- [Narrator] From the WVIA Studios, Bloomsburg University and WVIA present Conversations for the Common Good Civil Discourse, Civic Engagement.

Recovery from 9/11, 20 Years After: In Need of Restorative Justice.

- Hi, I'm Larry Vojtko, coming to you from the Sordoni Theater here at the WVIA Public Media Studios.

Welcome to the latest edition of Conversations for the Common Good Recovery From 9/11, 20 Years After In Need of Restorative Justice, a community conversation.

This is the third and last in a series of discussions marking 20th anniversary of the attacks on 9/11.

You can view the previous two programs on Demand at wvia.org.

And of course, this episode will also be available on Demand.

Tonight, we will explore activist experiences promoting what's called restorative justice in the interest of healing apparent personal, political and social divides in the post 9/11 era.

So what is the definition of restorative justice?

Restorative justice is a theory that emphasizes repairing the harm caused by criminal behavior.

It is best accomplished through cooperative processes that include all stakeholders.

Now this can lead to transformation of people, of relationships and of communities, which is why we are having tonight's community conversation.

So now let's meet our panel of special guests who are here to add perspective to the conversation.

Terry Kay Rockefeller, founding member, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.

Tammy Krause, PhD, defense victim, Outreach pioneer, and Elizabeth Miller, a Rule of Law fellow with the September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows and a Bloomsburg University graduate.

Now, if you have a question for our panelists, submit your questions at wvia.org/conversations or on social media using the hashtag WVIA Conversations.

Now we'll start by taking a closer look at restorative justice, and I'll go to you first, Dr. Tammy Krause.

Could you elaborate on that short definition I gave at the top of the program, restorative justice, what does it mean and how can it be implemented in real life situations?

- Certainly, so restorative justice borrows from both ancient and indigenous traditions.

So rather than solely looking or taking a punitive approach, focusing on the accused, restorative justice creates more of a central role for both the victim and the community.

Whereas the American legal system asks two questions such as what law has been broken and what does the offender or the accused deserve, restorative justice asks, who is harmed, what are their needs and who is obligated to meet those needs?

So you can see the shift completely in that sense.

In criminal justice cases, restorative justice is about listening to the victims and addressing what is important to them.

Justice becomes less about what to do to the accused and is more focused on what can be done for the people who were harmed.

- All right, and so it seems to me that the current criminal justice system is really based on this set of law and statutes and these sorts of mandates.

In the legal system, restorative justice really brings back a human element to finding justice.

Am I on the right path here?

And trying to reach out to the humanity, not only to the victim, but also to the offender, trying to get them to understand that what they did really did have an impact on this particular person in a profound way.

- You've said it very well.

Restorative justice is in some sense trying to restore relationships, but you can't do that in a lot of violent criminal cases.

But what we can do is really try to focus on restoring a person's sense of senselessness.

I mean, trying to reclaim some of the things that have happened to them in the past, getting answers to the questions, Family Member's, Tarry and Liz can talk more often have questions about why, and only the person who has actually caused the harm truly can answer those questions.

And our legal system asks questions such as, like I said, what laws have been broken, but it doesn't focus on the questions that actually give more meaning to the family members.

And so by actually creating relationships and helping the person accused of the crime to understand the importance of answering those questions, that person can more directly address the interests of the people who've been harmed.

- All right, so I can sort of embrace or understand how this might work in a typical crime, maybe burglary or some kind of assault or something of that sort, but we're talking about a terrorist attack and the perpetrators of that attack are dead now.

And there there's no recourse for us to go and talk to them.

So Terry, I'm having a difficult time understanding how to apply restorative justice to the victims of the attacks of 9/11.

- Well, thank you for that wonderful question and thank you for that introduction, Tammy.

I think that, yes, the hijackers are obviously all dead and they're no longer with us.

And we will never know from their own mouths what they were thinking or why they did what they did, but there are five men who stand accused of planning and helping to carry out the attacks at Guantanamo, currently being heard in a pretrial set of hearings that are part of military commissions.

