Sunday 15th May, 2011

Q+A interview with U.S. Ambassador, David Huebner

The interview has been transcribed below. The full length video interviews and panel discussions from this morning’s Q+A can be watched on tvnz.co.nz at, http://tvnz.co.nz/q-and-a-news

Q+A, 9-10am Sundays on TV ONE. Repeats at 9.10pm Sundays, 10.10am and 2.10pm Mondays on TVNZ 7

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David Huebner interviewed by Guyon Espiner

GUYON Thank you, Mr Ambassador, for joining us. We appreciate your time.

DAVID HUEBNER – US Ambassador
Thank you for having me.

GUYON Can we start with the death of Osama bin Laden? You said about this on May 2nd, ‘Bin Laden was a danger to all humanity. This is a victory for all who seek to live in peace, security and dignity.’ The US had been seeking this guy for 15 years. He sparked two wars, thousands of deaths. Can we really call it a victory?

DAVID Oh, absolutely. I mean, the person who was the head of the syndicate has been found, has been dealt with. It’s part of a process, it’s not an end point, but it’s certainly a significant step along the way.

GUYON The Economist, writing about that this week and this process which has led finally to what you call a victory, says, and I quote, “Along the way, America has compromised the values that are its greatest strength. That was partly accident, because war is always cruel and messy, but also by design through the torture of jihadists and the oblivion of Guantanamo.” Do you accept that America has compromised its values over this time?

DAVID No, I don’t accept that premise at all. It’s clear that in the wake of 9/11 things happened that shouldn’t have happened. One of the strengths of a democracy, though, is it self-corrects, it evolves, it changes. What’s important is what President Obama is saying now, which is torture is not what we’re about. These things that people—

GUYON Why isn’t he closing the torture camp in Guantanamo as he promised to do?

DAVID He is working on that. He’s announced a four-point plan to close the detention facility in a way that—

GUYON He’s missed his deadline, though, hasn’t he?

DAVID Um, deadlines are artificial. This process is very difficult. There are a lot of factors to consider, including safety and human rights, ensuring human rights protections for the people who are released. He’s committed to closing the facility; it’s going to take some time.

GUYON You spoke about torture and whether that was acceptable. We’ve had a lot of scrutiny here in NZ about the SAS and what happens to the prisoners and suspects that are handed over to the Americans. After a 2002 raid by the SAS, troops were handed over— suspects were handed over to the United States, and our Defence Minister said in Parliament on May 3, “the mistreating authority was, in fact, the United States. Surely, the responsibility must lie with the United States and not NZ.” Do you agree with that?

DAVID Um, I don’t agree with the underlying premise. We’re dealing with news reports that I can’t speak to, particularly when the news report at the base of the issue has already been identified by the head of the NZ Defence Force as riddled with inaccuracies.

GUYON Have you looked into this, Mr Ambassador? Because it’s obviously going to be a bit of a lightning rod for someone in your position: you’re at the fulcrum of the relationship between the United States and NZ, and this is quite a key aspect in that respect, that these were handed over by NZ forces to Americans, and our Defence Minister is saying that you are the mistreating authority.

DAVID I think what the Defence Minister’s saying is that if there was mistreatment, in his view the US would be the mistreating authority. And no, I’m not—

GUYON Have you looked into whether there was?

DAVID No, I’m not— I have not looked into it.

GUYON Do you need to? Should you?

DAVID My position is to look forward and carry the relationship forward. There are plenty of other people that will spend time looking at things that might have happened seven, eight, 10 years ago. That’s not how I spend my time.

GUYON Can I look more broadly at Afghanistan? The war goes on despite the victory in respect of Osama bin Laden, your words. Al Qaeda, though, has fled largely to Pakistan and Yemen. And if I look at someone like Richard Lugar, the Ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he says it makes no sense to keep 100,000 United States troops there at a cost of 100 billion dollars a year when Al Qaeda have fled to foreign lands. Do you agree with that?

DAVID Uh, no, I don’t agree with what he’s saying about it makes no sense to continue the process that’s been started. The correct troop levels, that’s an evolving situation, and President Obama has indicated beginning in July we will start our drawdown and accelerate the turning over of security responsibility to the Afghan government.

GUYON Sure. Is that hastened by the death of bin Laden? Many would be wondering at home, they’ve got the head of the franchise, as you say, or the head of the terror organisation of Al Qaeda. Does that hasten the exit from Afghanistan?

DAVID No, I don’t think it does at all. The pace and nature of the drawdown is determined by a lot of different factors. I don’t think this one factor changes what the President’s planning.

