singles, doubles and getting on base. looking at politics and prose i came away reassured that this store has many of the attributes for success that other stores around the country have, particularly that very loyal customer base, a large number of avid readers, great reputation that still has a lot of unrealized value in it? >> host: barbara meade and carla cohen were well known for working the floor at politics and prose. if booktv viewers who have come because they have seen it so often on the channel, come to visit politics and prose if they are in washington pouring will they be able to meet you? ..

>> and they will, we are counting on many of them,not all of them, to remain and carry on. >> host: now, mr. graham, do you see a need for politics and prose, perhaps, to move into the selling of digital books or an enhancement of the web site? >> guest: we are looking at enhancing the web site. i think, i think that will be important. we realize the threat from e books, but it's not a threat we're going to run away from. we are hoping to, to provide

opportunities for self-publishing, and we're looking at a print on demand machine like a number of other stores have acquired around the country. there are a host of initiatives, i think, that you'll see beginning to take shape at politics and prose. >> host: well, bradley graham is the new co-owner, along with his wife, of the well-known washington independent bookstore, politics and prose. mr. graham, good luck to you, and booktv looks forward to continuing our relationship with you. >> guest: we do too. thanks very much. >> and now from the 2011 annapolis book festival, rights of the people. garrett graff and david shipler discuss what our need for security as a countries has cost in terms of our rights and liberties. this is about an hour. >> by garrett graff, who's seated on my left and your right, and the rights of the people with by david shipler

who's seatedded on my right. your left. i'm steven, i teach at the naval academy in annapolis. i'm very interested in the questions these books treat, as you will be, i'm sure. david shipler's career tracks a brilliant trajectory for journalism in the 20th century. he started as a news clerk at "the new york times" in 1966, was serving in saigon five years later. his career took him from saigon through jerusalem and moscow where he was the bureau chief for "the new york times" in each place and also to washington where he was the chief diplomatic correspondent for "the new york times" in washington. his books from these experiences won the overseas press club award, the book from moscow which was called "russia: broken

idols, solemn dreams." his book from jerusalem won the george polk award. he also then produced a pbs film, "arab and jew," which won the dupont columbia award for broadcast journalism. his work returned to focus on the united states, and he looked at the issue of race in the united states in this a book called "country of strangers: plaques and whites in -- blacks and whites this america. " and then another titled, "the working poor." and those books literally won a pile of awards. the pulitzer prize included. his work has been outstanding on every level, and now he's turned to the issue of civil rights and civil liberties and the

consequences for them during this, what's been called the war on terror. mr. graff's career has been defining the trajectory of journalism in the 21st century. he's the editor of the washingtonian magazine and served as the deputy national press secretary on howard dean's campaign. he was howard dean's webmaster when dean was first mastering the ways to make the web useful in forming a political campaign and movement. he's written about that experience in a book titled, " the -- >> you know the title. >> "the first campaign." >> that's it. [laughter] "the first campaign." and now he's written about the experience of the fbi, war in the age of global terror, a book called "the threat matrix." these two books actually mention

some of the same people and cover the same stories, but from different ways. in one case treating the excellence of the fbi in preventing the repetition of another september 11th, and in the other case documenting some of the dangers that may come from a zealous attempt to provide security sometimes at the expense of rights. mr. shipler. >> thank you very much. when i was working on the the subject of civil liberties, i -- people kept making wisecracks. oh, remember them? oh, you're doing a history. i was at a luncheon in washington with former ambassadors and flag officers, and when i told them what i was doing, there was a round of one-liners, oh, it's going to be a short book. oh, it's getting shorter and shorter. you're going to be a panel me tier. well, it's not a short book and, in fact, this is only the first

of two volumes. so it becomes a very complex issue in a way. i understood this immediately after signing up to go out with d.c. police looking for the bill of rights in the middle of the night on the streets of some of the toughest neighborhoods of washington. i was in the care of two different groups, one an undercover narcotics group, the other what's called the power shift which is a team that goes out looking for guns. the power shift i'll talk about a little bit because it's a particularly interesting area given that the fourth amendment is the one part of the bill of rights that's been most tested since 9/11. now, the issues that i saw on the streets of washington had nothing to do with 9/11. they had to do with a different war, the war on guns, the war on drugs. but many of the same questions arise more subtly, less visibly