So I think one thing members of Peaceful Tomorrows have been looking at is how we interact with that military commission system and perhaps get more of the kinds of answers to the questions we've had all along, the kinds of understanding that Tammy was describing.

And it totally different level.

I think that we now, 20 years after the 9/11 attacks understand that there have been many, many obstacles to justice in the military commissions.

And so we have in addition, a set of questions about what our government did and whether or not our government ever intended there to be truth and justice.

So I think we're working through all those things.

And I think working within the military commission framework is an absolutely unprecedented experience.

And we will go on and Liz and I, and Tammy, I'm really looking forward to a very robust conversation among the three of us, because I think we are right now grappling with exactly what we might get out of a restorative justice process.

And not only what Liz and I might want as members of Peaceful Tomorrows who lost a loved sister in my case, and Liz losing her dad at a very early age, but we are dealing with a much larger community of 9/11 family members, most of whom do not belong to Peaceful Tomorrows.

And so we are also trying to think about the way we are part of that larger community and how we can have conversations about the shared needs of family members who often profoundly disagree.

And that's where I've learned a great deal from Tammy about how restorative justice in perhaps much simpler settings enables real conversations and communications and that that can be.

I love the title of this series, that those can be conversations for the common good.

- Terry, you said something that peaked my interest or prompted another question.

But first, before I get to that, you mentioned that you had a personal loss on 9/11.

We've heard about Elizabeth's personal loss in previous programs.

Can you tell us a little bit more about yours?

- Oh, sure.

My sister, Laura, was an actress and a singer, and she made her living or tried to, as an aspiring musical theater performer, and she had jobs, but in between them, she took day jobs and on 9/11, she was helping to run a seminar on information technology and risk assessment of all things.

And it was being held in Windows on the World, which is on the top floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center.

So when the first plane struck the building, she was well above where the plane hit.

And really, with no hope of ever getting out as it turned out.

- That really is ironic, a seminar and risk assessment on that day.

Well, I would like to invite the viewers to participate.

And if you have a question for a panelist, please submit your questions at wvia.org/conversations or on social media using the hashtag WVIA Conversations.

So Terry, I'll get back back to this and this, we could all, Elizabeth and Tammy could follow up on this.

It occurred to me that we're talking about restorative justice.

We got a definition of that and kind of a compare contrast to the criminal justice system.

But it occurred to me now, on top of that in 9/11, you're dealing with military justice.

And I could imagine that as you went through trying to deal with the aftermath and seeking this justice, there was confusion and frustration, and it was a learning curve of how all of this works.

Is that true that military justice, criminal justice, it seems like they don't necessarily intersect or articulate well with this theory of restorative justice.

So Elizabeth, maybe you would like to take that.

- Yeah, Terry and Tammy are also the experts from their experience being in Guantanamo, following the commissions, seeing as I've come into the picture a little bit later in 2022, where I started following the military commissions more closely.

But from my perspective, a criminal court case is hard enough to grapple with, to sit in a place where the accused are sitting, to try and follow what evidence is admissible, what isn't, but I think what's extremely difficult about one, the military commissions is none of this is happening stateside.

This is happening at the Guantanamo Bay Detention center.

So if you wanna participate in this at all, you have to fly to the Guantanamo Bay Detention center.

Or if you're a family member, you can view from a viewing site.

And I know they have one in Boston, maybe the DC, I think the DC area, and there might be one other in New York that I've never attended, but the accessibility is what's difficult.

And when accessibility is limited, it's very difficult to find the knowledge about what's really going on, how this is progressing, how it's not, and unless you know all this legal jargon, a lot of it goes over your head unless you spend a lot of time dedicated to trying to understand evidence what we can't consider evidence because of torture, what the US did after 9/11, why they're at Guantanamo and why they're not here, why they aren't in New York?

I mean the two, Tammy and Terry could probably elaborate more on that, but for me, there is a lot of confusion and you have to really dedicate a lot of time to trying to wrap your head around all of this.

It's almost like taking a college course that seems to never end.

It's an open-ended deadline with constant research required.

