nuclear holocaust. in january 1956, eisenhower was informed about a nuclear exchange with the soviet union, 65% of the american population would be casualties. years later, chief of staff, sureman adams said what surely applies to president obama today. the real reason the president wants to run again, adam said, is because he doesn't think anybody else can do as good as a job as he's doing. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. ♪ >> coming up next,booktv presents "after words," and hour long program where we invite guest hosts to interview author. they present the collaborative work, "the dictator's handbook,

why bad behavior is almost always good politics." they describe how to maintain power by doing whatever is necessary to support. they talk with national security news editor. ♪ >> host: hello, i'm anne gearan. we're going to talk about a new book, "the dictator's handbook," that i think builds on work that both of you have done in a number of years in some previous political science work. can you explain how "the dictators handbook" is different from previous theories how governments function differently than democracies, and to whom is this book primarily aimed? >> guest: well, the prior

work, academic book, takes a survival, 500 page book and 100 pages of call cue louse. there's no statistics or algebra in this book. >> guest: there's a little math, there's a little math. >> guest: this is a book aimed at intelligent, politically interested audiences, people who read "wall street journal," "the economist," things like that. the other work is aimed at those who want to read 350 page description. >> guest: that's right. we tried to translate technical material into something easy to understand. our arguments are general and how political organizations, how

religious organizations, how corporations, how charities or any kind of urges works, and so -- organizations work. the purpose of the book was talking to students and fellow academics, and we never talk about the following function is increasing or the mathematical terms and statistics. we just give examples. we decided to write the book, and to be honest, it was a book that wrote itself. it was incredibly easy because we have this wonderful idea about how politics work and it's based upon self-interest and constraints that people have to operate within this system, and, you know, the jostling who of gets their way and who is not. it was a book that was just story after story fell into place, and so we wrote it for a general audience. >> host: explain more about that theory of self-interest going back to your earlier work. is it always the case that a leader will act primarily in his or her self-interest trumping

every other potential motivation? >> guest: absolutely. that's the absolute dominant motivation. people have things they'd like to do, and if there's discretion, they may want to advance public works projects or push for some religious preference over something, but first and foremost, you can't do that stuff until you secured yourself in power and taken care of the people who keep you in power. that's what has to be done first so before anything else, people take care of them. we don't deny there's benevolent people who care about others first, but they are not the ones who crushed the heads to get to the top in the first place. >> host: how far across the political spectrum does that theory of paramount, self-interest, extend? i mean, i can understand in a country in which there's a cult of personality, one leader who essentially gets to make all decisions, that that would be an

easier model to sustain than it might be in a country where say there's a hunta or going all the way on the other side where there's a democratically elected government. how far? >> guest: so the theory applies to all governments, indeed to all organizations. now, what the theory tells us is that leaders need to obey to the extent that they can five rules. the problem that they have which is what you're eluding to is that depending upon the nature of the political system, the amount of constraint they face in changing the way the system operates is greater or lesser, so as we sigh -- see it, leaders want to depend on few people as possible to keep them in power. they want those few people to be drawn from as large a pool of

available people as possible. they want to tax people as much as they can, subject to the limitation that they not try to tax so much that the economy collapses on their watch, and not so much that they have a rebellion. there's an optimum level. they want to pay the few people they need properly so those folks will want to defect to someone else, not a penny more, and they don't want to make the mistake of spending money on people who are not essential to keep them in power, so as we see it, a dictator contrasts with the hunta leaders and what people think of as a dictator, someone who depends on very few people drawn from a large pool of people. for example, lennon invented the

universal adult suffer raj system. everybody knew the election system was rigged, but there was a small probability of an individual who could get inside the little group of insiders, and they could get payoffs and lots of benefits. as a set of people you depend upon gets bigger, bribing people is too expensive. if you have to bribe 1 # 00 people, not, but if you have to bribe a million people, it's expensive. as the coalition that you depend upon gets bigger, loyalty to the leader gets weaker because they are safe rating the pool, -- saturating the pool. the quality gets better, and the leader is thrown out more quickly. a leader depends on a small coalition like the dictator, but they have a small group of generals, and a dictator depends