on those streets than they have in the counterterrorism field where the fourth amendment, of course, has been quite severely tested by various electronic surveillance and other search methods. the fourth amendment has a very pivotal word in it, and i'd like to read it to you because a lot of people forget this word when they're talking about this particular protection. the word is secure. and because we often juxtapose security and liberty thinking that, perhaps, they're a zero zero-sum game and we give up one for another, the fourth amendment actually imagines the importance of security in privacy in a sense although privacy is never used in the constitution. the right of the people to be

secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause supported by oath or affirmation and particularly -- another keyword, tribing the place to be -- describing the place to be searched and the person or things to be seized. it was deep in the night when i went out with the power shift looking for guns a mile or two from the supreme court. the police officers travel uniformed and in marked cars. not undercover because they want to see the reactions of people on the streets when they arrive. they believe they can tell who's carrying a weapon. as you know, in d.c. it is still the case even after the supreme court decision on the second amendment that carrying a weapon concealed out on the street is illegal. you can have it in your home if you get licensed, but not on the

street. so the power shift, it's an automatic crime. i mean, if you have it, you have committed a felony. the power shift was going hunting. the sergeant had a 12-gauge shotgun between the seats, and when he would see a couple of guys on the seat -- as happened very early on in that night -- he'd pull up and get out of his car. now, these two young men started walking away. and immediately the sergeant suspected that there was a reason for that. three other patrol cars arrived, six other officers, and what happened next was a very interesting indication of how the constitution plays out on the streets. the fourth amendment is there. it's a little bruised at times, it gets bent, but within the confines of what the courts have prescribed, the police operate sometimes bumping up against the

limits, but fairly freely in certain respects. it's a little bit like a team going out for a game figuring, well, they could commit a foul here and there, maybe the refs won't notice. so the power shift was with doing this -- the power shift was doing this very often. now, this particular activity -- searching pedestrians, frisk pedestrians, trying to figure out whether they have guns -- is permitted under a line of cases that began with terry v. ohio in 1968 when the supreme court ruled that you did not have to have probable cause to search a pedestrian. probable cause meaning probable cause to believe that evidence of a particular crime will be found. that is more than a 50% chance. they reduced that demand to something called reasonable suspicion. reasonable suspicion is vaguely defined. it's a hunch, it's a sense, it's

the kind of thing that police officers will say make, makes the hair on the back of your neck stick up. and reasonable suspicion that someone is armed is good enough to permit a legal patdown on the street of a pedestrian. this particular area is really pretty close to the constitution along with formal search warrants. you can pat down somebody, you can frisk somebody personally on the street under reasonable suspicion, but you cannot search his home without getting a search warrant on the basis of probable cause, that higher standard, and a judge's signature. no judge on the street to sign a warrant, a moving situation. the same with vehicles. that's why the supreme court has allowed warrantless searches where there is probable cause to believe that evidence is inside a vehicle. or a reasonable suspicion to

suspect someone is armed. so that search, kind of search, is really closest to the constitution in a sense. this is part of a spectrum, a broad spectrum of government's ability to intrude into our lives. that's the end of the spectrum most faithful to the warrant. take a few steps from the constitution, and you find yourself along a continuum that leads to the secret foreign intelligence surveillance court which issues secret warrants based on secret showing by the fbi or other agencies that someone should be monitored for being an agent of a foreign power, including a terrorist organization. this can include breaking into homes secretly, copying hard strives of computers. -- hard drives of computers. and unless that particular evidence that's gathered is brought to court as evidence,

the subject never gets to see the basis of that warrant. now, the foreign intelligence surveillance act has been relaxed tremendously by the patriot act. it was passed in the 1978, actually, as a privacy protection after the co-spell pro activities by the fbi, spying on domestic groups and so forth. that privacy law, that attempt to regulate intelligence gathering has been undermined by the patriot act. we can go into that during questions, if you'd like. it's a very complicated but quite significant area. then there are, then there are ways the government can look into your personal electronic records and so forth on the basis of mid-level officials issuing what are called national security letters which do not require any judicial authorization. only that they have to be, quote, relevant to an investigation. a very vague standard. national security letters have

mushroomed. there are about 50,000 a year being ordered, and they all come with a gag order. you cannot say anything to anyone except your lawyer about having received one. this biffs the -- gives the executive branch enormous power without judicial oversight. but let's go back to the streets, because it's very interesting what happened when i was out with the power shift. the officers would pull up, they'd get out of their cars. these two young men walked away, and the sergeant in charge was a friendly guy. he said, you know, good evening, gentlemen, what's up? got any guns or drugs this evening? [laughter] you know, chatting them up. you know, got a cigarette? these two guys stopped, and without being asked they did something which was quite astonishing. it was a warm evening in june. they pulled up their t-shirts to show that they had no guns in their waistbands. they hadn't been asked to do