- Tammy, do you have a comment you'd like to add?

- Well, I think Liz did a great job explaining just somewhat of the difficulties of it.

I think one of the problems in terms of engaging more holistically with restorative justice within the military commissions is that the military commissions are marred simply by the fact that there isn't truly a ruling body or an independent ruling body.

You have all of these national government agencies who decide what information can be shared firstly, with the defense teams, even though the defense attorneys have the top most secret security clearance, but it's up to those classifying agencies, whether the defense teams are even able to get the information about their client or the evidence that's being used against them, then you also have another layer of, are they allowed to even share that information with their clients.

Then you have another filter of the layer of can that information even be discussed publicly and so harms create obligations.

And so what we try to do within restorative justice in the criminal context is try to address the questions that family members have.

And so many of the questions that Terry and Liz and others have often can't be answered because they're shrouded in so much classification.

And so that's one of the most basic limits that we have in terms of actually even trying to help family members have a sense of justice in that regard.

- Do you have something Terry?

Yes.

- Yeah, I just really have to add for people who are listening to this and who haven't of course, had any ability or reason or opportunity to follow the 9/11 military commissions.

It's not an issue, Larry, of criminal justice versus military justice.

The system at Guantanamo was created was created, it's a Jerry rig system.

This is the only time it's ever been used to try the people who were held in detention at Guantanamo, those small number of people who have been held at Guantanamo who have actually been charged with a crime.

And yet even though their trial will take place there, ultimately, it will get appealed through a military appeal process.

And then ultimately, it will get appealed through our federal courts.

So it is a terrific burden on 9/11 family members to know that things that are going on at Guantanamo will continue to go on for years and years and years, even if a trial is actually conducted there.

And frankly, almost 10 years after these pretrial hearings have started and they have been just hamstrung by all the issues that Tammy just referred to, we see this process which was created frankly, to hide from the public record, the torture that the men experienced as a kind of, it's potentially an endless process and that's incredibly frustrating.

- Well, in your statement there, I could start to understand why one of the main goals of the September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, one of the main goals is to get Guantanamo the facility at Guantanamo Bay closed and last December 7th of last year, there was a Senate judiciary committee hearing to consider just that, closing the Guantanamo Bay facility.

And at that time, there was testimony by Brigadier General, John Baker from the Marine Corps.

He gave testimony.

Elizabeth, one phrase that jumped out at me is justice delayed is justice denied.

So at this point 20 years later, what does justice look like for the victims of 9/11?

- That's a question that each family member might answer differently, but I think the commonality that we all have is we would like to see this case closed.

It's time to, is it a guilty verdict?

Can we reach that?

Will we see a trial?

And so for me, and for peaceful tomorrow as our organization, we are at this point advocating for plea deals.

We wanna see this progress.

How long are we going to be in this endless cycle of deciding what evidence is admissible and with those plea deals, and with this process, working with individuals like Tammy, it would give us that opportunity to have that restorative justice, to have those conversations of you can do some of this research on your own, like why 9/11 was perpetrated, but to hear it from the mouths or through a liaison from the accused, means so much more because it just feels that much more factual when it comes from the primary source.

And for me, that's what justice looks like, is getting more answers because the more answers that I have, the more I'll be able to heal.

And I think, this is a phrase that the three of us, I think have all been just lingering on is judicial finality.

And I'll let them talk about that too.

But judicial finality is one step closer to justice for me.

- Guantanamo is there, it's now 20 years later, doesn't seem to be a real end game.

I mean, we're still having hearings on whether to close it or not.

And in his testimony in December before the Senate committee, General Baker stated, "But the injustice meted out "by the Guantanamo military commissions to the defendants, "the public and victims extends far beyond mere delay.

"These delays are the direct result of government decisions "that have corrupted the process from the outset."

And he added "The system has failed."

Now, Tammy, the system has failed or perhaps right from the outset, there was no well planned system devised to deal with the suspects or to actually meet out justice.

Could that be, was that it was just off the cuff?

No system was really put in place, no end game, no exit was devised at all.

