Day 2 Roundup - 5th Worldwide Security Conference

I'm going to do a full report on the conference over the weekend but thought I'd run through some highlights here.

First of all I need to explain some of my frustrations.

1. Semantics. It is important to get the use of words, especially those used to describe violent extremists. However almost every session has included digressions on this - sometimes at great length, and these digressions are often contradictionary. The use of words is important, but is it so important that this conference has to discuss, for example, how to address 'moderate muslims' or 'jihadist', and not the topic of the session on how to counter extremism?

2. The sessions are too similar and too broad. Here is a list of some of the 90 minuite sessions:

a. How good have we been at protecting people, economies and infrastructure from terrorism? Where is the threat going? How do we counter it?

b. How good have we been at countering extremism? How is the threat changing?

See what I mean? how about another couple:

a. Building a new global architecture to counter violent religious extremism and radicalisation.

b. Building a new global architecture to counter terrorism and organised crime.

c. Measures to channel support away from extremist groups.

I attended the session on violent religious extemism and radicalisation. The Russian ambassador gave a speech and recommended firm astion - but didn't explicitly recommend bombing Chechenya to hell and back. A stand-in speaker made the most telling point - that 80% of countering extremism is local. Any strategy, especially one developed by global strategic policymakers needs to remember this.

The second session I went to was the previously mentioned 'Talking to terrorists?' with our little neo-con on the platform.

Claudia Rosett has the air of Wendy Craig in a hefty dose of Prozac and gave us the benefit of her wisdom. As a neo-con, she naturally said we shouldn't talk to terrorists, in fact there were quite a few states neither we or anyone else should be talking to. Naturally she didn't go into who decides which states are pariah's, or which landmass should be sent to Coventry. Bless.

Richard Dalton, a former UK ambassador to Iran and Libya gave a fascinating insight into the arts of negociating with terrorists and advice on when and when not to. He followed this up with a detailed description of the process he used to bring Libya away from pariah status and back into the international community.

Caludia jumped in as soon as he finished with her version of how Gadaffi came in from the cold; "But he's just seen pictures of Saddam being dragged out of a hole and saw himself being in the same position".

Dalton looked around in shock, remembered where he was and concentrated on staring at the ceiling with a pained expression, seeing his long hard work being so glibly cast aside.

Finally I attended a session on the role of the media. This was imaginitively led. Yonah alexander concentrated on media preperations for a future large scale terrorist attack - a concept I had some concerns about as I would rather see chaotic reporting than pre-planned reporting. I was tempted to ask if he thought we should wheel out all those 'Protect and Survive' films.

Bill Silcock from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism gave an interesting talk on journalism and the pressures on stations for ratings etc.

I raised the question of US pre-war Iraq reporting that allowed a propaganda war to go virtually unquestioned and the role of a narrowing band of media owners in countering independent journalism for their own agendas. Finally I mentioned citizen journalism and how that could be a valuble resource in countering extremism.

Bill explained that his students were making and using media in a very different way and that citizen journalism was a major force.

Nevertheless, I have has the feeling that for many of the speakers and participants, they simply don't get bloggers and citizen journalism yet. They are just not aware that we exist, how many of us there are and our potential to support their causes. Perhaps it's a generational thing but we're below everyone's radar here and that is bad for the conference and for the causes they, and we advocate.

The East West Institute is organising a get together for journalists from BBC, SKY, CNN , Al Jazeera and FOX to get together. Shouldn't be too hard as many of them have worked together before - most of al Jazeera came from CNN, BBC and Sky. What would be interesting is to get the people who own these stations together.

The conference has been very good. My comments are meant as constructive criticism of a worthwhile and fascinating conference. I've had a lot of good chats with some fascinating people and we'll have some interesting features coming soon on Blairwatch. It's also important to understand that networking/ free discussion is a big part of the programme and although this doesn't appear in the halls, it allows for excellent interchanges in the corridors and foyers.