that. nobody had patted them down. this happened the again and -- this happened again and again and again when i was out with the power shift. people so used to the cops coming around and asking if they had guns that they would defend themselves immediately by just pulling up their shirts to show they didn't have guns. now, the police have a training program, and i went to it, in which you are enaled to spot people who have guns. for example, one of the key ways to do this is to watch their hands. if you have a gun in your waistband, you're going to start, you're going to touch that gun many times to make sure it's there. police officers do this, too, and they have holsters. but if you just have a gun in a waistband, your hand is going to kind of keep going down to that area. if you're walking, the hand closer to the gun swings a little less of a distance away from your waist. the faster you walk, the more

asymmetrical it becomes until you're running, you're holding the gun, and it's a clue that you've thrown the gun if you're running symmetrically again. watch for people who are in coats that are too baggy for the weather. if there are five guys on a street corner, chances are that four of them will look at the guy with the again when the police -- gun when the police arrive. if they turn their gun side away from you or lean it up against a car, the sergeant i was with had this experience in iraq. he was in the army, and they were in, they went into a house, and the guy in the house seemed awfully calm. for the situation. and he turned one side away from them. sergeant thought he might have a grenade in his pocket, and he dove for it and another guy did and, sure enough, there was a grenade. now, with that kind -- and there

are other clues, too, you know, jackets hanging at an angle and that sort of thing. now, with that kind of sophistication, you would think that the averages of finding guns would be very high. and yet when i was out with the power shift, they may have searched 18, 20, 30 people a night, came up with two guns. so most people are getting searched, but there's no evidence of any wrongdoing when they get searched. now, this sergeant was like a bedouin in the sinai. i've been with bedouins in the sinai who can see things that you don't see, or an old veteran in israel driving through lebanon during the war in '82 who had a sense that we were going down a road, and there was something wrong here. it was a little too quiet. sure enough, there were syrian troops at the far end. we made the fastest u-turn i've

ever made. or an interpreter in vietnam who had a sense of what roads were safe and what weren't. now, thisser sergeant saw things that i could never have seen. and one evening we were -- one evening, it was about two in the morning. i think we were driving down a street in d.c., and there was a white ford suv, and it pulled over to the right. and a middle-aged man got out and walked across the street and back up toward our way. and the sergeant told me later that he thought this man was trying to get away from his vehicle a little too fast. i must say, i didn't see it that way at all. so the sergeant said, good evening, sir. is this your, is this your vehicle? the man stopped. he didn't have to under the law, but he stopped. yes, he said. second thing, he didn't have to acknowledge the vehicle. i think your windows have too

much tint on them. you know, d.c. police take -- the gun squad carries tint meters that measure the amount of light getting through the window because it's an infraction if it's too little, and it's a great excuse to make a stop and even sometimes to get into the vehicle. so the fellow said, no, well, it's factory tint. he said, well, let's have a look. the man went over to his suv, he unlocked it, and he opened the door. at this point the sergeant said, is that alcohol i see in the cup there? this was another way to get into a vehicle. no, no, no, it's just, you know, soft drink, and he picked up the cup at which point the sergeant saw a little bag of crack. at this point when you see evidence in many plain view -- in plain view, then you have the right to do a search. that's probable cause. you don't have to have permission. he searched the vehicle, there was a black gym bag on the floor in front of the passenger seat.

inside there was a tech nine machine gun, a very nasty-looking gun with an air cooler on the barrel. the man was busted. so i said to the sergeant later, i said, now, just -- i want to understand this. he didn't have to stop when you spoke to him. no, he didn't. and he didn't have to go back to his vehicle, right? >> no, he didn't. and he certainly didn't have to unlock the door and open it. no, that's right, he could have done better, said the sergeant. [laughter] people do not know their rights, especially under the fourth amendment. under boost monte, a supreme court decision in which thurgood marshall strenuously dissented, there is no obligation to advise people of their right to refuse to be searched as there is an obligation in the miranda case to advise people of their right to refuse to answer questions. therefore, people, you know, say, okay, all the time, and a

lot of people i asked did you agree to search? why did you agree to a search? they'll say, oh, i didn't know -- i ain't got nothing in there, or i didn't know i could say no. and their afraid if they say no, the cops will search anyway and be more suspicion. so when you give permission, you waive your fourth amendment rights. it's a problem throughout, across that broad spectrum that i described. and the court has made it easier and easier to the point where, for example, after the terry v. ohio case we have a broadening permission where you can search without permission if you see evidence in plain view. that was decided in 1969. and then if you smell marijuana, you can search. that was decided in 1982, that's called plain odor. and then plain feel in 1993 if you're searching, if you're