GUYON Can I look back at when NZ was preparing— making a decision about whether to send the SAS back for another deployment? The embassy said in a cable of March 2009, “We will need to work directly to encourage PM Key and Foreign Minister Murray McCully.” Do you believe that the embassy played a key role in the outcome of that decision to send SAS troops back into Afghanistan?

DAVID No, not at all. I think NZ makes its own decisions based on its own national interests.

GUYON It’s your job to encourage them, though, isn’t it?

DAVID Oh, absolutely. The job of any embassy around the world is to make its government’s case to its host government, so the embassy all the time conducts discussions with government officials. But there’s no basis for taking credit for any outcome. We’re just providing input.

GUYON There’s been a lot of talk, and I think Paul mentioned it in his introduction, that the relationship is at its best from 25 years, perhaps.

DAVID I agree with that.

GUYON One of those areas where there is a better relationship is in intelligence sharing. A US cable written in January 2010 says, and I’ll quote it to you, “Despite the ANZUS break in 1985, NZ remains a member of the Five Eyes intelligence community, but with access to certain types of intelligence curtailed. Our intelligence relationship was fully restored in August 29, 2009.” What does it mean to have a fully restored intelligence relationship?

DAVID Guyon, it’s long-standing practice, as you know, not to discuss intelligence matters. There’s really nothing I can say in answer to the question.

GUYON Well, this is in a cable which is on the internet for absolutely everyone to see, Mr Ambassador, so—

DAVID Well, it certainly doesn’t— There are two points to that question: one is the fact that a classified document may or may not have been made public doesn’t make it any less classified; and number two, I can’t speak to the authenticity of any cable that appears on the internet.

GUYON Well, I wondered whether you might say that, so I’ll quote you from November 2010. You wrote about this very issue, and you said, ”These documents appear to contain our diplomats’ assessments of policies, negotiations and leaders from countries around the world, as well as reports on private conversations with people inside and outside other governments.” That was a public statement from you; you’ve already acknowledged that these are genuine documents.

DAVID No, no, there’s no way to get from that statement to “all of these cables are genuine”, and what I said was these appear to be discussions about things we’ve said, things we’ve done. It doesn’t mean they are accurate.

GUYON What is the status, then, of our intelligence relationship with the United States? Because it’s clear from at least two cables that I’ve read that it’s fully restored, it happened on August 29, 2009. Are you going to deny that?

DAVID No, I’m not going to say anything about it. As I’ve already said, we don’t discuss intelligence matters, and we don’t discuss them for very good reasons.

GUYON Why not?

DAVID Because they’re confidential. They deal with people and issues—

GUYON Not now, frankly.

DAVID Well, yes, they are. They deal with people and issues and projects that would be compromised if they were discussed. There’s really nothing I can say about them.

GUYON Before I leave that issue, because there’s quite an important timing aspect here, because August 29, 2009 – August is the month that we decided to send those SAS troops back into Afghanistan. Now, I’m wondering whether it was a quid pro quo that you restore the intelligence relationship with NZ and we send our troops back into Afghanistan.

DAVID All I can say is what I’ve said before: NZ’s government makes, and has always made, decisions based on its own national interest.

GUYON Was there any relationship between those fairly coincidental dates?

DAVID I don’t see… the coincidence and I don’t see the relevance of the dates.

GUYON August 2009 we decide to send our troops back; August 29 you restore the intelligence relationship to a full footing.

DAVID There were a lot of things, Guyon, that happened in August of that year. I mean, you’re drawing links between things that aren’t linked.

GUYON The relationship until recently was still a little bit frosty. You go back to the 2005—

DAVID Well, it depends what you mean by the relationship. Are you talking government to government?

GUYON I’m talking about the United States government relationship with the NZ government relationship. You go back to 2005, an embassy cable says that, “Labour clearly believes that stirring up anti-American sentiment is a vote getter. It will continue to play the anti-US card in the run-up to September’s elections.” I mean, many of those Labour MPs are still there. Do you get any sense that the Labour Party plays on anti-American sentiment? Do you still stand by the embassy’s position at that time?

