found out about that plot, but might have had to pour some water on somebody. we might have had to keep him incommunicado in an air-conditioned room for hours or maybe days. what is the explanation to that family? it is a trade off. critics imagine that they live in a world of infinite means. that they can -- you can have the most humane and gentle treatment possible. by the way if you look at the cia reports on this which are now public and looked at the elaborate bureaucratic precautions no reasonable person would find these measures harsh. ..

>> when they were trying to catch him. i was wondering if you could go into the detail there and, especially, if you could go into detail on how he specifically was capture inside the end. was it the pakistanis or the cia? how did that come about? >> the tip that captured ksm came through the cia. the largest cia station in the world is in islamabad, pakistan. they are fishing where the fish are, and that's where most major al-qaeda figures have been killed or captured. ksh is catchtured, and that famous photo of his hair askew and that hairy-chested photo, he was woken up sleeping on a

floor, i believe the spare bedroom on the second floor of a house. s that is a joint operation -- that is the joint operation, the pakistanis were involved, but the intelligence originated with the cia partly through a walk-in. you know, anyone who's been to the spy museum knows that most of the time walk-ins are not trusted by embassy personnel or cia personnel because there's all sorts of reasons for walk-ins. um, sometimes it's a foreign service just trying to test the agency's procedures or to discover who is the intelligence officer in that delegation. and sometimes it's people offering false information for money. but this particular walk-in announced that he was going to be seeing ksm for dinner later that night which is very unusual. walk-ins never, almost never, say that they have information that they'll have in a few hours. they usually try to stretch it

out for months, get a few payments out of the cia if possible. so he was given a secure cell phone number to call. at the restaurant he sends a text which is, i think, hilarious, i am with ksh, you know? and, i mean, it sounds like a message between two high school girls. [laughter] and hours later he calls the number and announces that he just had gotten out of the car that dropped off ksm. so he's picked up by a cia official, a case officer, and they drive around the expensive neighborhoods trying to find the house. he doesn't though the number or the name of the road, so they're looking in the dark trying to see a building that he recognizes, and they drive around in circles for a large chunk of the night. and the cia officer is thinking to himself, what a wild go goose chase. and then suddenly at about 2 in the morning, that's it, that's the house. and, ultimately, with both the

cia paramilitary team, other members on loan from the embassy and pakistani police they raid the house. there's more details in my book, "mastermind." >> on that let's all thank richard for a -- [applause] >> thank you very much. >> [inaudible] thank you all for coming. >> for more on richard miniter and his work, visit richard miniter.com. >> every weekend booktv offers 48 hours of programming focused on nonfiction authors and books. watch it here on c-span2. ♪ >> 9/11 commission co-chairs tom cain and lee hamilton are co-authors of a new book, "without precedent: the inside story of the 9/11 commission."

the book tells the story of the commission's work to produce its report and provides new details on what went right and what went wrong during the investigation. this september is the five-year anniversary of 9/11. they discuss the book with veteran journalist marvin kalb who serves as a senior fellow for the kennedy school of government at harvard university. >> host: hello. i'm marvin kalb, senior fellow at the shorn steven center at harvard, that's the kennedy school of government. i'm here with the co-authors of their new book, "without precedent: the inside story of the 9/11 commission," and they are thomas kean, the former republican governor from new jersey, lee hamilton, former democratic congressman from indiana. they were co-chairs of the 9/11 commission. gentlemen, welcome.

>> guest: thank you. >> host: my first question is a very simple one, why the book and why now. and i ask the question because two years ago the 9/11 commission report came out. it was a gripping account of what had happened with the whole 9/11 phenomenon, a roaring bestseller as i remember. now you have this book which i found very interesting, clearly written, candid and, i think, important. but i didn't find anything brand new about the 9/11 phenomenon, the attack on the united states. so i'm kind of wondering what is it, therefore, that you felt was so necessary to produce "without precedent," we'll start with the governor. >> guest: for one thing, other people are starting to write about us. [laughter] characterize us, so when that start toss happen, it's going to

depend on who's going to write the account. that was one reason. another reason, frankly, is because we thought it was interesting. we went through experiences probably no other people on any other commission have probably gone through. and as the congress increasingly seems unable to deal with difficult problems, i think they're going to turn more to commissions of citizens than they can hide behind, but then they've got to be commissions that work, and not like commissions in the past whose reports go on the shelf, and the way we did this was to try to guarantee things don't go on the shelf. so those were two major reasons why we wrote about it and a third one to remind the american public. an important part of our whole effort is the recommendations, and the recommendations still aren't enacted in many cases, and we wanted to remind people we're going to be a lot safer if we can get the rest of those recommendations done. >> host: and so it has nothing to do with timing. you wanted to time it with a certain event happening how?

