prize. i publish a newspaper. we've been publishing the michigan bulletin for 17 years here, and my dad is one of those people who are remembered as a kid used to go down south and he would bring people up in the car. he would drive down and he would pick up some of the guys out of alabama. they're still here in the community and they are like me, their kids are first generation from the south and their kids kids are now here. i really appreciate that you hide light of that type of thing. ..

>> caller: do we stay and try to reto our institutions, do we restack the churches, do we come out with our own measures and demand this community make the adjustment for us and fight for our place here in the sun? >> host: all right, lansing, thank you so much. >> guest: it's my belief that this great migration that occur inside the 20th century was a water shed event that helped bring us to a point where legalized caste system as it had existed for so long, for three or four generations, was no longer legally on the books. that was a major change in our history. the next migration or the next journey, i believe, has to be spiritual. in other words, the goal is to find our own place in the sun. there are no other suns. i mean, we have lived everywhere

in the country. so now it becomes an issue of recognizing our common humanity with other americans, with all americans that all americans recognize that we are one in this situation whatever it might be, the economic crisis, other crises that we might experience, and that we all need each other, and we have so much more in common than we've been led to believe. when it come toss the younger generation, the goal of the book is to get all of us talking about what people hadn't talked about. i grew up as the child of people who had done this very thing, and they never talked about it. in fact, one of the most difficult interviews was my mother who did not want to talk about it. she said, that's this past, why do you want to dredge that up? we don't need to talk about it, that was a long time ago. and the goal of this was in some ways to make this, in some ways validate what they had done, the

magnitude of what they had done so that they would feel proud of what they'd done. and by recognizing that, to start talking and sharing the stories. we will gain strength as a country and african-americans as a people by recognizing what people have survived, what they learned frit and how they -- from it and how they can go forward with the knowledge which many other groups have. it gains us nothing to not realize what we have survived, and getting the older people to talk about what they went through was one of the goals of this. so my hope was that younger people will get a sense of grounding and the foundation and recognize that they don't have to look on the outside for heros, that there are heros within all of our own families and backgrounds. we need to know who the heros are in our own background. we don't have to go out to others to learn what someone else is doing. the answers are within our own families if we merely take the time to share them and talk

about them. when i go out and talk about this book, i think some of the most heartbreaking comments are from people who read the book and then say to me, my mother has already passed away, by father or my grandparents already passed away, the people who lived this are gone. what can i do, how can i tell the story, and how can i share it with my children so that they will know where they came from? so the goal, this some ways s a sense of urgency to go to the oldest people in our families and find them and get the stories before it's too late. to be able to, i mean, i've had a father and a daughter, i remember, in los angeles who both came together, and after hearing the talk and hearing about the book, the daughter said to the father, i'm taking you to the coffee shop now, and you're going to tell me the stories. and that's what i think will build strength in all of us, to know where we came from. and the young people need to

know so that they will have strength going forward. and that's what i would hope. in fact, a wise person told me that the most important readers of your book have not yet been born. and i think that's a powerful statement about the importance of stories, the importance of history in our everyday lives. and i would also say to those of us who are, don't consider ourselves part of history quite yet to realize that what you did last week is history for people who are the children of today. so that to record our own stories is an important part of maintaining the history. it's living history, and it matters. >> host: just a few minutes left with our guest, isabel wilkerson. ma'am, you're next. >> thank you. i'm annie brown, and i grew up in louisiana with a family that stayed behind. and we used to wish that our parents would move to

california. but we stayed in louisiana, so i'm curious because you've expanded my conception of the people who are part of the great migration. i didn't consider myself a part of the great migration. but i did leave louisiana in the '60s to attend washington university in st. louis. and i know there were a number of students in the south that left historically black colleges and others to go to graduate school. and so i'm, um, it's almost like i was not -- i feel i was not a part of the great migration, but i was a beneficiary of the great migration. and so i'm just curious, you know, because to me it's almost like a new, another book. the new migrants. those folk that migrated at another time when they weren't experiencing, experiencing quite the same things that people

experienced earlier. jim crow was there, i rode on the back of the bus, but there were other things that had softened, but it was opportunity and education that drove us. >> guest: well, you are part of the six million just demographically, so you are part of the great migration from the way that statisticians and demographers talk about it. one thing to remember is that once the migration began, there were waves after waves after waves such that the very first ones who migrated were actually the grandparents of people who would have been the grandparents' generation of those who were the last to arrive by the 1970s. and so it went on for a very long time. and the migration did not end until the circumstances that were propelling it, meaning legalized segregation and legalized caste system, until that caste system ended legally, the migration didn't end. and as soon as it ended, then

the tide turned, things began to become equalized, and then some began returning. so this was a long process of movement of people which changed the country. >> host: this is one of the most awarded and celebrated books of 2011. "the warmth of other suns: the epic story of america's great migration," isabel wilkerson has been our guest here at the national book festival. >> up next, former vice president dick cheney talks about his experiences during 9/11 and the lessons he's learned since then. mr. cheney is interviewed by stephen hayes, senior writer at the weekly standard and author of "cheney." [applause] [applause]