patting down, say, for a gun and you don't find the gun, but you find something else hard and it turns out to be a bag of crack, for example, then you had probable cause to go and search further and take it out of the pocket, and then it gets admitted into evidence. there's a lot of room here for what defense attorneys call testa lying by police, of course. you know, to what extent did they, in fact, see evidence? did they really have, smell marijuana and so forth? there are lots of opportunity to shade the truth, and it does happen. but this is a, this is one little sliver of what we see, and i think that the police do, at least these squads i was with, bend the rules but not flagrantly. really, the rules are set by the courts, and they're pretty good at least in d.c. for the most

part at staying within those parameters even though they do shade the truth from time to time, and they bump up against the limits. at the end of the night, the sergeant said to me after we had gone through all of this one of the nights i was with him as he was going back into first division headquarters, he turned over his shoulder, and he looked at me, and he says, it's addictive, isn't it? [laughter] thank you. >> thank you. [applause] >> well, i end up, many my book -- in my book, telling a specific slice of the full picture that david traces in his book. i set out to tell the story of how the fbi has evolved since 9/11. and this was a book that i began working on in 2008 when i profile bed fbi director robert mueller. muller -- mueller is this

fascinating character in the war on terror. he started work as fbi director on september 4, 2001, and on his seventh day got hit, almost literally, with the 9/11 attacks. he is now still in office. he is the longest-serving fbi director since j. edgar hoover himself and is now the only national security official in the u.s. government left in if his same job since 9/11. and so mueller, i think, in a lot of ways becomes this essential figure in the telling of the way that the u.s. has responded to the 9/11 attacks and the war on terror. and so my book started out as a story of trying to tell mueller's evolution and the pressures of the fbi on the morning of 9/11 and the morning

of 9/12 as they were handed this huge new mission of preventing the next attack. now, as i got into this, though, one of the things that i found fascinating was that the fbi has been struggling with this pend hum that david talks about -- pendulum that david talks about between security and civil liberty since the 1970s. and so the finished book actually begins the day that j. edgar hoover dies; may 1972. and that year after hoover's death becomes this really seminal moment for the way that we approach national security, the way that we approach intelligence work, and the way that we approach terrorism. hoover dies in may. in september of that year you have the munich olympics, the palestinian terror attacks on

the israeli delegation to the munich olympics, the first act of violence, international terrorism. and in november of that year you have this great moment mostly lost to the cobwebs of history now, the hijacking of southern airways flight 49. now, some of you in this room may remember there was actually a time when hijackings of commercial aircraft in the united states were quite frequent. and that we actually had in the '60s and early '70s a hijacking about once a week or once every other week in the united states. and that they were almost all nonviolent. they followed the exact same path. it was a criminal looking to escape who would hijack a plane, fly to cuba, get dropped off, the plane would fly back. no one was injured, it took a couple of hours, sometimes overnight, and it became sort of like thunderstorms at o'hare in

the summer afternoon. [laughter] sorry, honey, i'm going to be home late tonight, my plane was hijacked to cuba. and this had been something that we as a country had gotten relatively used to. and i found this great quote from an faa official in the late '60s saying, in effect, we're sorry that there are all of these hijackings and that they're such an inconvenience, but the only way we could possibly stop all these hijackings would be to put all passengers through metal detectors. [laughter] and the american traveling public would never stand for that. [laughter] and i was sort of thinking of this last fall as we watched the debate over thanksgiving about the new back scanner technology and thinking that someday we'll be telling our grandkids like, yes, there was a moment where you didn't have to be naked to fly. [laughter] and just sort of these things that, you know, in one era seem

a complete anathema in terms of that pendulum and that continuum between security and liberty, that at one point we're unwilling to do at a later point after a changing event we become quite willing to embrace. and one of the things that happens in that period after, of course, j. edgar hoover dies, as david mentioned, was this pro-intel scandal. sort of all of these black bag surveillance jobs that the fbi had been doing against american dissident groups like the weather underground, the black panthers and then those terrible american radicals, people like reverend martin luther king. and all of these illegal surveillance programs, intimidation programs, break-ins, sort of all of this relatively nasty, determine illegal stuff -- definitely