on a coalition potentially drawn from a huge coalition, so the hunta leader doesn't have the loyalty. they get overthrown more frequently than the guy with the little coalition drawn from a big pool where everybody knows they are easily replaced. >> host: that's a lot of rules. i mean, you listed the five main ones, but it almost sounds as if a good durable dictatorship is an accident of history. how can those things be so easily reproduced throughout countries? >> guest: one of our technical papers is about how it is some governments evolve to be democratic and some governments evolve to be dictatorial. it's very easy to construct a dictatorship. take an example -- we use this in the book -- suppose we're in

a room of 100 people, and five of us have guns. the five of us will run the room if nobody else has a gun is dictatorship, creation of dictatorship is generally about controlling violence, controlling the opportunity to engage in violence and not hesitating to use it. democracy is being very hesitant to use it because we'll throw the rascals out. we vote with the ballot box rather than the bullet. it's harder to construct democracy than dictatorship. >> host: democracy is a much less self-regulating government. you can't do those things in a democracy because you'll throw the bums out, but it also can't

bribe that many people or educatively run that large an organization if people keep getting to vote on how that organization is being run, am i correct here? >> you have a have an executive to make decisions. we have leaders. we choose to retain them if they do the things we like. what's it mean to do thanks that we like. things we like depends on what we pick. a democracy there's many, many people. in the u.s. to be president you need 35 or 45 million votes is enough to win the presidency. we might think of it as a democracy, but that's over 300 million people. nobody everybody's eligible, and if you pick the right folks in the right states, you can win the seats, and that's all you need to win. that's the thing to remember. the president gets votes, but how many does he need, and we

can see the debate is tailored towards rewarding society. we take the system down and move away from politics, a business enterprise, and we might wonder why is it wall street firms pay out huge bonuses. the people are not poor. they want to rip livers out, you know, these people feeding from the public purse to pay big bonuses. what's the reason here? well, most publicly traded corporations run like a small number of board members, senior executives, institutional investors, certainly not much more than the hundreds who are really important to staying at the top. how do you reward a small number of people? you give them enormous bonuses. you don't run them by giving public goods. we think everybody would like to

get top down the number of people they are beholding to because that leaves fabulous wealth to the small number of supporters. >> host: is that why, for example, ceos and board members get paid money, but so do college, you know, big ten football coaches; right? >> guest: yes, yes. the highest paid government employee in the united states is the coach of the army football team. >> host: really? >> guest: yeah, by far. it's not even close. i have a very important point about democracy. democratic leaders have the misfortune of needing a lot of people to support them, but they work as hard as they can to reduce that number of people, so the congress is one of the least popular institutions in the united states, and yet an individual member of congress has a 95% probability of

reelection. why is that? that's because the politicians have chosen their voters. the voters are not choosing the politician. they choose the voters but jury mannerring. they rig the some so they don't have to answer to so many people, and who do they reward? well, we have a favorite rhetorical question. journalists would have us believe that president obama wants to raise taxes on the rich, and that the republicans want to cut benefits to the poor. we prefer to express that differently. obama, president obama, wants to raise taxes on republican voters, and republicans want to cut benefits to democratic voters because that doesn't cost their constituents anything. it puts -- it helps to enrich their constituents at the expense of the other guy. >> the subtitle of your book is

why bad behavior is almost always good politics. can you talk a little about perhaps some of the exceptions to the overall theory? why is it almost always? >> guest: wops in a blue -- once in a blue moon, and i mean, once in a blue moon, it's in everybody's interest to become a more inclusive society. there's actually one the fascinating things that's slightly one of the harder things to get the grasp of is that the court wants to expand, and the court, and i'm thinking the development of institutions. when did the aristocrats want to bring people? we find, you know, aristocrats like small concentrated system, but once we get away from that and expand, they want to keep increasing and bring more and more people in. it's always in their interest. the leaders nearly always want to contract society. the coalition can go either way, and the people, of course,

outside the system who are not privileged, they want to make the system more and more democratic and more and more inclusive. relatively few times will leaders actually ever want to switch from being contraction and want to be repressive. they adopt the policies when they are bankrupt. the real problem with running a repressive society is it does not encourage people to do work. if there's no work, you can't tax them, and then you can't pay your cronies. there's a lot of examples when we see liberalization and politicians do good thing. they do good things because they can't pay their cronies without doing good things. they start to liberalize. the arab spring was e vice president-elect jipt. the -- egypt. the economy was badly. you have to have an educated population, so you liberalize