>> good morning, everybody. and welcome to the american enterprise institute. i'm danielle pletka, i'm the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies here at aei. let me first remind everybody, please, to turn off their telephones or to put them on vibrate and ask everybody when the session ends to, please, remain seated in order to allow our speakers to leave the room. a final housekeeping note, booksellers are available with the book in the reception after the end of the event. when aei president arthur brooks who, unfortunately, couldn't be here invited vice president cheney to join us today, it was with a view to remembering the attacks of 9/11 ten years later and considering some of the lessons learned and those that were not since that day. but the first thing to recall about 9/11 and about the long

war that we are still fighting is the many who gave their lives. the families who sacrificed loved ones and the awful loss. first and foremost, now is a time to remember those many brave americans who died at home, our fighting men and women who risk everything so that we can live in freedom and our invaluable allies from too many countries to name who share our cause. as some of you know, vice president cheney recently published a memoir, "in my time," written with his daughter liz cheney. we understand it will debut at number one on "the new york times" bestseller list on sunday. [applause] today he joins us with weekly standard senior writer and best-selling author steve hayes

for a conversation about that attack on our nation, about decisions made since then and some reflections on an amazing life in politics and pretty much whatever else he and steve choose to talk about today in the hour that we have. in the time remaining after that conversation, we'll have a q&a session moderated by steve. lynn cheney has been a scholar at axe i for many -- aei for many years. dick cheney is, again, a member of our board of trustees. we're so glad to have them as part of our aei family, and we thank them and you all for joining us here today. [applause] >> well, thank you. >> i won't interrupt. [laughter] >> remember, you're a reporter, steve. >> that's right. look, i get my payback. [laughter] >> i just wanted to say a word,

and then i'll turn it over to mr. hayes. the book i wrote is a memoir, it coffers all -- covers all 70 years of my life, the early years are short. there wasn't a lot of good stuff to write about that period of time. but, um, the last half of the book roughly focuses on the bush/cheney administration, my years as vice president. and the book opens in the prologue with a recounting the events as i saw them on 9/11. and, um, then much of that last half of the book deals with what we had to do during the course of our subsequent seven and a half years in order to keep the country safe, some of the controversies we were involved in on things like the terror surveillance program, enhanced interrogation and so forth. so that's a large part of the book is relevant with respect to

9/11 and the aftermath, although i don't want to mislead anybody, there's an awful lot in there of other stuff as well, too, going back to the fact, i guess, there have been five republican administrations since eisenhower, i've worked in if four of them, worked closely with the fifth, the reagan administration, as part of the house republican leadership. and so i try to cover all of that period of time and, obviously, a lot we had to leave out, but there's enough there that steve's trying to make a living writing articles about me. [laughter] so i'm going the turn it over to him. >> excellent. well, thank you and thanks to dani and aei for having us. just to give you an idea of what i thought i would try to do this morning, i'm going to start with some questions about 9/11 specifically and push you in particular about your personal views on these things because i know you love to kind of put yours on the couch -- yourself on the couch.

[laughter] public self-reflection. [laughter] and then i'm going to go and talk about a number of different ways in which the policies that emanated from 9/11 that you, i think, in large part helped to drive and try to fill in some gaps. i've spent a lot of time looking at the interviews that you've done since the book came out, i've read it now, twice, and some questions that i have remaining for you. i think that's how i'd like to proceed, and then as dani mentioned, we'll throw it open for additional questions that will probably be much better than mine. so i thought the first place we would start is on the morning of 9/11. i would be interested to know when you first knew we were under attack. not when you first heard about it, but when did you know we were under attack, and what were your very first thoughts at that moment? >> well, the -- i was in my office in the west wing working with my speech writer when my

secretary called in to report that a plane had struck the world trade center in new york. and we turned on the television, and this was after the first plane had gone in but before anything else had happened. and be the immediate reaction was to think, how is this possible? this is a really weird accident. perfectly clear weather, there was no way to account for it, and then as we watched, we saw the second plane hit, and that immediately, in my mind, triggered the notion that this had to be a terrorist attack. you couldn't have two airliners fly into the world trade center within minutes of each other and not have it be anything but a terrorist attack. shortly after that i talk with the the president down in florida, and we talked about a statement he was getting ready to issue a statement, and that was whether or not it was proper to talk about terrorism within that context of that statement, and we both agreed it definitely

was, and the words he used was probably a to have toist attack -- terrorist attack on the united states. the, within a relatively short period of time people fan to gather in my -- began to gather in my office. secretary rice, then the national security adviser was there, scooter libby, my chief of staff. we probably had seven or eight people in the room. and then all of a sudden the door burst open, and my lead secret service agent came in and came over to the desk where i was sitting, and he said, sir, we have to leave immediately. i said, you know -- he didn't say i'd like to take you out, he said we have to leave immediately, put one hand on the back of my belt and one on my shoulder and literally propelled me out of my office. i didn't have the option of not going. [laughter] and the, the cause for that, the

reason he'd done that is he explained to me as he was taking me down to the presidential emergency operations center under the white house was that he'd received a report over the secret service radio net that there was a hijacked aircraft out at dulles headed towards crown at 500 miles an hour, crown being the code word for the white house. and that turned out to be american 77 which, of course, came in and made a circle and then went into the pentagon. be at that point -- at that point i was down partway to the piac yet, i hadn't gotten there yet, and i immediately used a telephone that was there to place another call to the president, and that was our second or third call that morning. and to let him know that washington was under attack as well as new york. and the secret service had