an election, for example? >> guest: the timing is the fifth anniversary of 9/11, but i think your observation is correct. there's nothing shockingly new in this story we've written. i do think, however, there are a lot of subplots on 9/11, and it's kind of fascinating. for example, one of the stories that has not been told publicly is how we got access, limited access to the detainees, the people that planned 9/11. that's a hugely interesting story. but for some reason the press just didn't look at it very carefully. the whole period of negotiations between tom and me on the one hand and the white house on the other, we go into some detail about those negotiations. it's got kind of a behind-the-scenes look, if you would, as to how we got access to documents and to people. so i think it's a fascinating

insider's view of the way the commission operated. >> host: it's also very interesting when you mentioned you ought to get at it because other people were going to write it. remember what president nixon once said? he said it was terribly important you write your own history before the historians get a crack at you. [laughter] >> guest: churchill said the same thing. >> host: he did. >> guest: they asked him how he was going to appear in history, and he said, very well, because i'm going to write it. [laughter] >> host: at the beginning of the book and again at the end you write, and i'm going to quote you: it appeared to both of us that the commission was set up to fail. um, well, clearly, they did not fail. in fact, it was a roaring success from many different points of view, and we'll talk about that. but why did you think you were being set up to fail? governor? >> guest: well, for a number of reasons. i mean, i got appointed, i was second choice, lee was second choice, first was kissinger and mitchell. so i accepted because i had friends, frankly, killed in 9/11, you couldn't say now.

now -- say no. we were late because we'd lost a month and a half, basically, on the other appointments, we had no staff, we had to hire staff all of a sudden, we didn't have a budget, we didn't have enough time to do the report, and my colleagues had been appointed by the most partisan people in this town, the leaders of the house and the senate. and not only that, we'd been appointed in a presidential election year which was turning out to be and turned out to be one of the nastiest elections in some ways and the most partisan in our history. now -- and then i looked at the fact no other commission, look at the pearl harbor commission, looked at the warren commission, i looked at a number of other things, and they were all deemed failures. so i, you know, for all those reasons, i think, at least i looked at it and said, wow, we've been given a task that is almost impossible. >> host: you were suggesting before, also, that perhaps the government when it's in trouble will set up a commission behind

which it can hide. >> guest: yes. all the time. all the time. and most of the time they don't pay any attention to the recommendations. >> host: who would want, lee hamilton, who would want a commission of this sort? tremendous publicity, everybody knew about it when it was happening which we'll get into, too, the way in which you did all of this. but i'm kind of curious, who do you think would want a commission to fail? >> guest: well, i think the policymakers were very wary of us. they were wary because they knew we'd be looking back, we'd be trying to identify mistakes, we would be looking at how well they performed in the clinton administration and then in the bush administration the first eight months. and that makes politicians kind of nervous. so there was a good bit, as you'll recall, of opposition to the creation of the commission.

>> host: uh-huh. >> guest: and i think the fact of the matter was we were created because of the families. the families had such moral force after 9/11. they became, as tom has repeatedly pointed out, very sophisticated in using that moral force with politicians. and without them we would not have been created because they put the pressure on the politicians, and the politicians responded. >> host: wasn't the opposition at first, didn't it come from the white house? >> >> guest: yeah, some of it. >> guest: remember, the white house is full of what i would call control freaks. [laughter] particularly this white house. and they really like to have it down, know what's going to happen and know they're controlling what's going to happen. >> host: uh-huh. >> guest: and they had this commission of five republicans and five democrats dealing with the issue of national security which the president was going to run on -- >> host: sure. >> guest: -- and they had no control whatsoever on it. so i remember the first time i

went to the white house and they said to lee, you know, we're so scared of a runaway commission. and i think that meant to them a commission that was not going to be controlled out of the white house. and so, and it's understandable. they were facing a tough presidential election. the president was going to be the subject of the investigation in many cases -- >> host: looking ahead to 2004 election? >> guest: yeah. >> host: is that what you mean? >> guest: yeah. it was coming right up. we reported three months before election day. so what we said could be an enormously important factor in the election, and so people from both parties liked to sort of control that. and i think when we started, at least, people got tired of it eventually, they were sort of cold to the members of the mission from political leaders on both sides why aren't you criticizing the president more, why aren't you defending the president, you're not going to let president clinton be attacked, are you? i think they listened when the commission went on. >> guest: it's important, no commission that's created in

this town has automatic credibility. you have to you earn it. and when we were initially created, we didn't have credibility. so we had to think how do you establish your credibility. we did that with our public hearings. but we also did it with very, very good staff work. and the politicians eventually began to understand that we were serious, we were professional, we weren't out to hang anybody, we were going to do the job. do the job according to the mandate that was given to us in the statute. number one, tell the story; number two, make recommendations. so once they perceived our approach, our state of mind, i think we began to break down that wariness, that suspicion. but it constantly reappeared during the course of the commission. it would pop up. we had a very difficult period with the republican leadership in the house, not so much in the

senate. they were very supportive of the president. they didn't want any criticism of the president, and they had a lot of doubts about tom and me and a lot of doubts about the other commissioners as well. be so we had to overcome that, and i think we reasonably did. >> host: i think you certainly did. i mean, the early challenges that come up, i think, in most interesting ways the access, how would you get full access to what it is that you felt you needed? transparency with the public and how would the public be brought into this process. organization, you were talking about your staff. how did you know who these people were? did you, did you find people you had already worked with in sort of a similar capacity earlier? how do you get the job done in a timely fashion? so i'm interested, explain, for example, on access. do you feel that you got the access that you needed?