- Well, that's way above my pay grade and all those decisions that were made.

What I can tell you is that I did actually work with the defense team in 2006 for Zacarias Moussaoui who was at the time considered the 20th Hijacker.

And that was in the federal system in the Eastern of Virginia.

And in that situation, family members had more access to both the prosecution and the defense teams.

They had the ability to actually hear in open courts, things that were done.

They were able to hear the evidence in open court, very rarely if ever was there actually closed hearings in terms of classified information.

And so I can't really answer to the military commissions of why it was created that way.

I think Terry would have a much more opine, something to say about that than I do.

But what I can say is that families, as Liz mentioned, have questions and needs all across the spectrum.

And it's really difficult when you have thousands upon thousands of families, whether they were deceased or injured, they all need to feel valued and heard.

And how that can happen is something that could maybe be something like a truth and healing commission.

I would never use a word reconciliation because I don't think that's something that we could foresee, but there's something that could be far more meaningful to families in this process than what we have at this moment.

- Terry, you have something to add?

- Yeah, I think it's really it important for your viewers, our viewers to understand, and I don't think I'm speaking, please don't think I'm speaking just out of my own beliefs, General Baker said this very clearly in the Senate judiciary committee hearings, the military commission system at Guantanamo was purposefully designed to keep the fact and the details of our government's decision to torture people after 9/11 out of the public mind and out of public attention.

And that is why, as Liz describes, it's far away, but that is also why the process of over classification, just extreme over classification.

And I can just personally share, I sat one of the few times that the 9/11 pretrial hearings actually presented evidence, however, not evidence about 9/11, but evidence about the torture.

I heard from the mouth of the man who designed the CIAs rendition, detention and interrogation program, which is what was done at black sites, which most human rights activists around the world think was torture.

He said, "We never wanted to put people on trial."

"We were just there to do everything "it took to get information.

"We never considered a trial at all," but then, thankfully, Congress demanded that there be a trial, but because of this need to keep so much secret, they designed the military commission process and it is very different from traditional military justice.

- Well, if you viewing now have a question, please submit your question at wvia.org/conversations or through social media using the hashtag WVIA Conversations.

And there is a question here that goes right to what we've been discussing the last couple of minutes.

And the question is, "It seems that a common thread "runs through all three of these conversation discussions "on 9/11, that the US government "failed to tell the truth throughout, "for instance, about the motivations of Osama Bin Laden "about the rendition detention torture programs "and about why such truths are hidden from US citizens.

"So if restorative justice goes on, "begins with openness and honesty about trauma, "who is injured and why is not government truth telling "the necessary first step to healing this situation."

So government truth telling, is that the first step and I'll add something, do we expect them to tell the truth?

- Yeah, that's a great question.

And I think in an ideal world, it would be a great first step because the hiding, the lack of truth telling, the lack of admitting to the fact that such human rights abuses were carried out, that's part of the delay.

That's part of this justice delay, justice denied.

And I think I've said this previously in maybe some of the three conversations that we've had, but it takes a lot, and this is just like a, like for anybody in any type of circumstance, but when you've done something wrong, nobody will ever learn, unless you admit that you've done something wrong and you've corrected the mistake.

And just because we are no longer necessarily, physically abusing these men at Guantanamo, does not mean that these human rights abuses aren't continuing, and that's the problem, that the guilt was never addressed.

And so this would be a great first step to this eventual healing that I always talk about.

- Right, isn't that the first thing we teach our kids, we teach our kids to, if you offend somebody, if you do something wrong, you've gotta go there and say you're sorry, even if you didn't intend to do it, you still have to say, "Oh, I'm sorry, I hurt you, I didn't intend it."

Well, it seems very basic, but for some reason, we can't seem to the government, our leaders to embrace that.

Just a very basic thing we teach our children.

Now, Elizabeth and Terry, your organization is Families for Peaceful Tomorrows and the co-founder of the organization, Colleen Kelly also testified during that December, 2021 hearing before the Senate judiciary committee.

One of the main goals, as we stated for of Peaceful Tomorrows is the closure of Guantanamo Bay.