strongly recommended that he not come back. i also recommended that he not come back, believing that it was very important for us to stay apart so that we didn't become a riper target, and we didn't know at that stage what was happening. >> he department like to hear that, did he? >> he didn't like that at all for understandable reasons, but he agreed to it. i think he saw the wisdom of it. did you ask what our reaction was that morning, steve? i went from that spot after i talked to the president, went in to the peac itself, and there i was presented by norm ma net that who was our secretary of transportation and responsible for the faa, norm had a list of six aircraft that they believed had been hijacked at that point, actually had the flight numbers on them. and, of course, it was only four, but for a while we thought it was six. and there were two major drivers in be terms of what i thought

about that morning and as we worked through the crisis that day. number one was we had to get all the planes down out of the sky so we could isolate whatever had been hijacked and account for all the aircraft including the list we had of ones we thought had been hijacked. at that point we'd accounted for three of them, two in new york and one at the pentagon. and so that was a major part of the effort, and the other thing that was very important that i focused on was the continuity of government. some of you are probably familiar with over the years especially during the cold war we had developed programs and procedures for preserving the continuity of government in the event of an all out global conflict with the soviet group on. that was always a scenario. and we'd actually exercised that system on many occasions, and it

focused on, um, having ways, taking steps to insure that somebody in the line of succession survived whatever kind of attack we were under so that when the dust settled, we'd have a president and a government, be able to function. and that's what we referred to as continuity of government. that day it took the form, basically, one was to recommend the president we not bunch up. it was very important for us to stay separated. but secondly, it was to get ahold of denny hastert, of course, speaker hastert. he was out at andrews air force base where his security detail had had relocated, and we ranged for him to be move today a disclosed location because he was next in line. so those were the two major concerns that occupied most of

our time. one was, as i say, getting all the airplanes down out of the sky, and the other was guaranteeing that there'd be somebody in the line of succession in a position to be able to take over. >> right. speaking of the secure undisclosed location, much of the time when the media was reporting that you were in a secure undisclosed location, you were actually at camp david, and that's where you went the evening of september 11th. and i remember having a conversation with you much later in which you described what that was like, being at camp david late that evening. and the way you described it to me was that the family gathered around the television. you sat, basically, in silence for a couple hours watching reruns of the planes hitting the towers and of the horror that day. what was that like, how long did you do that, and what were you thinking at that point? >> it was, after the president had returned, we'd done the, we

had a national security council meeting, he addressed the nation. and when we finished that, then lynn and i got on the white top helicopter on the south lawn and were flown to camp david. um, it's the only time aye ever taken -- i've ever taken off in a helicopter off the south lawn without being with the president be. i've done it a lot over the years, but you don't fly off the south lawn except in those extraordinary circumstances. and when we got to camp david, they took us to aspen lodge which is the presidential lodge up there. but, again, for security reasons the secret service was, obviously, totally focused on and concerned about, um, the possibility of follow-on attacks, and aspen was the most secure facility at camp david. so we spent a couple of days there at aspen lodge. we sat in the living room,

watched the television, and i was accompanied by my wife lynn and daughter liz. daughter mary was out of the country, enroute back by then. but i can remember sitting there focused, obviously, like i think people were all over the country watching the towers come down, the fires at the pentagon and so forth. and began to think about what we needed to do by way of policy, what steps we might take in order to deal with this new situation. and the thoughts that came to mind were, first and foremost, that this wasn't just a terrorist attack. we'd had a lot of terrorist attacks over the years. we tended to treat them as law enforcement problems. we'd go out and find the bad guys, aroett them, put them on -- arrest them, put them on trial, lock them up. this was an act of war.

we had 3,000 dead americans in a matter of minutes that morning, and we needed to treat it as an act of war, and that meant, obviously, you'd martial all the resources of the federal government to be able to deal with, to prevent a follow-on attack and to deal with those who were responsible for what had happened. we had a pretty good idea the afternoon of the attack that this was al-qaeda related. that was the advice we were getting from the intelligence community. so it wasn't a big mystery about who was behind it. by then pretty well focused in on osama bin laden. but there was a lot we department know about -- we didn't know about al-qaeda. now, you know, we've heard so much about it for ten years, there's a bit of a temptation to sort of think we know everything there is to know about al-qaeda. but the day of the attack this was a group of terrorists.

but there was, as i say, a lot of key questions that we couldn't answer. we department know how big they were, we didn't know who was financing them, where all they were operating. there was a lot we needed to learn, and that partly drove our search for intelligence that generated some of the policies that we put in place. and, um, but i sat as i recall and made a series of notes on a legal tablet that night as i thought about what we were faced with and how we might begin to deal with it. and i chewed over in my own mind what we needed to be doing. ultimately, we all met up at camp david, all of us -- the national security council -- that weekend. the attack, i guess, was on tuesday, and by friday night we'd pretty well gathered up at camp david, spent saturday and sunday up there with the

president and began to pull together what, ultimately, emerged as our strategy for the global war on terror. >> in the days after the attacks, we saw various public officials, um, in very public displays of emotion. we saw president bush almost come to tears in the oval office, we saw, heard about condoleezza rice going back to the watergate and breaking down at one point because of the emotional toll that this was taking. on a personal note, i remember coming back from new york driving across the roosevelt bridge hearing martin sexton's version of "america the beautiful," and i broke down crying. did you ever have a moment like that? >> not really. [laughter] >> you understand that people will find that -- >> strange. >> we call peculiar -- peculiar?