DAVID Well, there’s— Again, I have to quarrel a little bit with the premise of your question. Any particular cable – and I’m not saying these are authentic cables – don’t necessarily represent the position of the embassy. What a particular cable represents is the conveying of opinion or information that a particular officer has collected. It’s raw, it’s unrefined. It is sent into a policy process, it can be read and followed, it can be ignored; it could be one of many factors involved in making decisions. So I think these cables, or the alleged cables, are given far more weight than they deserve. They are raw inputs in a very large process

GUYON I want to finish on trade. Um, both NZ and the United States claim to be committed to freer trade. I wonder if the facts bear that out when it comes to the United States, and I’ll quote from one of your own great newspapers, the New York Times: “In 2011, the American government is expected to pay 16 billion dollars in aid to farmers, including five billion in direct payments awarded simply for owning tillable farmland, even if they do not plant on it.” It doesn’t sound like the actions of a country committed to free trade, to subsidise its farmers to that degree.

DAVID Well, you’re looking at one piece of a very large puzzle. The United States has always been committed to free trade. We have a series of very vibrant free trade agreements that allow products to move both ways across borders at very low or no tariffs, and we have been focussing over time on reducing even the non-tariff barriers.

GUYON Why do your dairy industry need 16 billion dollars of help from the government? Why can’t they foot it on a level playing field?

DAVID I can’t speak to what they need or don’t need. I’m not a dairy expert, I’m not a subsidy expert. Across the world, you will find countries putting particular care into maintaining the vibrancy of their agricultural industries. At root, the core of a nation’s security is its food supply, and we all know that transitions in agriculture take longer than transitions in most other industries.

GUYON The dairy industry in the United States is very worried about a free trade agreement with NZ, even multilaterally, with the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In fact, 30 of the senators, including John Kerry, who NZers will know, wrote to your trade representative, Ron Kirk, on March 11 last year claiming that US dairy producers may lose up to 20 billion dollars over the first decade of an agreement if the US restrictions on exports from NZ are fully phased out. That must carry a lot of weight in the administration as they look to whether to do a genuinely free trade agreement with NZ.

DAVID Well, again, I’m interested in what you mean by a genuinely free trade agreement. You’re focussing on tariffs and subsidies; there are also non—

GUYON Isn’t that what it’s largely about?

DAVID There are also non-tariff trade barriers. There are regulatory impediments. You know as well as anyone, here in NZ for generations apples had trouble getting into Australia. Was that a tariff, was that a subsidy? It was another kind of barrier trick. And to get to your specific question, there are a variety of interests. Um, in NZ, in some ways, trade agreements are clinical exercises among experts; in my country they are highly political, highly transparent, with armies of interests, not just dairy interests – labour interests, a variety of NGOs. That’s why we don’t do as many of them and we don’t do them as quickly. So yes, yes, it’s an important issue. It will work itself out as part of finding an agreement that works overall.

GUYON Given that myriad of complexities and voices, is it possible that America is going to let NZ agricultural products, dairy products in tariff free, which is our idea of a quality free trade agreement, I think?

DAVID Well, we’ll see what happens in the negotiations. People said similar things when we negotiated NAFTA with Canada and Mexico. Both Canada and Mexico are very difficult trade environments, just like the United States, yet we worked out a multilateral trade agreement that, to most experts’ eyes, is working very well.

GUYON Let me ask the question another way. The goal of the Trans-Pacific Partnership is tariff free by 2015. Are you gonna be able to meet that?

DAVID I don’t know. I’m not negotiating it, I’m not in the rooms, and the negotiations are ongoing. I don’t think any of us know what exactly the TPP document will look like until it’s finished and it’s presented.

GUYON One of the controversial things they are looking at as part of this Trans-Pacific Partnership is the ability for big companies, American multinationals, being able to sue a government if they lose profits from a law change. If you look at a tobacco giant, Philip Morris, they are looking at Australia’s plain packaging of cigarette laws and saying, “Look, we should include provisions in a Trans-Pacific Partnership that allows a multinational to sue a government if they pass a law which means they lose profit.” I mean, is that acceptable?

DAVID Again, I can’t speak to what’s being discussed in the negotiations, and whatever my personal view is is irrelevant.

GUYON What is your personal view?

DAVID I don’t really have one on that issue. What matters is what the nine negotiating teams come together and agree on, and what then the nine nations are able to – or not – get through their own approval processes back home.

GUYON I respect that, and not expecting the detail to be laid out before us today, but is it— in the US government’s position – cos that’s who you represent here – is it an acceptable provision to make in an agreement like that?

DAVID Again, you’re leading me back into the negotiation— Negotiating, as you know, positions change. It’s an organic, vibrant process. I don’t know what the US government’s negotiating position is on that issue.

GUYON Right, we’ll leave it there, but thank you very much for your time, joining us this morning. We appreciate it.

DAVID You’re welcome. Glad to be here. Thank you, Guyon.