other detainees like my brother for example. So what I am looking for is for a way to, whether it has to come from the government or how else to have a level of accountability from global corporations who might have connections and ways to help, whether it's help the US government, help the Svihar or whatever, but that that is considered only the, that's the acceptable standard and not helping is considered unacceptable. Thanks Elizabeth. And I think we brought a lot of information into a really small discussion. I think we could talk all day about this but I know we're out of time so. Oh, good. Oh, I got the hook. Okay. Okay, good. All right, perfect. Then I can go over to Cindy. I don't know, Cindy if you want to weigh in on your perspective from everything that's just been said. Five more. Okay. Sure, I'd be happy to. I mean, of course going last years everybody had great opinions on this. It's challenging. At the end of the day, accountability is what matters. Having the world watching when you're committing crimes, that does something. You know, and I agree. I agree with sanctions, right? Like, you know, there's sanction fatigue, right? But at the same time, you know, if we look at the sanctions that we do have is do we have the ability to delist some of these individuals? Does that help, would that help in steps and negotiations or lead to future and further negotiations? In addition to that, you know, along with what Ali was saying, having that international attention, having that broad definition, so it impacts globally. You know, there's the international convention against taking a passage that, you know, that was written in 79 that has not been updated to include hostages taken by foreign governments. That would be a good tool to use. My last suggestion, I'll be real brief here and this is kind of a long stretch here is the United Nations again, what would happen if you had, if you, here's the word again, if you do sanction somebody globally? We do, with the especially designated global terrorist lists, we will designate, you know, foreign terrorist individual here in the United States, which restricts their travel and their funds. But in addition to that, the UN will come on top and also sanction that individual that meets their criteria. And they usually, and they typically do that within the first week, up to a month when the US does designate. And that restricts travel globally for the countries that do participate as well. So that's just another look at that. But again, it's really difficult. The challenge here with holding individuals responsible for state hostage taking essentially is how high up the chain do you go? You know, what, you know, how is a sanction effective if, you know, if, because you can't hold the entire regime accountable when you can, but at the same time, how effective are individual sanctions if it's difficult to be able to identify which individual is responsible for those human rights violations, I wouldn't say. They have to feel the direct impact of it. Yes. Can I give you some good news? I would offer that when the president put out his executive order last summer, President Biden, he actually directed that we keep pushing on this deterrence effort. So it's not even just the secretary of state saying you will, it's the president of the United States with all executive authority saying, to the interagency, figure this out and let's get a deterrence effort up and running. And additionally, he did give us a sanctioning authority within the sphere and we've so far used it against the Russian FSB, their intelligence services and the Iranians IRGC IO. So there is an ability within the Spihal realm to like throw a sanction down on an offending organization or person. But the most important thing is everything that we're talking about, we have an order and a director from the president to figure this out and make it happen. Yes, and I think when those sanctions did come out, Josh, I'm not sure who it was exactly, but said that it's okay to build sanctions upon existing sanctions because it's about hostage-taking, it's about wrongful detention-taking. And so I think seeing more Levinson Act sanctions is something that's very much welcome and then building upon that. I do wanna allow for one or two questions out of the audience. I'm told I have a time for that now. So Peter. So this is really, first of all, a comment about Roger. Roger is, I think, one of the very few senior officials who was held over by the Trump administration, from the Trump administration into the Biden administration precisely because he's been so effective and the families really wanted him to stay in that position. So just wanted to thank you for all the work that you did. It was your leadership, Peter. I learned when I worked for you. The other thing is I wanted to put a little meat on the bones because Ali had been talking about third parties. And Ali was involved in an effort, I think it's all public now, that involved David Bradley, who's the former chairman of the board here at New America, which is Theo Padnos, an American journalist, was taken by an al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria and held for, I think, at least two years. And Ali and David Bradley were instrumental third parties in getting him out. So Ali, just if you could reflect a little bit on what you can say about that. You know, I think the way we were dealing with hostages and, excuse me, wrongfully detained was very different before than it is now. It