[laughter] >> yes. my wife and daughter were with me that evening. lynn was with me all day in the peac. she'd been downtown that morning when the attack started, and the secret service had brought her over to the west wig, and then she really sat beside me throughout the day. so she'd probably be the best person to comment on what my mental attitude was. i was focused very much on what we had to do. i was thinking of it in terms of what this meant with respect to policy and our military forces and what the targets were out there we might go after and how we might go after them and so forth, what kind of intelligence we were going to need in order to be able to cope with this new threat. but that's what i recall. it wasn't that it wasn't a deeply moving event, it clearly was. but the ore -- other thing that influenced me from a personal standpoint was that i had spent

a good deal of time over the years on the continuity of government program, and i'd been through exercises where the nature of the attack on the u.s. far in excess of what we actually faced on 9/11, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of people killed. so i had the benefit of having gone through those exercises over the years, and that training just sort of kicked in terms of thinking about what we had to do that morning and the next day. >> right. let's get to those policies. specifically, let's talk about the two that everybody, i think, thinks that has the most controversy, the terror surveillance program on the one hand and enhanced interrogations on the other. can you describe, i think there's a general sense among the public that you start of brainstormed these ideas, you came up with them, they were your ideas. you've been the most fierce

public advocate of them. can you describe how the terror surveillance program came to be? >> sure. well, it's important to keep in mind they were initiated at different times. the terror surveillance program is something we moved to within days of our time with, after 9/11. the enhanced interrogation techniques really came in a year or two later when we were in the business by then of capturing people like khalid sheikh mohammed who i believe we caught him in the spring of '03. and it was the capture of certain kinds of individuals that led us to the point where we needed enhanced interrogation. but coming back to your basic question on the terror surveillance program, the origin of the program came really from mike hayden and his people at

the national security agency. and george tenet was involved as well. there'd been a conversation between the two of them, this is within a couple of day of 9/11. as i recall, the two of them had talked, and george mentioned it to me. the basic question being, are there additional things we can do with our, our capabilities, our capacity to read the mail that would help us deal with the situation we then faced. that led to a meeting in my office, as i recall, where mike came in, then general hayden, then the head of nsa, later head of the cia, and george tenet. and the three of us talked. and there were things that, that nsa thought they could do if they had additional authority.

and i took that package, that proposal basically and went to see the president, sat down and went through it with him. he signed up to it, but with a caveat that he wanted it very, very carefully managed, he wanted to make certain that he personally approved it, each step of the way, and that they had to come back in for approval on a regular basis. what emerged out of that was significantly enhanced capacity for us to be able to intercept, um, communications originating outside the united states possibly from what we've referred to as a dirty number. you capture an al-qaeda type, he's got a computer, a rolodex, whatever it is, he's got his group of phone numbers on, and you want today know who he was -- wanted to know who he was talking to in the united states, for example.

and the safeguards that we built into it at the direction of the president involved, um, the fact that every, i think it was every 30 or 45 days it, excuse me, varied from time to time. the, i think the secretary of defense and the director of the cia, um, and nsa all had to sign off on continuing the program. it didn't get renewed automatically. they all had to say in writing to the president that they thought we should continue the program from the standpoint of the nation's security, etc. um, the attorney general had to sign off on it. all of that then went to the president. dave addington, who worked for me, was responsible for carrying it around, and he'd get all the signatures, and the president once he was, had received this input from his senior advisers, then he would sign up for it and

extend the program for another 30 or 45 days. and that's the way we operated it for years. i briefed the key members of congress, i had the chairman and ranking member of the house and senate intelligence committees come down every couple ofs to my office -- copping of months to my office, and mike hayden would come this and george, usually, tenet, and we briefed the key four members of congress who had jurisdiction in this area over what we were doing and what kind of results it was producing. so they were wired in from the beginning. later on when some controversy arose inside the program and with the justice department, um, we expanded that group of four into be nine. we added the speaker, majority and minority leaders of the house and senate and had all of them in, briefed them as well. and then i went around at that point and asked them all at that

point, nancy pelosi was in the group, jay rock ferrell and the -- jay rockefeller on the democratic side, asked them if they thought we should continue the program. they said, absolutely. then i said, do you think we ought to go back to the congress and get additional legislative authority to continue to operate the way we're operating? and they said, absolutely not. and they were unanimous on both points. they were concerned that if we went up and asked congress for a vote on the subject, the fact that we were doing it would leak, and we'd in effect be telling the enemy how we were reading their mail. so it was well notified to the congress, there was some controversy later on, but internally that the president dealt with, but it was, i'm convinced, a key part of our success in terms of preventing further attacks against the united states. i think we saved thousands of

lives by what we were doing. i think it's one of the great success stories, especially with respect to nsa and be how they put the program together and developed the capability, one of the great success stories of american intelligence. and maybe someday it'll all be told. >> you've made the same argument about enhanced interrogations. you're a strong believer that the policies quote-unquote worked. let's go beyond that part of the debate and talk about the effects of enhanced interrogations and the perceptions around the world, um, that it is torture, that the things that we did amounted to torture, and the sense that maybe the moral position of the united states was eroded because of the things that we did here in this country. how do you respond to those arguments? >> is that a question or an invitation to argue? >> the -- i always offer you an