And during her testimony, Ms. Kelly stated, "Each of the 2,977 people murdered on September 11th "has a family, coworkers and friends.

"And for all of us, "there has been no justice or accountability "for what happened on September 11th."

Now, Terry, for your organization, what would justice and accountability look like?

And has that vision changed over the course of years?

- Oh, absolutely.

20 years is a long time.

If we hadn't changed, I'd be surprised.

I love the viewer who sent in that last question because doesn't there need to also, is the government admitting its mistakes, a necessary first step.

I don't know if it's a necessary first step, but I'd say it's a vital step in the process.

And when Liz, when you talk about if you don't know the truth, you can't correct it, you can't make the future better, I believe, we really have to deal with the profound injustice that are the legacies of 9/11, the torture, yes.

The fact that we arrested and detained only black and brown Muslim men and boys at Guantanamo, which has contributed to a climate of othering people and very divisive, social thoughts and practices.

And we've witnessed a year of, several years now of really new, inspiring struggles for racial justice in America.

But I think we can't deny the role that what we did at Guantanamo has had in our ability to think of other people is less than human or less than us, if we're white and European.

So to me, there has to be some kind of, I like Tammy's idea of truth and healing, truth and really sharing, getting back to a place that we can talk about our common beliefs, that we believe in religious freedom, that we believe in the rule of law, that we believe in the equality of all people.

Those are things that we done damage to in the process of responding to 9/11.

So justice and some kind of restorative justice would encompass all of that for me.

- Well, Tammy, we also have this facility open that has no end process to it, and this was addressed by general baker in his testimony back in December.

He said, "And it is difficult to understand "why the government is gambling extraordinary resources "and time on these cases to obtain fragile death sentences, "deeply vulnerable to appellate reversal, "at least without attempting to negotiate a conclusion "that will give the victims a modicum "of the justice enclosure they deserve."

So, Tammy, the question here is why is there no movement on this?

We all know that this is a problem.

And I would think that the stakeholders on the other side that are in charge, the military leaders know this, why is there no movement to address this and to try to find the justice and try to try to close this detention center?

- I mean this with all sincerity, I would really like to know that answer myself.

I think it's a question that the government can only answer why it's not moving more forward in incremental steps where people, especially family members can see things moving forward.

I think that if we say that we are concerned about families and we are concerned about providing some sense of justice to families, then I think both the prosecution and the defense should be listening in earnest to what the families would like.

And I think one of the things that you had mentioned earlier is crime destroys a sense of normalcy or what we believed our world to be.

And I think in that destabilizing process, what we've seen in the last 20 years, because we have had such lack of information and such lack of transparency in why this actually happened is that so many family members are suspended in their grief because they're not able to make sense of that senselessness.

And I think that by trying to give finality, I would never use the word closure myself.

I would say judicial finality, because I think families have a long, long journey in terms of their grief and how they actually integrate that into their life.

And it is not something that I think ever goes away for family members.

And so I think what we could, and we should provide is a sense of judicial finality by actually helping families make sense of the senselessness by giving them the answers that Liz was referring to as to the whys.

We may not agree with them, but if we can actually start to begin to understand them, it helps people begin to reintegrate in their own sense of what has happened and where their lives go from there.

- Well, that brings up another quote from testimony.

And this comes from Colleen Kelly, who's a co-founder of the Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.

And she's talking about the, there's a wound that needs to be healed.

"I'm asking this committee and the Biden administration "to deliver a resolution on the 9/11 military commission "that provides answers to our questions, "accountability for unlawful acts, "justice too long denied and a path to closing Guantanamo.

"Perhaps then, this long festering, "very personal yet collective national wound "can truly begin to heal."

So Terry, we're talking about a wound that is open, it's festering and we haven't even begun to heal it.

- Yeah, and I think one of the most important things in that quote that you've read from Colleen, she calls it also a national wound.

I mean, for me, this is not just about advocating and claiming a right to some kind of personal judicial finality, but I think the American nation needs judicial finality around this and the nation needs to learn answers to some of the same questions that family members are in a good position to pose, but there are answers to questions that we need as a country in order to not respond as we did to other acts of violence.