illegal stuff that the fbi had been involved in. all of it mostly sanctioned by hoover personally. and there become several rounds of scandals that come out after this, after hoover dies. a number of fbi officials including the man that we now know as deepthroat, mark felt, end up being prosecuted for their role in watergate and these black bag jobs for these illegal surveillance activities. and the fbi begins this big crackdown, and by crackdown i mean agreeing that they will only do legal surveillance from this point forward. and one of the things that becomes really fascinating to me as i begin to try to trace out this book is that the rules that we put into place in the 1970s, the rules that we put into place after the prosecution

of deep throat and pat grave and the acting fbi director become the exact thicks that -- things that handicap the fbi in the runup to 9/11 as that pendulum sort of continually swings back over those intervening 30 years between security on the one hand and civil liberties on the other. and that in the 1980s you have sort of these great stories of the fbi as they begin to confront some of these terror threats. and that, in fact, one of the first cases that the joint terrorism task force in new york worked, sort of this new organization that the nypd and the fbi have set up together to combat this new scourge of terrorism, was this fascinating case where the fbi/jtpf busts this sort of break-off group of the black panthers on the eve of their planned assault on a federal courthouse where they planned to attack the federal

courthouse where one of their leaders was being tried. storm the courthouse, kill the officials inside and free their ringleader. now, in court these men are all acquitted. and what the jury says is this is a free society and that there is no proof that these people were actually going to execute the i tacks -- the attacks that they were planning. and that by busting them before they executed their attack, you are punishing them for a crime that they have not yet committed. and that's not something that we as a society are willing to embrace. and there's this sort of great senate debate, again, sort of, you know, 20 years after, after co-intel pro where senator arlen specter says to the deputy directer of the fbi in a senate

hearing, "in a free society we need to wait until the bomb goes off." and that the fb irk deputy director -- fbi deputy director says, "senator, if that's what you want us to do, there's going to be a lot of blood in the streets." but it's that mentality that helps lead to the first world trade center bomb anything 1993. because the fb with i was dfbi d. because the fbi was watching the cell that ended up executing the bombing, and they ended up breaking away and stopping their surveillance a couple of months before the first world trade center bombing. in essence, because the fbi management says there's no crime that this group has committed yet. we're worried about them, we think that they might be doing something or plotting something, but there's no crime, and we can't be watching them if there's not a crime that they've committed already.

on up through 9/11, you actually have the same man, alan cornbloom, this sort of fascinating character from the justice department who was brought in the 1970s to say that, to put into place the regiment that would govern the way the fbi could conduct domestic surveillance on terror groups after the scandals of the 1970s. this same man is the man enforcing the rules on 9/11 during the summer of 2001 as the fbi squad in new york that has been tracking al-qaeda at that point for nearly six years doing some amazing work through the east africa embassy bombings through the millennium plot through the uss cole. sort of all of these things where they now know that there is a plot underway, that they know that sort of something is is happening in the summer of 2001. and you end up with this sort of

crazy moment in the string of 2001 -- spring of 2001 about four months before the 9/11 attacks where the fbi and the cia are sitting in a room together in new york. and the rule is that the cia cannot tell the fbi intelligence information for criminal prosecutions. and that what ends up happening is the cia officers in this room know that there are two al-qaeda operatives, known al-qaeda operatives in the united states and that one of them has a multiple entry visa to come and go in the united states anytime that he wants. both of these men end up being 9/11 hijackers. and that the cia refuses to tell the fbi agent who is sitting there who has been working al-qaeda at that point for years that these men are in the united states, that we don't know what they're doing in the united states, but as the cia --

as the fbi agent later said, they're certainly not planning a trip to disney world. and that this pendulum just continually swings back and forth. and, of course, as david laid out after 9/11 you have sort of this huge change where we say, okay, we're going to stop this next attack, and we're going to, in many ways, break down a lot of these walls. we're going to erode a lot of these civil liberties protections in order to insure that we can stop the next attack. and that over the last decade you have seen a number of these new policies, the national security letters that david mentioned, the increased use of the fisa courts for all sorts of different rules and something that david brings up in his book that he hasn't mentioned, these things called material witness warrants which are warrants that sort of say, in effect, that we

think that you're someone important, but we don't have any reason to hold you except for the fact that we think you will try to run away if you're left out free. so these material witness warrants and what they're supposed to be used for is so that you can hold on to reluctant witnesses. but what the fbi ends up using them for after 9/11 is, effectively, to snatch up anyone who might be a terrorist, but we're not really sure. and then hold them in jail until we've sorted out whether or not that they are, in fact, a criminal. or a terrorist in this instance. and that all of these policies come into place and are used with, i think, alarming frequency in many cases. but at the same time this becomes very much a question as these cases evolve that hearkens