invitation to offer. no, those are, i think they're sort of crazy critiques, and then there are more thoughtful critiques. i think that's a more thoughtful critique. do you? >> i do not. i am persuaded that the way we went about seeking the authority to be able to extract more intelligence from a handful of individuals -- we're talking here not about your rank and file enemy troop or soldier, this does not involve the military, this does not involve the department of defense. this is a program that was authorized by the president, signed up to by the national security council, carried out with all kinds -- excuse me -- of safeguards by the central intelligence agency. we had a case, excuse me, where we had a handful of individuals

who clearly had knowledge of what was in the works from the standpoint be of al-qaeda, what they hoped to be able to do, how they funked, who the -- functioned, who the key members were. it was people like khalid sheikh mohammed, a man named ali that she ri, the notion that somehow the united states was wildly torturing anybody is not true. anybody who takes the time to look at the program, i think, will come to the same conclusion. obviously, there are people out there who differ with respect to that perspective, but when we get into the whole area of one of the most controversial techniques as waterboarding, i think there's a protester out front this morning when i drove in commenting on waterboarding. um, three people were waterboarded. not dozens, not hundreds, three. and the one who was subjected

most off to that was khalid sheikh mohammed, and it produced phenomenal results for us. there are reports that the intelligence be community did of the results of the program which were declassified at my request and are now available on the internet that talk about the quality of information that we got as a result of our enhanced interrogation techniques apply today a handful of individuals. we were talking about only a handful of people who were, indeed, a part of the al-qaeda organization. and khalid sheikh mohammed was not only the man who we then had reason to believe, correctly, had beheaded daniel pearl, reporter for "the wall street journal", but also had claimed credit for being the architect of 9/11, killed 3,000 americans that morning. another key point that needs to

be made was that the techniques that we used were all previously used on american military personnel. not all of them, but all of them had been used in training for a lot of our own, um, specialists in the military area. so there wasn't any technique that we used on any al-qaeda individual that hadn't been used on our own troops first, just to give you some idea whether or not we were, quote, torturing the people we captured. the way the program worked was the, um, the agency came in, um, primarily george tenet, then still director of the cia, came in. he talked to me, talked to a couple of other people,

basically, he wanted to know how far they could go in terms of interrogations of these individuals that we captured. and the, he really needed two kinds of sign-offs. one was a sign-off from the president, and secondly was the ruling from the justice department as to where that line was that you couldn't cross. and we sought and obtained both of those. president signed up to it as did the other members of the national security council. some of my colleagues may have forgotten that, but, in fact, everybody who was a member of the security council was informed about the essence of the program and signed up to it. so you had the proper governmental authorities agreeing that this was necessary and worthwhile, and we had the key people over in the justice department, people like john yoo

who has been severely harassed because of the fact, the legal opinion he and others issued. but they were legitimate legal opinions from the jus he's department -- justice department, said this is okay and appropriate, this isn't. gave us very clear guidance that we could follow. and the folks out at the agency insisted on that kind of guidance before they were willing to go forward. now, they, one of the things that i found most objectionable with respect to the obama administration when they came in was the initial decision by the president and attorney general holder that they were going to investigate and prosecute the people in the intelligence community who had carried out this interrogation program at our direction. and, um, i thought that was a terrible precedent to set. you've got the president of the united states has signed up to

it, he's the legitimate authority in this case. the justice department has signed up to it, these guys have gone out at our direction and used this authority to collect intelligence that we badly needed to have, and the next thing you know you get a change in administrations, and the new crowd coming in many says we're going to go prosecute those guys who were responsible for carrying out those policies. um, i, well, i came here to aei at one point about two years ago and spoke on the subject. i will say the administration appears to have reversed course. all of those activities were investigated by career lawyers in the justice department at the tail end of the bush administration. it had all been looked at before to make sure it was cope settic. but the obama administration did finally, and i think, i hope the matter's now resolved, back off.

and those people that, frankly, i think didn't deserve to be prosecuted, i thought they deserved to be decorated for the work they did for us that saved, again, many, many lives. >> let's jump forward to that speech which, as you say, was may of 2009 here at aei, and it was in part a critique of the administration's decisions on those things that you mentioned, but it was also -- at least the way i heard it -- a warning. by stepping back from the kinds of things that your administration had done, you were in be effect saying, we're putting -- we're choosing to put ourselves at greater risk. and yet here we are some two and a half years later. we had, of course, the attack at fort hood. um, but in spite of all the things that you warden against, we haven't -- you warned against, we haven't been attacked again. osama bin laden's been killed,

you've had a series of successes on al-qaeda central, um, in afghanistan and pakistan that has by, i think, most accounts been decimated or pretty thoroughly taken apart. were you wrong when you made those warnings in may of 2009? >> i don't think so, steve. i would argue that the policies we put in place back in those days that were available to us and were utilized over time, and i've seen some comment to this effect from current officials of the government, um, helped produce, for example, the intelligence that allowed us to get osama bin laden, that it was out of the enhanced interrogation techniques that some of the leads came that ultimately produced the result when president obama was able to send in seal team six to kill bin laden.