governor? >> guest: after enormous effort. i mean, lee and i spent a lot of our lives negotiating with lawyers from the white house headed by judge gonzalez, and they were difficult. they were difficult negotiations. and they would involve presidential privilege, they involved whether the whole commission could see things or only a couple members of the commission, they involved timing. the clock was ticking on all of this. they involved all sorts of issues, but they were ongoing and constant and difficult. >> host: were they frightened by the national security substance or the politics of it? >> guest: i think it was a little bit of a combination, but i think generally they were -- this was a presidency, as you know, that feels very strongly about the power of the presidency. >> host: right. >> guest: now, we wanted to do things that no other commission had ever done before. i mean, no other commission than looking to a criminal matter had

ever interviewed a president of the united states. it just hadn't been done. lyndon johnson told the warren commission he wouldn't see 'em. presidents didn't do that, he wrote them a letter, said that's enough. so it was understandable the president didn't want to be interviewed by the commission. nobody had ever seen a pdb, a presidential daily briefing. that's the holy of holies, protected by all presidents. they were generally concerned, they told us this a number of times, judge gonzalez, they were genuinely concerned that if we saw them having been created by congress, that congressional committees were going to come right behind us and say you've been protected in the courts, but now you've let it out, there's a precedent, we can see it. and we kept saying, the argument that's the title of the book. we kept saying this is 9/11, there's never been an event like it, what we are doing is without precedent, and anything we do is not going to set a precedent for anything that follows -- >> host: but, of course, they wouldn't, they couldn't know that for a fact. >> guest: no, they couldn't.

so they were very concerned, and we understood that. >> host: sort of understandably in a way. >> guest: we just argued there was no way we could do our job without know what the president knew and when he knew it, and without that we couldn't have written the report. >> guest: i think it's important to point out that in the end we got what we wanted. we had access to every single person we requested to see. >> host: every sheet of paper that you requested as well? >> guest: we got access to all the documents we requested. now, some of that access, like the presidential daily brief, we had access to under fairly restrictive conditions. >> host: uh-huh. >> guest: access to the detainees was quite restricted. but we felt we got access to the point be where we could fulfill our mandate and do what we were supposed to do. took a lot of doing, but we got it in the end, and i think we felt we had satisfactory access. >> host: was getting to the

detainees the most difficult problem of access that you had? >> guest: yes, i think so, in the end. the detainees were key because they included the man who plotted 9/11 -- >> host: yes. >> guest: -- khalid sheikh mohammed and one or two other key operatives. we wanted to see them, and we wanted to see them eye to eye. i had a meeting with george tenet who was cia director, he invited me over for breakfast -- >> host: do they serve good things at the cia? >> guest: they serve a very good breakfast. [laughter] the first thing out of his mouth was, lee, you're not going to see those detainees. >> host: oh, really? >> guest: it was a very sensitive matter for the administration. interrogating suspects is a complicated business. they do not like people interrupting that process. and so we tried, we floated then a lot of ideas, could we put our

people behind a screen? could we blindfold our people and some other suggestions. and what we finally decided was agreed with them that we could submit questions in writing to the interrogators who would then ask the question of the detainee, and we had the system worked out so well that we could immediately have follow-up questions. and in the end we asked over a thousand questions, i think, of the detainees. >> host: how many did you actually get? >> guest: of the detainees? >> host: yeah. >> guest: i think three, but just a handful. >> host: three is what sticks in my mind. >> guest: i think that's the number. khalid sheikh mohammed was the key guy. >> guest: we got the ones we asked for. >> guest: yeah. obviously, if you're a long-time investigator that's not entirely satisfactory because you like to be able to eyeball the person and judge their reactions, but we feel like we got the story.

now, you're dealing here with terrorists, so you have a huge problem of credibility. we, we couldn't talk to any of the 19, they were all dead. so we talked to these fellas, and we tried to judge the credibility with documents and other sources as best we could. but you have a huge question looming as to what's this guy's angle. in the back of your mind. >> host: did you feel as if you got to know their minds a little bit? >> guest: i think we did. >> guest: yeah. >> guest: i think we did. i think we understood it as well as any. it's important here that the cia was interrogating those men for a very different purpose than ours. their purpose, the government's purpose was how do we stop a future attack. >> host: sure. >> guest: our purpose was not that. really, our purpose was as much at least how did this happen.