back to the 1980s and that first plot on the courthouse where the fbi now tasked with stopping all terrorist attacks before they happen ends up in a situation where they can take nothing for granted and that they, that we sort of as a government and as a society have told them that they have no margin for error. and that in order for them to do so, they need to take everything seriously. and the drawback of that is that a lot of the early cases that they end up arresting after 9/11, i think that the line between an active terrorist plot and idle bar chatter ends up pretty hazy in a lot of those years after 9/11 where you have sort of people being arrested for plots that are so far beyond

their capabilities that, to me, it's a real stretch whether these people would actually be capable of these attacks. it would be as if me sort of sitting here and saying, i would like to build a nuclear bomb. is enough of a reason to arrest me and try me for attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction. and that, so the fbi ends up, again, evolving the way that it e approaches these cases. and the way that they end up sort of the procedure that they now have in place is that they wait until the would-be jihadist, the would-be terrorist has actually pressed the detonate button on what he or she thinks -- i guess it's always been a he thus far -- what he thinks is a live bomb and that the fbi has been running these stings.

this might be something worth talking about together in a minute here. these cases end up, i think, sort of walking a very fine line between entrapment and enticement where you have people who sort of express an interest in, in plotting an attack, the fbi hears about it, the fbi inserts an informant into the group or pairs up an informant with the would-be terrorist and that the fbi really helps facilitate the attack. oh, you're interested in a car bomb? actually, here, i happen to have a car bomb parked right outside by the loading dock. would you be interested in coming out here? would you be interested this driving this down to the federal building? oh, you would? well, i would encourage you to park it right out front, and then meet me around the corner, and we'll press the detonator together. when they actually get the guy to the point where he's pressing

the detonator, that's when the fbi swoops in and makes the arrest. and they've run this particular plot four times in the that's two years, spring field, illinois; dallas, texas; and up the road here. and they've been kept busy flying around this car bomb that they've bought -- [laughter] and it's ended up, somewhat amusingly, they've been having to try to take these cases down in pairs. springfield and dallas they did in the same 24-hour period and then baltimore and portland last winter, or this winter they did very quickly because they don't want the guy sort of sitting there and being like, oh, you know, i just saw this guy was arrest inside that's for doing almost exactly the thing that i plan on doing tomorrow. but that these cases end up being, i think, really hard public policy discussions for

ourselves as a society. because the fbi's viewpoint is that, yeah, no way this guy could have built a car bomb unless we provided it to him. but if he can't build a car bomb today, he could go shoot up a shopping mall in ohio next weekend. that he will -- once he has set down on a path of attempting to harm america, our mission is to stop that attack, and we need to get that guy off the table. we need to get him off the playing field. and so if it's not with the car bomb today, it could be a shopping mall tomorrow and that now that he has expressed this interest, he needs to be gone. and that that, i think, ends up with a very difficult civil liberty discussion that in a lot of instances reminds me a little bit too much of the tom cruise "minority report" movie where you end up with these things

that but for the intervention of the u.s. government, these men likely would have not been able to execute this particular plot now. but whether they could execute a future plot down the road that would leave the fbi sort of left hanging, holding the bag in be front of the congressional hearing where they said, oh, yeah, we did hear that guy was interested in building a car bomb, but we left him out there on the street, that that's not what we as a society since 9/11 have agreed on the fbi's mission to be. so i think that this is a really, really interesting and robust discussion, and that actually ten years after 9/11 this is a really opportune moment to begin to look back on a lot of these decisions over the last decade and see whether now from a moment of more calm this is where we want to be. >> thank you. [applause]

just what authors like david shipler and garrett graff ought to be doing is guide ago public debate into these issues, so this is, i think, exactly what book fairs are about and what excellent authors ought to be doing for their society t. david, did you have a -- >> well, the only thing that occurred to me as garrett was giving his very lucid description of the sting operations was something that police officers and prosecutors have said to me quite frequently. the crooks we catch are the dumb ones. and on the street when they don't quite have the evidence, sometimes they'll say, you know, if a bag of crack is on the ground under a bench and they can't really tie it to a particular person even though he's sitting on the bench but, obviously, the defense would make something of the ambiguity, the officers would say, it doesn't matter, we'll get him next time.