Going back to the founding of Peaceful Tomorrows, and I joined shortly after it was founded and the first person I met was Colleen.

And we talked about how we wanted to decrease the violence in the world.

We didn't want to see the response to our loved ones murder, be something that sent the world into ever widening spirals of violence and terrorism.

And I think with 20 years hindsight, we can say that many of the decisions, many of the actions that were taken, I include the wars that we got into.

I include Guantanamo as one of the places where we see the bad decisions living out and having incredible legacy still.

And so in getting answers to our questions, I think we will begin to get answers to a nation that needs to get back on track, and I guess I need to say just given the terrible events that are going on in the Ukraine right now, and my heart goes out to civilians who I know are going to become immersed in warfare.

And I am deeply reminded that the Soviet Union fell apart in no small reason, in no small part because of the war they carried out in Afghanistan.

And it was our fighting the Soviet Union in a proxy war in Afghanistan that led to us funding religious jihadists, and the Soviet Union collapsed and years later, the people we had funded in Afghanistan to fight our war for us with the Soviet union.

they morphed into the terrorist organizations that carried out 9/11.

And I think there's so much that we need to learn about all of that.

And we need to learn to take measured non-violence steps.

And in the earliest years of September 11th families heard Peaceful Tomorrows, we talked about the rule of law as not being perfect, but as being a force for nonviolence.

And of course, we haven't seen the rule of law, let alone restorative justice apply to this.

We've seen a really corrupted system of violence of hearings at Guantanamo and as general baker pronounced in the Senate hearings, it's time for the government to recognize that they have totally failed.

And I stand with Tammy and I know with Liz in saying, I would like to know why the government hasn't been able to recognize that.

- Well, we have another question, but before I ask it, I want to invite you as a viewer, to submit your question to a panelist and you could do so by going on the website, wvia.org/conversations or through social media using the hashtag WVIA Conversations.

Now this question, what is your view of the recent indication by the Biden administration that frozen Afghani financial assets should be allocated to family victims of the 9/11 attacks?

So what is your view of that, Elizabeth?

Have you thought about that at all?

- Yeah, actually our organization, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, in addition to the advocacy that we do regarding Guantanamo, we have an Afghanistan committee that's dedicated to issues surrounding Afghanistan.

And so this has been something we've been really active with lately.

And although as an organization, we are a collective group, it's also hard to speak for everyone, but personally for myself, this has been very hard to stomach because money does not bring back your lost loved one, buying something new really does not take the pain away from your grief and your loss.

And I'm not saying that that's what this is for, but you can't look at the recovery from grief as a transaction.

And there are people in Afghanistan who are suffering, have limited access to food, they are a vulnerable population right now.

And to take that me away from them, when it is their money, what does that make us?

So that's something for me, that it's been very difficult, that this is a conversation even floating and Terry can respond to that too, because she's been working diligently with members of our organization, providing comments.

- Terry.

- I do just wanna add to where Peaceful Tomorrows has a very strong position that all of the funds that are held in what's known as the Afghan bank reserves belong to the Afghan people.

What Biden did has been misrepresented in the press.

He didn't say he was going to take half of the money for 9/11 victims.

He tried to address, and this is another place where our judicial system has failed us, he tried to address the fact that all of the funds are currently impounded because of a writ that was obtained in the Southern district of New York federal courts that said, none of this money can be distributed now that the Taliban has taken over.

What Biden tried to do was to say, let's take half of it and get it to the Afghan people and figure out how we can do it while the courts figure out if these 9/11 family members indeed have a claim to the them.

I personally think that the Biden administration could have been much more courageous.

They could have said, "No, these funds never belonged to the Taliban.

"They were being held in Afghan bank reserves "because they had come from donations from governments "and foundations that were interested in humanitarian aid.

"And by my executive order, "I am going to instruct my department of justice "and my department of state "to see that they get to the Afghan people "in a way that they do not get "into the hands of the Taliban," but those funds are not Taliban funds.