in other words, we were looking back, government kind of looking forward to oversimplify it a little bit. and so the perspective is very different here with the interrogators, and that was one reason they, the administration at no time want us to -- administration didn't want us to mess up their interrogation. one other point that's important here and that is all of this was occurring just as abu ghraib was happening. >> host: scandal in iraq. >> guest: that's correct. that could have been a factor as well. >> guest: at one point they said something which sort of shook me a bit when we were trying to get our people this to see them, somebody said to us, you know, not even the president of the united states knows where these people are. and i thought, ooh, the president ought to know everything. i don't like that. >> host: did both of you get to actually meet the three terrorists? >> guest: no. this was done by staff? >> guest: yes. this was done by their staff because it had to be the same people interviewing them on

other subjects. we could submit questions and follow-up questions, but they were the ones who saw them, and they were the ones who -- >> host: so was it an eyeball to eyeball -- >> guest: no, it was not. we wanted it. and the reason we got as far as we did, i think, not only by that time we had established some credibility, but beyond that we always had one power in our pocket -- >> host: which was? >> guest: that was the subpoena power. i don't think we'd have gotten anywhere on that one, i think we'd have gone to court and lost, but it would have been tremendous publicity and embarrassment, and the administration was scared to death we were going to do something like that. >> host: you talk about that, i think, toward the end of the book, but you never used the subpoena power. >> guest: yeah, we did. we made the decision that if we used it all the time, one, it was going to get stale, not be that effective. >> host: right. >> guest: two, that we were going to lose many of those cases, possibly, either because it was going to string out past the life of the commission in the courts, or because

presidential privilege is upheld almost every time by the courts. and bethought we might -- we thought we might lose. so we figured we'd hold it back for special occasions and have it as a threat and use it publicly when we needed it rather than actually using it, and i think that tactic worked. we used it for the faa and for norad, and one time for new york city. and in those cases it was extreme. people were either not telling us the truth or withholding documents or both. >> host: connected issue is the one of accountability that comes up time and time again. you write in the week that there is a -- in the book that there is a thirst for accountability in this country. but then you speak about a fear of accountability on the part of politicians, and i am adding on the part of the white house as well. and i'm wondering why, explain it to us, why on the one hand this thirst for accountability on the part of the public, and yet this concern on the part of the government?

>> guest: the thirst, i think, impressed us again and again. and it really relates to the incident. so traumatic. so vivid. every adult american will always remember where they were on 9/11. >> host: where were you on september 11th? >> guest: that's right. and people wanted to know why it happened, and did the government screw things up? so everywhere we went you just felt this deep-seeded need among the american people to know what happened. and that created a burden for us. we felt we had to try to meet that burden. >> host: okay. >> guest: now -- >> host: that's a good burden, though, wasn't it? >> guest: it is a good burden. that's a very important point. the politician, on the other hand, sees accountability as am i to blame. >> host: that's right. >> guest: are they going to hang me with this?

>> host: yes. >> guest: so they're way ri about us, skeptical, suspicious, some of them even hostile toward us. >> host: could it be as well that they felt they had, in fact, not performed as they should have, and they didn't want the information to come out? >> guest: who knows. i mean, it's possible they felt that way. we don't know their motivations. but clearly, it took a little persuasion. to get them to accept us and to that persuasion's not due to anything tom and i did. it's what the families did. >> guest: the families, by the way, were very tough on wanting accountability. a number of the family members wanted to say who is responsible, get them fired, get them jailed, something happen to them. and we looked at it and, you know, people were responsible from the lowest levels to the highest levels in two administrations. i mean, who let 15 of these 19 people into the country even if

they had forged documents that should have been spotted? who let them in? maybe those border guards there. the question of who in the intelligence agencies refused to share information, didn't pass things up the line, screwed up at that level to who let them on the planes, i mean, that's lower level stuff. >> host: but their families were right. they were absolutely right because there ought to be an accountability for something like 9/11 in this country. i think many, many people feel that. >> guest: i don't think that's a problem. we didn't see that was our job, and we figured if we tried to do that, say somebody's to blame here and somebody's to blame there, that we were getting into the kind of debates that were going to stop us from doing our job in a timely manner. we said, let's tell the story, tell it totally accurately. it's up to somebody else to decide whether there are penalties here, whether this person or that person should be held accountable for it, whether it's the american public or the government itself. >> host: but as you look back

upon it, i mean, frankly, i could have expected that answer two years ago when you put out the 9/11 commission report. but with this book, "without precedent," it would seem to me that you've had these two years to sit back and sort of think about it for a second and say, yeah, somebody should have been held accountable. >> guest: oh, yeah. but we were writing in "without precedent" about writing the report and how we did it. >> host: don't you think there is accountability? >> guest: should be. >> host: who? >> guest: i think it goes from the lowest to the highest in two administrations, both the clinton administration and the bush administration, and we can assay it to individuals and policymaker ors at the highest levels. >> guest: marvin, you look back over this story, you can make a list of 100 people who didn't do the job right. many of those are government officials, some of them are ticket takers at the airport. and what good does it do to identify those people?