because they always do it next time. but i think that there are big issues here, and garrett is right to raise them. you know, freedom has risks. we do not aspire to be perfectly safe and perfectly orderly. that's the aspiration of a police state. they don't always achieve it, but that is what they aspear to. there's -- aspire to. there's always a certain amount of play and open doubt and chance and danger in a society that is pluralistic, is open. i mean, look at the difference in if our free speech laws -- in our free speech laws compared with germany, let's say, in which you cannot talk about the holocaust not having happened. the united states, i mean, we see it now. i mean, the flagrant kind of amazing range of speech that's permitted. i mean, there are boundaries,

there are taboos, usually cultural, not governmentally-opposed particularly. but we value this as our core. there's a risk to that. look at the recent supreme court decision in west borrow v. snyder, the church that goes around with these ugly, ugly demonstrations outside funerals. at some distance, by the way. you know, we -- i mean, i feel the court was absolutely right in that decision because once you start to curb speech on the basis of content as opposed to manner, time, place, that sort of thing -- which are legitimate ways of regulating -- then you give to the government or whatever individual may be harmed or feel he's harmed an enormous censorship power. so we take risks. i mean, the risk there, obviously, is for people's emotions to be hurt and to suffer in a moment of extreme

vulnerability. but remember, also, our rights are very fluid. they expand, and they contract, and they have over history. i count this as the sixth that we're in now, the counterterrorism era, as the sixth major detour from basic constitutional rights in our history. not counting slavery, the disenfranchisement of women, the displacement of native americans, i mean, these were long-term, ongoing problems. but discreet periods. the first the alien concern -- well, i don't want to take up any more discussion. you might find others, but i think this is the sixth one. so we need to look carefully ahead at this discussion. it's an important one. >> and there may be an example. there's another democracy even more stalked by terror than the u.s. which would be israel, something of a cousin state in a sense, and there they've faced

bombers on buses and so on. there, at least, there was a very public debate before the issue of torture began to be exercised. david was the bureau chief in yes jerusalem, and his successor for the washington post where a justice named landau set up a standard saying moderate physical force defined as shaking. not by the lapels, too much whiplash. holding the shoulders. not to cause pain, but to establish physical domination and psychological domination. that's permitted in a ticking bomb case, he said. only when you have certain knowledge of a plot that is underway and could be interrupted by information that you know to a moral certainty that guy has. then you can shake him. and what get match reported on -- getman reported on was a press conference under the us

rail lille press laws -- israeli press laws. and he made sure the attorney general was present, and he called the press conference to apologize to the families of some israeli children who were shredded in a bomb on a bus. and he says, i had the bomb builder in custody 72 hours before. i apologize for not stopping this. if i had questioned him more severely, i could have. the reason i failed was that man over there, and he pointed at the attorney general for enforcing landau decisions. and there's discussion in the question and answer about whether these shaking episodes hadn't been somewhat severe, and hadn't one person actually been shaken to death, like shaken baby syndrome, shaken so violently that his brain rattled this his skull and hemorrhaged and he died? and the man said, yes, but actually that was only one time out of 8,000 cases.

and then he froze, and everyone said, 8,000? 8,000 ticking bomb cases? 8,000 times when you had a moral certainty that you had the guy and the plot wasn't -- that's more than, you know, even bauer doesn't get that kind of results. [laughter] and so he had to finally reveal, and there was a long -- it was about 22,000 cases, and there had been six examples of people being shaken until they die. and what it seemed to be what they were doing was under the huge pressure that you bring up when this man, buck revel for the fbi, have trying to bring up any case before it can occur what the shinbad had been doing, basically, was what they were suspected of doing, and they might even have been neutering in this sense, emasculating them as terrorist leaders. after you've put somebody through the 20 days of imprisonment and the questioning and you have broken them down

and kept them in a small cell and done them hypothermia and kept a hood over their head, it's a brutal kind of treatment when it all comes out. the person who comes out is no longer the same. he's damaged goods. he's, he's isolated. he's incapable of social trust. he's never going to lead a terror cell because nobody's going to trust him anymore. and then i guess you've maybe accomplished your goal. he's not going to be leading a terrorist cell, but he might make a very good suicide bomber, depressed and damaged as he is. the israel example gives me huge reason to be concerned at organizations that will push the envelope out of their desire to accomplish what they were told they need to do. did you see that in the fbi? >> well, one of the things that i think is really interesting about tracing the fbi's path over the last ten years was that because the fbi had had these experiences many the 1970s and

the 1980s where they faced real constitutional pressures to abide by some of these unreasonable search and seizures and these constitutional protections that the fbi in several key instances made very different choices than the rest of the u.s. government, particularly the cia and the department of defense. and, and in some of these remarkable incidents that i trace in the book of individual agents out in the field in the cia's black sights in thailand, in afghanistan, in guantanamo under the immense pressure of feeling like that they are in these ticking time bomb scenarios that you mentioned, that the fbi makes a decision that they're not going to participate in enhanced interrogations. that the fbi -- that that's something the cia might be