so i think it's been a continuum, if you will, between administrations focused especially on the part of the career folks in the intelligence community and in the special ops community in the military that have worked out over time -- worked it over time. it wasn't just the new administration came in and, gee, all of a sudden we got bin laden. they had the benefit of all the work that had been done -- >> true, but at the same time, the terror surveillance program isn't operating as it was originally conceived, there are no more enhanced interrogations, we're broadcasting to al-qaeda and others exactly how we will interrogate them, we read miranda warnings to abdulmutallab, all of these things you warned against, and yet here we are, we haven't been attacked again, we've had these major successes. you know, when the bush administration came to an end, i remember you making the argument that you should be judged by the fact, at least in large part, that we hadn't been attacked

again, that that was a sign of success. why can't we use that same standard for the obama administration and say that the things they're doing have been successful? >> well, i guess i make the case that they've been successful in if -- in part because of the capabilities we left them with, the intelligence we left them with, because of what we learned from men like khalid sheikh khalid sheikh mohammed back when he was subjected. i think it's a mistake, for example, not to have an enhanced interrogation program available now. the president, when he canceled our enhance t interrogation program, said they were going to set up their own for high-value detainees, but as best i can tell, i don't know that they ever have. i don't know what they would do today if they captured the equivalent of khalid sheikh mohammed. probably read him his miranda rights, i don't know. that's not, in my mind -- it's a mistake for us to give up those capabilities. i hope that there are no more

attacks. but even as we meet here today, everybody drove to work with their car radio on this morning heard that there's, you know, a threat that's of sufficient credibility at least at this stage that the authorities are saying, you know, this is unconfirmed, but we're taking it very seriously. >> right. >> so i think, um, say i do think it was a mistake for them not to stay as actively and adepress ally as -- aggressively involved. charles krauthammer's written a brilliant piece on the notion that we somehow overreacted. i don't think that we did. i think we did exactly what we needed to do, and i think the results speak for themselves. >> we'll do one or two more from me, and then we'll open it up to others. you often made the case that iraq was a central front in the war on terror. looking back on iraq, one of the things that people have focused on in reading your book and in the reviews of your book is the

fact that you don't think that a lot of mistake were made, that there's not much you would change about the way that the iraq war was conducted. and i noticed in my reading of the book that in the criticism of, um, what the state department did you often focused on secretary powell and later secretary rice. but in the criticism of what the pentagon did, you focused on generals casey and didn't focus on your friend and mentor, don rumsfeld be. why is that? >> well, i, i thought i wrote a pretty good book. [laughter] i thought it was relatively balanced. i chose not to, um, dwell at length sort of on what transpired in the immediate aftermath of our going into iraq. i mean, we had -- there have been a lot of books written, some of them pretty good, i

think, about the policy in terms of setting up a new government in iraq, of, you know, jerry bremer's written one, several other books have been written, rumsfeld's written pretty ec tensively about it -- extensively about it. i, basically, took the approach that i could focus on a few things, and what i really wanted to focus on was the surge and the counterinsurgency doctrine that accompanied the surge that we put in place at the beginning of '07. so there's a lot written about that in my book be. but i didn't spend a lot of time going back over what the state department did with respect to managing, um, situation in iraq or what the pentagon did outside normal military activities in terms of the -- >> but if you read jerry bremer's book, and if you talk to other people, and i've talked to people on your staff and elsewhere who said that you were asking questions about the u.s.

military strategy in iraq during those years that things, obviously, weren't going well. asking tough questions; what is our strategy, do we know how to win, why are we doing the same thing, is the training effective? and i guess i'm interested on a personal level, um, when did you start asking those questions? >> well, on a personal level at some point we'll sit down and talk ab it. [laughter] >> i thought now was as good a time as any. >> no, i, i could have -- you have to make choices in a book. we wrote about, well, a little less than 600 pages. and as i point out in my early remarks, i had material for four or five books. what i chose was to focus on the highlights as i saw them and what i thought was vital this that regard, and, obviously, i

wrote it from my intereducative -- perspective in terms of what i saw, what i believed. i exercised a certain amount of discretion. i didn't want put down everything i know -- i didn't put down everything i know about what transpired in a whole range of different areas -- >> will there be a volume? >> well, i don't know, it depends on how this one does. [laughter] no, there are things i didn't talk about not just on iraq, but throughout my 40-year career. when you've been chief of staff to the president of the united states, you know, there are things you're involved in, um, where he expects discretion and deserves it. and i didn't write about those things. um, that's generally true of lots of things. i had connection with, in my time, the president bushes, i

think it's fair to say in both cases there are confidenced that they had in me on certain issues, and i've honored those, always would. >> on second term foreign policy, you write in the book quite a bit in a chapter that you not so sutley called "setback" about iran, about north korea, about syria, about non-proliferation issues. and you suggest at various points in the chapter that the bush administration lost its way. had, essentially, veered away from the bush doctrine that was so well established in the first term. and i wonder if you think president bush himself sort of lost his nerve? >> i didn't say that in my book, did i, steve? is. >> that's why i'm asking you now. [laughter] >> no, i, i did write a chapter called "setback," and i thought it was important because it was,

well, it was a source of frustration for me. it also demonstrated pretty clearly that i didn't win all the or arguments, and i thought that was important be to convey that. and there were, this was an area that had to do with north korea's nuclear aspirations and activities, building a nuclear reactor for the syrians in eastern syria that would allow them, ultimately, to produce nuclear weapons and so forth. it was one where there were significant differences inside the administration. i think many of those were known, but a part of my interest was in putting down the history of that period and the policy debates, and i thought there were lessons to be learned. we weren't the first administration that had trouble figure being out how you get -- figuring out how you get the north korean not to go nuclear. the clinton administration faced similar problems. i think the obama administration will have similar problems as