But I think in no small part, because 9/11 family members are frustrated at there being no legal process that has delivered information and accountability, people are bringing lawsuits against all kinds of people, sometimes hoping for money.

And I share Liz's view that money can never bring back your loved one and it has nothing to do with healing.

And for me personally, it has nothing to do with justice.

But I do think the common frustration that pervades the community of families has led to many of these lawsuits.

And in this case, with tragic impact for the Afghan people, I do wanna say one thing that has been quite heartening since Peaceful Tomorrows came out strongly advocating that all these funds should get to the Afghan people, we started having people joining our organization and that's really heartening for me.

- Tammy, do you have anything to add?

- Their wisdom is... - Okay, well.

- One thing, I do wanna say one thing is that I think that one of the things that happens is that in our traditional judicial system, we don't really have a role to actually address the interests of the victims.

So oftentimes, there's silence throughout the entire process.

And then somehow money becomes the thing that we can actually give to achieve a sense of, some sort of redress.

And yet, I think that still avoids the very essence of what we should be doing, is actually listening to the victims, listening to their suffering, listening to their grief, trying to find through that listening what it is that they need, what it is that we as a society and as a government can do to actually truly address their harm and their suffering.

- All right, well, I have a question that came in, "Could you explain for viewers who don't know "what all happened at Guantanamo, what that was," and that's from Sabrina.

So Elizabeth, why don't you take that?

- Sure, Guantanamo Bay as a facility had existed prior to 9/11.

It was utilized after 9/11 as a space to detain prisoners whom they call, instead of calling them prisoners, they... - Detainees.

- Yeah, exactly.

And we briefly talked about that last time, how calling them a detainee almost removes that personalness from who they are, and it allows for that type of treatment.

So at Guantanamo, right now, there are still 39 men detained there.

And at this point, 20 have been cleared for release.

So again, after 9/11, this facility was used as a place to hold these men to harm them further, to interrogate and I don't always even like to use the word interrogate because it was just, I think the interrogations just had this aggressive nature behind them.

And for viewers, if you'd like to hear more about Guantanamo, we did talk about that during the last session, which you said is on Demand.

- That's right, Sabrina, if you're really interested, we went into that in depth in the last episode, which you can find on the website, wvia.org/conversations.

And we had, as one of the guests, detainee Mohamedou and he was there, what?

14 years?

14 years he was held and was finally released because he was held without any kind of charge.

He never did really anything.

It was almost guilt by association, it was.

And being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

So that's covered quite in depth in that.

And I would suggest that you watch that episode.

I wanna get back to, we're coming down to the end of our time together, but I wanna get back quickly to this idea of restorative justice.

And so many people will hear that and hear us define that the victims and the offenders get together and we talk and try to come to some kind of relationship there.

And I wanna make sure that people understand, to be clear, that restorative justice is not a quest for leniency, that you believe in punishing offenders.

And during her testimony, Ms. Kelly declared as much, she said, "Peaceful Tomorrows wants those responsible "for the September 11th attacks "held accountable for their crimes "pursuant to a just process that follows the rule of law, "which must also apply to our government.

"And that includes the judiciary."

So what you wanna achieve is this justice.

And as you pointed out earlier, this could be defined in a variety of ways by the victims.

So it's really important that we understand, right, Terry, that we're not looking for leniency, there is a sense of that the offenders have to pay for what they did, in some way or another.

- Yes, I think that what we've reached at this point is an understanding that if there were plea bargains and the ways in which these plea bargains as we're imagining them would work, if people pled guilty, they would have to plead guilty to very specific things.

So we would know what they had done.

We would know what they were responsible for.

And we would then be able to question them about exactly those things.

I think simply getting answers to the, and that probably the five men, although I don't wanna assume this, probably the five men would then receive life sentences, the government would have to forego the death penalty in part, because the government tortured them.

I have a larger vision of restorative justice.

I think that it's incumbent upon me and it's my personal choice.

I'm not saying it it's incumbent upon all families, but I feel like it's incumbent upon me to see that there's some kind of restorative justice for the men who have really suffered unfairly.