>> host: people know, you finger those who made a mistake. >> guest: well, i'm not sure it would help much, and i am sure that it would have wrecked our commission, and that we would not have been able to unanimously recommendations. we would have gotten so diverted into the question of whether john smith over here did his job right and going down the list of 100 people to see if they even did their -- each did their job right. there's a never ending road. so our book, as you'll recall, is very nonjudgmental. we just laid out the facts. that's what we were told to do, and that's what we did. where we did make a judgment, we clearly said that neither clinton nor bush in the first months of his administration put counterterrorism high enough if their list of priorities. they just didn't do it. the presidents didn't do it, their cabinets didn't do it,

their administration didn't do it. so western pretty hard -- we were pretty harsh at that point in directing blame. but fundamentally what we said was, look, this was a problem that was systemic. the fundamental problem here, for example, was intelligence agencies didn't share information. thatthat was really fundamental. that wasn't any one perp's fault. >> host: exactly. >> guest: that was systemic. and if you're going to get the right kind of information on terrorism, you've got to begin to break down these walls between the various intelligence community agencies, and so we went at it that way. >> guest: that always goes, by -- also goes, by the way, to the lowest level people, too, people who let these people into the country. we don't believe 15 of them just happened to hit a certain number of people who let them in. we believe that was the way the

immigration system worked and still does, by the way. appalling that people are coming in through mexican, this was a test, nine of them had, i think, had driver's licenses which were phonies. they all got through. they showed the same phony driver's license to a couple of bartenders, and they said we'd never let people drink with those. those are phony. people still aren't trained. that's what lee is talking about, that's what we've got to cure, the systemic stuff. and we did highlight, by the way, people who did their job right like that man in orlando who was a real hero just because he did his job and didn't let a potential terrorist into the country. >> host: we'll just take a brief break right now, and we'll be right back. >> on the go? "after words" is available via podcast through i tunes and xml.

visit booktv.org and select which podcast you'd like to download and listen to "after words" while you travel. >> host: you know, one of the things that you write about has to do with presidents clinton and bush on this whole issue of accountability. and you faced, as you described, a peculiar problem because clinton was perceived as being too weak on terrorism, and president bush up until 9/11, anyway, was perceived as having ignored terrorism, the entire thing. based on your research, and i'm trying to nail you on this, was either description really justified, that clinton, um, you know, was too weak on terrorism? i remember a meeting that we had up at the kennedy school with sandy berger who was clinton's national security adviser. and this was in march. in other words, just two months into the bush administration.

and one of the things that berger told a faculty meeting was the single most important issue facing the united states of america is terrorism. and osama bin laden. now, he said that to us. was that something that really galvanized the action of the clinton administration? were they driven by this fear of, or concern about terrorism? >> guest: i don't think they were driven, that was the problem. i wish they had been driven. i think it's unfair to characterize the clinton administration as being unconcerned or too weak on terrorism. they were trying to do a job. and clinton himself was fascinated with bin laden, considered him an entrepreneur of terrorism, and at one point, you know, he tried to drop a missile on him. so he did, but they missed opportunities. they missed opportunities to kill him in some case, missed opportunities, never responded to the cole. there were a number of things the clinton administration

didn't do in retrospect we wish they had. bush administration took a while getting its feet on the ground, but they had a long-range plan which they thought was going to be more effective than clinton's, but they were taking a year to develop it. turned out we didn't have a year. they were going to meet, i think it was a day after 9/11, they had a meeting scheduled, and they ran out of time. but i think both administrations were focused, and lee is exactly right when he says it's a problem of priorities. where to you put the priorities? if terrorism really is your top priority, the most dangerous thing, then both administrations would have been done a lot more. >> guest: the weakness charge against clinton comes because he didn't use forceful enough military action when he was advised of certain activities. there's something to that. this is a difficult judgement. the president responded by saying i did not have actionable

intelligence. >> host: bush. >> guest: president clinton. actually, both presidents. >> host: i remember that associated with bush. >> guest: well, both of them used the phrase "actionable intelligence." the problem always is that intelligence comes to you, it's not all that precise. and there are arguments against the use of force, collateral damage, the blow to your reputation in the region. and presidents have very tough calls to make here. if, for example, you hit the house where osama bin laden is with a cruise missile and you kill him, everybody would applaud that. but suppose you hit that house, and you got 50 women and children in it, what's the consequences of that? intelligence has to be realtime, that is, it has to be right at the time osama bin laden is in

that house on action bl in a military -- actionable in a military sense. then in the case of the uss cole that president clinton was criticized because he didn't respond forcefully, the fact is we had a big argument for a period of time as to who did it. we weren't sure. we thought we knew, but we weren't sure. presidents have to make the call, do i fire off this particular weapon when the information is, maybe it's 75% sure or 60% sure but not 100% sure. and incidentally, when president bush came into office, he didn't retaliate on the uss cole either. the uss cole happened in october, right before the election. clinton did not take aggressive action afterwards. he's been criticized for that. bush came in if, for eight months he didn't do anything either. so both presidents can be accused of being weak, if you will, with regard to the uss

cole. but in each case it's not quite as simple as hindsight would suggest. >> guest: you know, the taliban, also, this was just to continue on this point, the kind of thing the presidents faced looking back at the time, the taliban, of course, were harboring bin laden, and we tried every mechanism of foreign policy under two presidents to get him out of there and came to the conclusion that the taliban would rather give up their country than give up bin laden. and so the administration, both of them, i guess, were faced with if you're going to get bin laden out, you've got to send troops into afghanistan in one way or another, either sub troops, proxies or american soldiers. and then they were debating whether the american public would stand for that. it was before 9/11. whether the american public would stand for a war on afghanistan after what the russians had been through in afghanistan to get this guy, bin laden, because at that point only a small number of people had been killed by him.