well too. but i thought it was important to put down, um, the record, if you will, of how we dealt with that. now, in the final analysis the president made the decision. he had to make choices. that's why he got the big bucks and lived in the big house. it's the responsibility of the president of the united states. um, obviously, he didn't always agree with my advice, and in this particular case he opted pretty much for the state department view of how we should proceed rather than what i was recommending. it's not the first time i've lost an argument with the president. >> do you think we're less safe because of those decisions? >> well, i think, this is a way to put it, would be that i believed -- i gave an interview before 9/11. it was actually in maybe april or may of 2001. we'd only been in office a

couple of months. and it, basically, i think it was the atlantic or new yorker -- >> [inaudible] >> new yorker where i cited as the biggest threat the nation faced, the possibility of the terrorist organization acquiring weapons of mass destruction, al-qaeda with nukes kind of thing. that i believe deeply, especially in the aftermath of 9/11 and i think it's important on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 to remind ourselves that that threat still is out there, still very real. and, um, one of the things i felt we did well up to a point was when we went in and we took down saddam hussein, obviously, we eliminated one of the guys who'd been a prime source of weapons of maas destruction previously, produced and used the equipment.

whether or not he had stockpiles at the time we went in, he clearly was a proliferater, a potential proliferater of that capability. so we got rid of saddam hussein as a threat. we, five days after we went in and captured saddam, moammar gadhafi held a press announcement that he was surrendering all of his nuclear materials. he had centrifuges for enriching uranium, he had uranium feed stock, he had a weapons design, and he surrendered all of those, and they're now in our possession, the unite has them. so we took him out of the nuclear business. pretty good given what's happened since in libya, it would not have been good to have the difficulties they'd had over there if moammar gadhafi had had nuclear weapons. we also took down the aq khan network. khan was the mastermind of the pakistani nuclear program. then he went into business for himself, black market operation

selling nuclear materials. his biggest customer was libya, but he also was dealing with north korea and to some ec tent with iraq -- extent with iraq. so saddam, moammar gadhafi, aq khan all put out of business from the standpoint of having to worry about them producing and/or proliferating or using those materials. the one we didn't get a handle on was north korea. and what the chapter you referred to that i call "setback," basically, is the story of how we did not deal effectively with the north korean threat. >> right. >> and, um, so i think, you know, if you're keeping score, three out of four's not bad. but the problem is that threat is very real, and the north koreans especially are dangerous because they've now tested two weapons, they have -- we caught 'em red-handed with respect to their providing a plutonium

reactor to one of the worst terror-sponsored regimes on the face of the earth, syria. and, um, fortunately for us, the israelis took that out, so we didn't have to worry about that anymore. but the north koreans, clearly, established that they will proliferate nuclear materials to terror-sponsoring regimes, and the problem that we're faced with is they're still very much there. and be we do not yet have a handle on north korea. the other problem, obviously, is still iran. we haven't even talked about that. but they've got to be front and center as well as the north koreans in terms of our concerns about that threat. and i do believe still today as we meet that that's the most dangerous threat the united states faces, is that technology will fall into the hands of an al-qaeda-type organization and

then nuclear weapons will no longer be a detent, they'll be an incentive. >> right. well, maybe we can take a few questions, and maybe we'll get a question about iran. please, when you are called on, wait for the microphone, give your name and your affiliation and ask a question rather than making a long statement. thank you. yes, ma'am. >> were you surprised when you found out that osama bin laden was in pakistan in terms of your talking with president musharraf at that time, the cooperation you had between both countries? did you at any point feel that the pakistan yi authorities had been -- pakistani authorities had been hiding something from the bush administration? >> i never had reason to believe that president musharraf was involved in anything like that. there was, i think there was a general view that, um, bin laden was in remote, some remote

section of pakistan, not just short ways from islamabad. i think what was startling was to find that he was living where he was, he wasn't hiding in a cave someplace, that there was a lot of the imagery that somehow he'd gone underground figtively -- figuratively. but i had no reason in my dealings with president musharraf, and be i dealt with him quite a bit, to question his, his commitment to the work he was doing with us to help us deal with the threat that had emerged from pakistan. i think he came to believe that, um, al-qaeda types threatened him personally as well as his regime as much as they did the united states, and i think that was true. two or three attempts on his life in a matter of weeks by

al-qaeda or al-qaeda-affiliated organizations while he was still president. .. >> well, it's difficult to judge the quality of the current effort without having to

speculate about what's going to come out. the far end of the process. and, frankly, i don't have answers to a couple of key question. i don't know who will be in charge when the dust settles, new governments are established, what are these regimes going to be like, how are they going to look at the u.s., what kind of relationships are we going to have. in some cases some of the regimes have been replaced, like president mubarak in egypt, for example. has been a good friend and ally with united states for years. we were together in the first gulf war, for example. so if you're evaluating the outcome in terms of u.s. interest, i think there's a lot we don't yet know about the outcome.

in terms of whether or not we should be supportive, i think that it is important for us to continue to express our support, certain values that we believe people ought to have the opportunity to live by, freedom and democracy. and i think that needs to come through, but they can't you've got to come back and be cautious your i think in terms of are we promoting that process with respect to islamic fundamentalist, for groups or organizations that may have one election and then shut down the electoral process and you will have the equivalent of hamas over a gaza. we don't know yet. and i think it's difficult to make a final judgment until we see how some of those things develop. >> should the united states taken more out front role in promoting the arab spring?