You mentioned Mohamedou Slahi, who just served 14 years and actually had never done anything.

There were probably about 780 people initially brought to Guantanamo.

The largest number of them were released under the Bush administration, because what turned out to be the case is that the overwhelming number of those men had been turned in for a bounty that the government paid, yet they have had to return to their communities, if they're lucky enough to have gone back to their communities.

In some cases, they've been sent back to other countries where they're totally without family, without the means of actually integrating into a community.

They deserve justice too.

And I guess that's where I see this restorative justice surrounding 9/11 extending far beyond family members of the victims.

I can see encompassing the country.

And I see it encompassing the other people who were victimized by our responses to 9/11.

But yes, I do wanna reiterate that it's not about just saying, "Well, we're gonna sit down and talk with you, "and then you're gonna go off scot free.

But the truth goes a long way.

- Our time quickly coming to an end.

And I wanna leave it, I wanna try to understand how we can make a difference, each of us, the viewers in trying to provide this justice.

And it just seems that hatred and violence they are on the upswing throughout the world.

And I'm not sure if this could be proved through measurement or perhaps, it's just that we're hearing more accounts of all of this because the information barrage that we're left with today, and hatred and violence, of course, has always been part of the human experience.

But Tammy, is there a way that this can be decreased?

What can the average person do?

So many feel helpless.

- We do, and whew, I think it's about really, in some ways, looking at trying to write relations with one another again.

It's about really listening to, even if we don't agree with one another, it's about listening to understand.

And when we listen to understand the other person, it goes with the hope that we are also listening to be understood.

And one of the things I wanna hearken back to when Terry was talking about restorative justice, I think that's really important.

And to me, is heartening, is that oftentimes, restorative justice is misunderstood that it's somehow trying to be lenient, like you said, on the person who is accused of a crime or that is trying to get the person off.

But in fact, it goes back to what you were just asking about in terms of what's heartening is that restorative justice actually requires the person accused of the crime to accept responsibility and to actually engage more deeply with the system rather than remaining silent.

And so it can actually be a more meaningful outcome for the families or the people who were harmed, because it actually requires acceptance of responsibility showing remorse and actually addressing the victim's interest, and to me, that is hopeful when we have so much brokenness in our criminal justice system.

- Elizabeth, in about 30 seconds, what can we do?

- I think, these conversations that we've been lucky enough to have can be used in the most general sense and for the restorative justice conversation, that's what it's about, conversation, sitting down with somebody, getting that detail, trying to learn from one another's perspective.

It's the simplest thing that you can do.

You never realize how kind a quick conversation can be.

- Terry, I'm thinking that maybe there's a way that if a person wanna take a more active role in doing something that perhaps your organization has some way that they could engage.

- Well, we're an organization of family members, but we welcome conversations with the general public.

I'm a member of several different organizations.

I would say that working through other organizations like Amnesty International to really achieve closure of Guantanamo, the shuttering of the detention facilities and an into the military commissions, there are actions that US citizens can take through Amnesty USA.

I also just wanna reiterate what Tammy and Liz have emphasized.

I think that, thank you to the audience who's joined us today, who is just curious and willing to listen and desiring to learn about what recovery 20 years after the 9/11 attacks might look like.

I think it's really important that we enter into conversations without assumptions and with humility about what we think we know.

And I think, an opportunity lies here for the common good of our nation and ultimately the common good of our world, if we do that more effectively.

- Well, I think that WVIA is proud to partner with Bloomsburg University in this endeavor because after 20 years or so, I think for a lot of people, it's fallen off the radar and we just don't think about it on a daily or even weekly.

It's just not there.

So with programs like this, perhaps we can keep that conversation going with you.

And thank you so much for watching.

I would like to thank our panelists and Bloomsburg University.

And of course you, for being part of this edition of Conversations for the Common Good Recovery From 9/11 20 Years After: In Need of Restorative Justice community conversations.

On behalf of WVIA, I'm Larry Vojtko.

Thank you so much for watching.

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