was very complicated and frustrating to deal with the government. And I think due to the leadership in the FBI today, there is a different culture looking into things and more cooperation between the bureau and outside third party. And I mean, just to build what you said, Spihar, Roger, his office, everybody in the office, they have been fantastic to work with. We really feel that we are one team. I think with Theo, it was very difficult to reach out into the groups in Syria. We dealt with a trusted, I think at the time, Qatar to reach out to some opposition groups in Syria and those opposition groups reached out to the folks who were holding Theo. And there was a deal that was facilitated through I think Secretary Kerry and other folks who had involved in this. And I don't wanna go on a lot of details because sometimes we utilize, we still utilize some of these tactics. So I prefer to keep it, and one of the things about third parties, I believe that the moment that they start talking about what they do a lot, the moment that means that we're having failure because you need to operate a little bit behind the scene just to facilitate what needs to be done. And we have a lot of friends around the world, a lot of partners around the world. And those partners have been instrumental and continue to be instrumental in solving a lot of the difficult cases. And I think what I can talk about, what I cannot talk about, I think it's better to have Roger talk about these things. I think you already said no comment. We have one more question. Yeah, me and Colin, senior fellow with New America. I guess as many of the panelists know, my background in hostage recovery is probably a little different than what we're talking about here, though it might have a role in deterrence for non-state actors, but I don't wanna ask about that, but the media, we haven't really talked about that. So I can imagine the media can be helpful in bringing awareness, but at the same time, when you're trying to get a deal across the finish line, you're just like, can you just stop? We're close, now you're causing problems at home with politics at home, or the actor you're trying to deal with. So it might be a question for Roger or someone else on the panel, but what's the role of the media? And do you find them helpful or harmful in your efforts? Well, thanks for that question. Liam and I, when we were young officers, we served together in Germany before we went off and did some more high-speed hostage rescue stuff, so great American hero right there. I look at the media as, this may be kind of strange to say from a government perspective, but I look at them as a part of hostage recovery enterprise. They've done so much to bring awareness to this whole topic. They've brought cases to our attention. They've held us accountable. I mean, I probably have one or two uncomfortable interviews, I would say almost every week, to where I'm held accountable by the media. And we actually, strangely, I think appreciate that. I think when you have a journalist asking hard questions, that's all right. I think they have a reason to and you all have a need to know a lot of this stuff. When it gets classified, I've been encouraged by the amount of journalists who when we say this is going on, please hold that story. I would say almost 100% of the time they do that, even if they lose what could have been a groundbreaking release. So overall, I would say the journalists we've had the opportunity to work with have done a great job of doing all the things that you would expect of a journalist. And yet in that one area, I guess those few examples where it could actually violate national security, they've been kind enough not to report. Specifically, you might talk about what's going on right now. I think everyone's doing their job and part of our job is not say too much or even say nothing until after the fact. And I think we have that relationship. But to my mind, we've not really had anything go seriously into the ground because of reporting. Maybe that will happen in the future. We make sure that we work with journalists. We have a very good relation all day long. We're talking to them. So I think in building those relationships we can make sure that we do our part and they do their jobs as well. And again, I'll repeat, because of what they do, I feel like they're a part of the hostage recovery enterprise. That scratch the issue. I answered that. And I'm just gonna add to that. And then I know we're now officially out of time, but I'm just gonna add from a family perspective, I think that they're really, it's really important that they also have the courage to cover the stories that maybe aren't as sexy. We were talking in the green room before this about how important it is to recognize when people come home that they actually came home as opposed to the mechanics of the deal and beating up poor Roger or others about the deal itself. But focus on celebrating that five Americans, hopefully, God willing, come home next week or the week after, whenever it might be. I also wanted to add, I've been doing this since 2007 when my father was first taken. I think we've grown in this ecosystem tremendously and we continue to move forward in such a great direction. And I hope one day we won't have to have these discussions because maybe we'll have brought everybody home and stopped it. But until that day, it's been a pleasure to have these colleagues next to me and hopefully we'll have something similar in the future.