>> well, to do -- i'm cautious, steve, partly because of things we don't know. but also i think it's important for us to be a little cautious about muslim altogether. and my experience over the years with that part of the world, and it's important to remember these are different countries. in some cases the our many differences. there are religious differences, splits between shia and sunni. and some cases you've got governments that i think are probably viewed as legitimate in the eyes of the government, and others who are clearly, syria comes to mind the you've got a brutal dictator he was in charge and using violence to try to preserve his hold on power. and most of us can agree that he ought to go. so you need to make those kind

of judgment. when we talk about the arab spring, i think i understand what that means. and i think generally it's been welcomed, fundamental change in the region or i do think it's important to keep in mind as we evaluate these developments that each and every one of these countries is different, and needs to be dealt with accordingly. >> next question. over there in the front. >> i'm the average citizen. i have a question. when do we know we have one of the global war on terror speak as when do we know we have on the global war on terror? well, the facts are obviously

that they are similar to what we think of as conventional war, where, you know, we get battleship missouri in tokyo harbor and all the guys are there to sign a document. that's not going to happen. and i think there is evidence out there that would make -- we're making significant progress. i think getting osama bin laden was very important, and very useful, demonstrated part of that process. but i think also it may be the kind of thing that is gradually fading over time. but i don't think it's going to be a kind of aha moment where you stay there, it's done. >> take a couple more.

>> if i could take you back to your earlier comments about the middle east. bring it back in history, the great controversy of bush 41 administration was general norm schwarzkopf's assertion that had we continued to march was the phrase he used, there might've been a different outcome. what do you think that outcome would have been if he's the vice have been pursued in that regard? >> well, john is talking about when he and i were in charge of the pentagon. i was the secretary but he was the comptroller. as i think back on that, careful here not to challenge my colleagues from that era. often did good work. but my recollection of the close of the cold war was there was

unanimity on the part of the president, of his senior civilian and military advisers. that we gathered around the desk at the oval office. we had the secure line open to read todd where our senior military commander joe schwartz gough was. and you could look back on it later and say well, we should've done this, should have let them have helicopters or there were things we did know at the time. but there was a general sense but we have done what we set out to do. we're going to liberate, with the u.n. security council had signed up, that's what we call the coalition. that's what we told a trip through going to do. i promise when i got over there initially to get permission to put u.s. forces in the saudi, i also promised we would complete the mission, we would go home.

we are not looking for permanent bases in saudi arabia. so there was a general sense that, now, should we have gone all the way to baghdad then? circumstances were pretty dramatically different 10 years later after we had the events of 9/11, after we had seen saddam violent 16 out of 17 u.n. security council resolutions and produce and use weapons of mass destruction against his own people. you know, the world had shifted 10 years later. and if we had gone in, if there was a way, one thing i can think of that out like to changed it would've been to have saddam at the table signing the documents to surrender. one of the things that emerged out of the way that was built

with was even he was very creative and didn't have any qualms about misrepresenting the situation. but for years afterwards, somebody who had defied, successfully defied the great united states of america. because i'll be done in the middle east still stands. the fact that he was still standing, that he used to demonstrate or validate the notion that the one, and, of course, he hadn't but he was able to peddle that in that part of the world. so if i can think of one thing that i might have liked to have seen differently would have been to go into baghdad at that point. it would have been to have him set his fanny down in a chair and sign surrender documents. >> another one? all the way over.

>> i served in iraq for five years as a united nations spokesman and i can tell you that the disaster zone, little chance to recover for decades to come. iran has almost -- the united states is about to cut and run. in retrospect, was a mistake to invade iraq? >> i think it would be a mistake to cut and run. i don't think that we should turn our backs on iraq at this stage, and efforts that we have mounted there over the years. i think it's very important for us to complete the mission, and i think, my own personal view is that there's a danger here, rush for the exits under the current administration.

and that would be really unfortunate. >> one more quick one. >> president bush in his memoir doesn't really mention iraq from the spring of '03 to the spring of '06. what do you say to that criticism that the president was insufficiently monitoring his generals and not listening early enough or as early as desirable, something on the order of the surge strategy which will ultimately develop at the end of six and early '07. could that have been done earlier in? >> well, i, i'm inclined, first of all, what i remember is the president was heavily engaged during that period of time. he was not by any means ignoring what was going on in the

operations in iraq. we have fairly regular sessions where he would get on the secure hook up to baghdad, not only with their own senior people but also with senior iraqis. i've got a picture, it was a picture i put in my book, of rumsfeld and i at the camp david. and it doesn't show the president because he's on the other hand in baghdad. we've got a secure hook up during that period of time. he's gone into baghdad, over there visiting, having an important session with then prime minister malachi. he turned his back on it wasn't focused on, wasn't engaged. i would challenge that.

>> let me take the prerogative of asking one last question bringing this sort of back to 9/11. you've made the case that 9/11 changed the government. i think that's obvious to everyone. in many respects it changed the country. clearly changed the world. did it change you? >> did 9/11 changed me? well, it was, i don't think it changed me in the sense some have suggested, that, you know, i've got friends out there, used to be friends, who -- [laughter] i knew when he was a nice guy. warm and fuzzy. i don't know him now. and the other night i did jay leno, i don't know if anybody here saw, but they have what they call a cold open, and the program begins with jay leno green his gues