willing to do, the department of defense might be willing to do, but the fbi is not. that they are not willing to participate at the extraordinary remember decisions -- renditions, the ghost planes that end up with dropping these terrorists off in jordan or egypt after 9/11. and, in fact, i tell the story in the book of the first fbi rendition after 9/11. they actually capture a terrorist and bring him back to stand trial here in the united states, and he ends up in an actual civilian court convicted and ends up sentenced to 160 years in the federal supermax in florence, colorado. whereas the cia takes their first rendition, almost an eerily similar case, drops the guy in jordan, and he hasn't been heard from since. and that robert mueller, the fbi director, ends up being this central figure in march of 2004

in the bush administration's showdown over the nsa's domestic wiretapping and domestic surveillance program. where mueller and attorney general ashcroft and the deputy attorney general, jim comey, end up in this crazy showdown which we don't know about for years publicly where the entire leadership of the fbi and the entire leadership of the department of justice threaten to resign unless the nsa's domestic surveillance program is brought under, on to firmer constitutional grounds. and it ends up telling a very complicated story very quickly with the showdown, john ashcroft actually end up in the hospital for gallbladder surgery and is on what people think is, at the moment, his death bed. and robert mueller receives word that the white house is sending alberto gonzales and andy card to the hospital to get ashcroft to sign off on this program from

his hospital bed. and that jim comey, the deputy attorney general, the acting attorney general at that exact moment, races to the hospital, mueller races to the hospital. they're all, you know, in their motorcades, lights going, sirens going, mueller realizes he's not going to get there on time and calls ahead to the fbi security detail that's guarding ashcroft and authorizes them to use force to keep jim comey in the hospital room if secret service agents who are with alberto gonzales and andy card attempt to remove him. so there was this cause si moment in the -- crazy moment in the government. here you are as an fbi agent guarding ashcroft, you know, dark hospital corridor, you're sitting there doing your suduko puzzle, and the fbi director

says the white house chief of staff is about to show up, and i authorize you to draw your weapon to keep the attorney general in the room if secret service tries to remove him. these crazy moments where the fbi takes a very different path than the cia and can the dod. and the reason they do which i think is fascinatingly prescient which is exactly what david says which is the fbi executives and agents talk about the green felt table. they say someday the decisions that we make here in the black sites, in guantanamo, in this iraq, in afghanistan, in the hospital corridors of gw are going to be picked over by a congressional committee looking from a calmer moment far down the road. and we're going to be called in front of that green felt table. and we want to be able to say, we didn't do this. because no one is going to judge our decisions paced on -- based

on the pressure of that ticking time bomb moment. they're going to judge our decisions based on a conversation in a room like this where we're sort of all having a great day eating hot dogs. >> as david said, it's really addictive, and it's obviously really important. and i'm sorry that because of our schedule we have to stop there. the books that we've been discussing have been david shipler's book "the rights of the people: how our search for safety invades our liberties." and "the threat matrix: the fbi at war in the age of global terror," by garrett graff. thank you both very much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> that was garrett graff and david shipler discussing the

rights of the people. in this a few minutes, we'll be back with a panel on civil war perspective from the 2011 annapolis book festival. >> yes, i've had an interesting and fun life, and i don't owe any of it to the feminists, i'll tell you that. [laughter] feminism has become a very hot topic. i suppose the reason for that is sarah palin. feminists cannot resist attacking sarah palin. it's not just because she's a republican and a conservative. it's because she's a successful woman. she has a cool husband, a lot of kids, a great career, making lots of money. she is, by any standard, a success. and they can't stand it. and acid in their wounds is that she's pretty too. [laughter] so the feminists don't believe that women can be successful in

the united states. they think women are oppressed by the patriarchy. they are held down by mean men, and they need the government to rescue them and give them more advantages. and that's very unfortunate. but you never hear them talk about really successful women; margaret thatcher, condoleezza rice. what about all the wonderful women who were elected last november the 2nd, 2010? well, it turned out they were all republicans. in fact, they were all pro-life. and that wasn't what the feminists planned at all. they simply do not recognize success. i really think one of the reasons i was able to beat the equal rights amendment was because they did not believe i was doing what i did. they conjured up conspiracies like the insurance companies were financing me or some other nonsense like that. now, this ideology of telling young women that you are victims of an oppressive