>> host: and the country wasn't, at that point, probably the judgement was made ready, they weren't educated enough to the problem. >> guest: yep. >> host: and like december 7th, we suddenly as a nation became educated to an international threat. um, the august 6th, 2001, pdb as you put it, the presidential daily intelligence briefing, that fascinated me. it fascinated me two years ago when i read your report earlier, and i don't remember the exact words, but right above it in big letters, i remember, was bin laden aims to attack the united states, function in the united states. and there were specifics in there that they're looking at this group out in california and this group here and there. honestly, i don't understand and perhaps you could through me, explain it to the american people now. why didn't this president pursue

the issue when this document was laid in front of him on the morning of august 6th? why didn't he ask questions? why didn't he demand answers? in your 2004 report, the 9/11 commission report, when you go through, there are many steps along the way toward 9/11 when the terrorists could have botched the operation, when something could have gone wrong, when if one of them had been pulled out of the loop, maybe it all would have collapsed. and you raise these questions. so i'm wondering as i'm sure many other people wonder, maybe there was a way of disrupting plans for 9/11. how could you look at this document and not follow up? >> guest: well, one of the problems i found with the presidential daily briefings is that most of them, frankly, i guess it's -- can we use the word garbage? [laughter] if you look at the product, and

we did, i thought when we were let in to see the pdbs, this is the holy of holies of american intelligence. i thought, my god, i'm going to see something really profound here in which the president is getting to make policy. what i saw, and this pdb is not a bad example of it, was sort of a tabloid headline. and if you looked at the points, there was very little, if anything there, what lee or the president would call actionable intelligence. it was a lot of suppositions, it was guesses. in some cases they would say, well, we think this and this and this, but the source wasn't credible. and there wasn't a lot there. after reading all the pdbs on this subject for two administrations with lee, i came to the conclusion that the united states intelligence group failed two presidents, failed two presidents by not giving them the information they needed. and i think this pdb you looked at is not -- because, if you look at what it says, you can follow up. yeah, it's an attack on the united states.

it's like the clinton pdb that we published that says we're going to use planes. but what do you do -- >> host: but with the planes, of course, there had been the discussion in the mid '90s that arose out of the incidents in the philippines, i believe. so the planes were not exactly a new idea. it was a matter of when they were going the act on it. but i still have to go back to this august 6th. if you were the president of the united states and that had been placed in front of you, you would not have asked a couple of questions of your national security adviser and say what the heck is going on here? >> guest: well, we were told that pdb was requested by the president, the president had gotten some hints early on about -- and wanted to know more. what is this bin laden, what is he planning to do? and that pdb was sent at the request of the president to clarify his thinking at his request. you know, in hind hindsight, of course -- >> host: sure. >> guest: a lot of other things we saw you want to jump up and

down and say do this and that and so on. but as i read that pdb, as you read through the rest of it, not the headline, but the rest of it, there's not a lot there to chew on. >> guest: it doesn't give you any information about where he is. >> host: no. >> guest: you see? presidents need to know that before they can order some kind of action. >> host: but there are several steps before you order the action. >> guest: that's correct. did he ask the tough questions of his advisers? i don't really know the answer to that question. should it have raised flags? the well, of course it should have. i mean, reading that even as, the inadequacies of it, it would still raise a red flag in your mind, and i think according to the president's testimony on it or his statements on it, he did ask some questions about it. we insisted that that be made public august 6th, it was made public. there was another pdb that was made public to president clinton

had, but in both cases i think it comes down to this business of actionable intelligence. and by that, that's a kind of arty phrase, i guess, in the intelligence community. but what it really means is before a can order -- a president can order action, he really has to know very specific detail; where is this guy, how million -- is he sitting in the middle of a hospital, or is he sitting out near the field all by hymn? what kind of reps do i use, how long is it going to take those weapons to get there? there are really some difficult judgments. >> host: you're opening me to this question which i can't help but ask. [laughter] as you look back upon it now, weren't you guys a bit soft, perhaps too understanding of the white house position the presidents and all, sure, actionable means act. >> guest: yeah. >> host: but until you act, you've got to know.