and bring more people in, get people educated, and reform. some leaders got ahead of the ball, and they can just keep liberalizing enough always so that they defer the protests. they gave enough to the people and a resourced poor country left to its own devices will democratic. ghana is a good example. he is jacking up army pay to keep them loyal, and then he runs out of money. the country is broke. years of dictatorship destroyed it. the coca crop is gone. they want to be a socialist. no one gives him money. what did he have to do? turn around, go to the people, do good thing, and the people were empowered. he couldn't stop them. they could demand good things. he's a leader who in hypped sight looks like the --

hindsight looks for the poster boy of liberal economic reform. he cracked heads while he could afford it, and he only did good things when he was forced to. >> host: it was in his self-interest to change, so he figured out, how will i stay in power? how will i keep the whole operation running? not the way i did before, but the best way i can do for me. >> guest: precisely. that's why almost always bad things always give you the best chance of staying in power, and once in awhile, that means doing good things. >> host: you mentioned the arab spring. what did hosni mubarak do wrong? he was a dictator for three decades. he ran one of the most successful countries in the middle east. he had policy in the middle east

that did good things like sign a peace deal with israel. what did he do wrong? >> guest: okay. excellent question. let me preface this by using the theory in the book that on may 5, 2010, we predicted 234 a public lecture that hosni mubarak would be gone in a year. >> host: okay, excellent. >> guest: first thing he did wrong was he had no control over. he got old. dictatorial leaders are in deep trouble under three conditions to start with. they've just come to power. they don't know where the money is so nobody trusts they'll be paid off properly, so they shop around. you survive the first couple years, you're golden until either the ben ali problem, you're believed to have a terminal illness.

they did this to marcos and shaw, or your cronies know you are no longer a reliable source of payment in the future, or you are old. very old is a terminal illness, and they again know you are not reliable. first problem, he's old. he's 82. second problem. his economy didn't have vast resource wealth. he depended on two sources of wealth. one was, for example, tourism. tourism requires a relatively well educated population. these are people with the education that they can think independently and might because they come together in business associations, begin to organize,

free assembly, very, very, very bad for a dictator. he had the undergirding of that and foreign aid. foreign aid is a great way to pay off your cronies if you're not generating an effective economy. president obama announced when he prom mull gaited his policy, and after that he announced he'd cut foreign aid to e gipped in -- egypt in half. two weeks after, the egyptian foreign minister for the first time since 1979 referred to israel as egypt's enemy. if you were a military leader, you'd be sitting there thinking the guy is getting old, and he's not able to manage his relationship with the united states in order to keep the money really flowing. most of that money is coming to

we, the military leaders. now, it's getting cut off. maybe we should look around for somebody else. maybe we should hedge our bets. you're there on the sidelines, one of these relatively well educated people, unemployed, paying double the price for food, and you're thinking, you know, the military's probably going to sit on its hands. they'll hedge the bets because the money's drying up. this is the time to rebel. that is, as we saw it, the perfect storm in egypt, completely consistent with the argument of the book that we use to evaluate that. we had done statistical analysis on countries two to three years down the road back then were likely to face regime change. israel, tunisia, morocco, jordan

were near the top of the list. in fact, egypt was at the top of the list. there was little he could do about the aging problem. he did good things like peace with israel. as we look at it, peace was israel was not a policy he favored. clearly the egyptian people favored, so he needing? to sell to the united states for money, something we would value enough to pay a lot for. son of a gun! peace with israel. >> host: and protect him. >> guest: exactly, and we did for 30 years. >> guest: there's a beautiful expression in this, but it's not a policy that the egyptian people were brought along with that we should love our fellow man across the border. you know, there was not a big campaign to educate tolerance

towards alternative religion. israel was still in the grass roots. they were treated as enemies. and this is what the government would want. if people are really like israelis, you can't sell we like israelis as public policy. there's egyptian textbooks saying israelis are not good people because we want to encourage hatred because we can sell that. we can sort of see that taking u.s. aid is not a popular policy. there's global studies, and it's amazing the countries they pick out as the ones having the most anti-american feelings are the ones with huge amount of u.s. aid. the big opec oil countries, they are not liberal democracies, they take enormous aid to undertake u.s. policies that are highly unpopular at home. the pakistanis hate americans. the afghans hate the americans.