it's not only the nation that has to know, the president has to know. the president has to be fired up. then the administration gets fired up. then the people get fired up. >> guest: yeah. >> host: isn't there some feeling as you look back upon it that you could have, perhaps, more adepress i havely pursued this issue -- aggressively pursued this issue? >> guest: i think we were both -- [inaudible] >> guest: i think the commission, marvin, was quite tough on both presidents in saying you were not tough enough on terrorism during this time frame. >> host: absolutely. >> guest: we were pretty tough about that. >> host: but that's post-9/11. >> guest: absolutely. >> host: that's when the factor's right there, and how do you escape -- >> guest: but you've got to remember before 9/11 presidents have 150 things on their desk. they've got 150 advisers out here telling 'em, mr. president, this is the number one priority. and so a president is confronted

with this, and he says, okay, what evidence do you have that the terrorists are about to strike? well, they pull out the august 6th memorandum. that occurred at a time of a lot of chatter in the intelligence community about terrorist activities which occurred all during the summer of -- >> host: 2001. >> guest: 2001. and then right before 9/11 it dropped off. >> host: right. >> guest: if you'll recall. so the, the context and the environment is important here. maybe we were too sympathetic with the presidents, but let me -- >> host: i don't mean sympathetic, i mean it more in a sort of you guys were walking a very delicate line. i mean, five democrats, five republicans. a republican administration. 9/11 has happened. sure, the media would love to have the fantastic story, commission blasts president, that sort of thing. but to do that is the end of

your commission's work, and you had another thing in mind which you've already explained, that to make this thing work, more than a warren commission report, maybe you had to step back at a certain point. >> guest: it's hard to think back at that time, but as you look at going in, for instance, a president bush, let's say, prepares for his presidency by the issues that you have on the campaign. as you go through the news articles, and we did, leading up to that presidential campaign you can't find anything on terrorism. you go through the speeches of al gore and george bush, you can't find anything on terrorism. it wasn't even a blip in that campaign. so in a sense bush came into office prepared to address the issues that were brought up in that campaign by the press and by his opponent and by everything else. so this was new to him. i mean, if sandy berger said that was a top issue facing the country, he didn't communicate that to al gore because al gore was not presenting it as one of

the issues to be faced in his campaign. so, you know, no excuses, but, i mean, that's the atmosphere. >> host: absolutely. and very important. >> guest: the point here is we had a mandate. the mandate told us to do two things; tell the story factually. we did. number two, make recommendations. if we had done the kind of things you're suggesting, we'd have blown the commission apart. we would not have had a unanimity in the recommendations, and the report would have been filed on this shelf over here, and nobody would ever know about it. >> guest: and we might have gotten into the kind of fight with the white house along the which would have prevented us from getting the help we had to have from the white house in order to complete our work. >> guest: we decided very early that if recommendations were to have any impact, they had to be unanimous. and so we drove very hard for that. >> host: and i think that anyone who teaches government or any public policy course is going to

have to read "without precedent" because you do take people inside, and you do reveal, i think, in the most honest way -- as you are right now -- what some of the problems are. that if you want to do something that has credibility and importance, maybe you have to ease off at a certain point on this or be, to use my word, perhaps too understanding. but let's move on. >> guest: interesting, by the way, the time i knew things were changing, i clearly remember this. for a while lee and i both worried because republicans in our private commission meeting were making republican points and democrats were making democrat points, and you start to worry. a long way into our work, there was a point at which all of a sudden republicans started arguing with republicans on policy issues, and democrats are arguing with democrats on the way to reform the intelligence committee. and all of a sudden everything was turned upside down because the alliances were not republicans and can democrats anymore, there were people who

very thoughtfully wanted to do a different thing. in the way to make our recommendations. and at that point when that started to happen, i knew we were home. >> host: and i think that does come through in the book, the progression, the story that you tell really, um, does get people an insight into the way in which government works. one of the issues i'd like to ask you now as you look back, also, because it's retrospective in a way, were there any mistakes that you made in the course of this effort that bother you? >> guest: yep. >> host: like what? >> guest: it's probably my fault. we didn't have anybody on the commission who knew the leadership of the house except for jim thompson who knew the speaker from illinois. but we had, we had some people who had been in the senate on both sides, and they talked to

the senator. slade gordon was enormously helpful in the keeping the senate republican leadership in touch with what we were doing. we had tim roamer on the democratic side of the house who went around -- >> guest: bob kerrey. >> guest: bob kerrey was very helpful in the senate, but we didn't have anybody talking to the republican house leadership, and they were the audience we needed most because they were the most wary of the commission, the most worried about us and, eventually, the most hostile to us. and i think communications being all important, had we done a better job of bringing them along and communicating with them all the way along, i think we wouldn't have those problems at the end where they were fighting our relations twea and fighting the end of the commission and giving us all sorts of problems and the extension and all of that. we hadn't kept in proper touch with them, and we should have. >> host: lee, anything that you remember? >> guest: well, i think we spent far too much time arguing about access. and we should have pushed that harder earlier.

>> host: ah. >> >> guest: so that we could have spent a lot more time and atlantic on the recommendations -- deliberation on the recommendations. however, i must say the recommendations came to us more easily than i thought they would. but we were still arguing questions of access a month or two away from report time. >> guest: yeah. exactly right. >> guest: so i think i'd push a little harder on the question of access. i think we mention in the book we had a marvelous group of commissioners, and tom and i let them take the lead for the most part on questions. and i think at times we were not as tough on questioning as we should have been. we mentioned mayor giuliani -- >> host: giuliani. but that's not a major thing. >> guest: no, that's not a major thing. that was our fault, not his. but i can look back on times and say, well, we should have been a little tougher here on

questions. >> host: the issue that i would raids with you and i'm sure -- raise with you and i'm sure i'm not going to be the first one to do this is iraq. you do say in the book, and it's quite clear that you're not there to do an iraq investigation. you're there to do a 9/11 information, that's what you did and be very well. but the administration, um, i think, prompts me to ask this question. the administration links iraq with 9/11. the administration says right now that if we were to lose or not quite achieve our goals in iraq, that would be a huge setback in the war against terrorism. so the link between iraq and the war against terrorism and terrorism itself is made by the administration. and it's so terribly important now, i mean, it is a bloody episode in our history. as you look back upon it now, do you think that separation was

the right call? >> guest: well, me made it clear because we thought that was part of our job that while there had been links between saddam hussein -- >> host: yes. >> guest: -- and al-qaeda, that that's all they were, were links. >> host: right. >> guest: and that saddam hussein and iraq had no role whatsoever in heaven. in the 9/11. but there had been people who were implying they had. >> host: yes. >> guest: what you're talking about now is a situation we've gotten ourself into, and can there's no -- and there's no question in my mind that we've got a situation in iraq right now that if we were to lee tomorrow and it turn -- leave tomorrow and it turned into a civil war, that that civil war would probably spread outside the borders of iraq itself and involve a number of other

countries in the area with the sunnis and the shiites and the kurds and all of that, and we would have a problem, i think, going all the way from lebanon and israel and syria all the way across to india and pakistan of trouble. and that would be a breeding ground for terrorists. so from that point of view, that's the kind of area that al-qaeda loves. >> host: oh, yes. >> guest: because they breed in it. >> host: sure. >> guest: and so from that point of view it is disturbing that if this whole area blows up because of iraq, that we're going to have more terrorists than we have now. >> host: what -- lee hamilton, what can you say about what you learned about terrorism that can be a kind of lesson for the american people now and the sorts of things that we ought to as a people be thinking about, perhaps doing? not just golfer nance, but -- governance, but ordinary folks. >> guest: i think we learned

that it's a formidable adversary. they're smart, they're sophisticated, they're patient, they want to kill us, they want to kill us in large numbers. there isn't any doubt about their intent. a good bit of doubt, perhaps, about their capabilities. that the problem of dealing with this phenomenon of terrorism is not a problem we're going to solve in the next, in my lifetime. it's a generational problem that you have to look at our relationship to three billion muslims spread from morocco to indonesia. and we had better understand that there's no such thing as perfect safety. there are a lot of things we have to do to make ourselves safer as a people, and we should to those things. tom and be i put that as -- tom and i put that as a top

priority. but every american has to understand that this really is a different world after 9/11, that there are greater risks. we believe that the terrorists will hit us again. we don't know when, we don't know how, but we think it's an exceedingly serious matter. and when all is said and done and you've done everything you think of you can do, there's still an element of risk there. but we're impressed with the adversary here. don't undersell osama bin laden. >> host: are you impressed equally with the way in which we as a government and a people have responded to the 9/11 challenge? >> guest: i'm impressed with the fact that we haven't done enough, that we haven't given it a high enough urgency or priority. that we haven't always spent our money most effectively or organized ourselves as well as we should. i'm appalled that you do not have detection devices for

liquid explosives at this time, five years after 9/11. >> host: it is an amazing fact. >> guest: i'm appalled that you still don't have communication among first responders at the scene of the disaster. i'm appalled, as tom mentioned earlier, that you don't allocate money for homeland security protection on the basis of risk and vulnerability to pass it out on the basis of politics. i'm appalled that we don't have, we haven't solved yet the question of a unified command at the site of the disaster. i'm appalled -- i can go on and on about cargoes, about containers. >> host: there's still so much to be done. >> guest: there's so much to be done and, marvin, i think the big thing that's confronting us now is cost. we simply cannot do it all. and we are at the point in the debate now where we really have to begin to make very hard choices about priorities, what you're going to protect and what you're not going to protect,

what kind of tactics are you going to protect against. >> host: well, we've only got just a few seconds left, and i can't resist, um, just pulling a quote from abraham lincoln that you use in the book which i love. i'm a firm believer, he said, in the people. if given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crises. the great point is to bring them the real facts, and i think, tom kean and lee hamilton, you've done that very well in this new book "without precedent." we thank you very much for being with us. >> guest: thank you very much. >> that was "after words," booktv's signature program in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by journalists, public policymakers, legislators and others familiar with their

material. "after words" airs every weekend on booktv at 10 p.m. on saturday, 12 and 9 p.m. on sunday and 12 a.m. on monday. you can also watch "after words" online. go to booktv.org and click on "after words "in the booktv series and topics list on the upper right side of the page. tomorrow, the ten-year anniversary of 9/11 on the c-span networks with live coverage from each of the memorial sites. here's our live schedule. at 8:30, a memorial ceremony from the world trade center site. on c-span2 at 9, vice president bide treason the pentagon. and on c-span c-span3 at 9:30, honoring those who lost their lives on united flight 93. 9/11 remembered tomorrow on the c-span networks. ♪ >> inig