the egyptians hate the americans. we pay their leader to get the money to pay off the military to keep the people down to adopt a policy they do not like. >> they should be pretty miffed. >> host: two things about egypt. we have not said the words "tahrir square". it is sprit separate and independent of the theory of why egypt was primed to fall and mubarak was primed to fall and there was demonstrations. that, i think, is the worldwide idea of why he fell. >> guest: not quite separate from the theory. so take a step back and ask yourself why people were willing to demonstrate, and they were not willing to demonstrate five years ago. >> host: they have license to now; right? >> guest: they had less to

lose because things were going badly for them in egypt, and they had more to gain exactly because the foreign aid was cut in half. they would have had a reason to believe that they will not face vasts amounts of oppression which they would have faced five years earlier. the way we think about this is they do what is called the back ward induction. you die on the street, you think do i want to demonstrate? no, i'm going to get my head bashed in. a little bit more educated, do i want to demonstrate? not this year, but, oh, now i see the situation is changing. the royalty of the military has been shaken. yeah, maybe they will sit on their hands. the risk of getting my head bashed in is still there, but it's lower, so if it gets low enough for enough people it's worth it, and others observe,

gee, nothing happened to the folks. the military did not bash their heads and protected them from the police who tried to bash their heads. more people take to the streets. it's this calculation. is the leader vulnerable? people would always like to overthrow dictators. the problems they face is most of the time it's a your risky thing to do. when the moment arises, they seize the moment. >> host: well, in the egyptian case, you identified a few minutes ago is the first to recognize and acted on it which was the military, the backbone of the country and certainly it was a big reason mubarak stayed as long as he was. they announced elections for november. do you think that elections will actually proceed in egypt, or will the military make a second

calculation that this holding pattern is probably better than the risk of an election? >> guest: well, i think you're entirely right to say this holding pattern will continue because we have an election. we're going to have elections unlikely to be truly meaningful. it's unlikely to be a large amount of free press. there's the reinstitution of the hated marshall laws where people are picked up off the streets, given short time in the court and arrested for dmon -- demonstration. they'll use repression against religious extremist groups arising that threaten the stability. you're not going to see particularly fair elections. one of the great advantages we discussed earlier of having an election, is elections tell anybody they can rise to the top, and anyone can be brought

inside the government and become a person of importance, but precisely because a lot of people can be brought in. that's the beauty of holding elections. we're not actually big believers in forcing elections on countries where they are not really going to be meaningful, so in some sense, you know, pakistan might have been better when it continued to be under military, and both cases, the reality was the leader is beholding to only a small section of society. in one case, that small section of society doesn't have replacements, so the leader has to work hard in order to keep the army very happy whereas in you got team who can be replaced, and they'll do the dirty work. they are more royal. >> host: to follow-up on

something there. the mubarak example. okay, here's a guy who executed a successful military coo, takes over the country, and becomes for his own self-interest a u.s. partner, if not an ally, post-9/11, otherwise they'll invade my country, blow me up, whatever. the better thing to do is help americans go after terrorists. first thing americans do after saying thank you and giving him billions of dollars is say you have to hold elections. was that a strategically poor choice for the united states because he was more useful to us in the previous role than the current government is. >> guest: i'm going to answer that two ways. was is a strategic error for the

united states? yes. do poll -- politicians in the united states differ from politicians elsewhere? no. if it was good for the united states, that's terrific. if it's not good for the united states, but good for them, that, too, is terrific. their calculation is how do my constituents respond to this? not how does grand strategy respond to this? how did this affect the country's welfare five years down the road? my constituents don't like our backing military dictators. i'm going to promote that policy. >> host: right. sticking with pakistan for a little bit here, there's a popularly elected government in

pakistan backed by the military, generally assumed to really run the show, does that mod et still -- model still fit your theory? can you have essentially a front man, somebody out there who is the person with whom the united states deals directly who is mentioned in the book somewhat admiringly for his ability -- >> guest: chief of admiration, yes. >> host: there you go. perhaps you can talk about that. is he a dictator? does he fit your model? >> guest: well, this is the beauty of the democratic systems that have not evolved. we have elections, so we'd like to think of the classic one man, one vote, one person, one vote. this is how we like to think about elections functioning, but

in many, many cases, we find that people twaim implicitly end up voting in big blocks. if you were to think about the pakistan case, there's a rural area, a politician shows up, and they make a deal with the elders, and if they deliver enough votes, they won't get much, but they will get a few jobs. there's going to be some crumbs that will go down to the village. delivering votes for politicians will win in a particular area. it's going to get the most few crumbs. people go along with what the village elder tells them to do. when you have people isolated and politicians and politicians play them off, there's a few things, not much, but if you don't vote for us, you'll get elected anyway, and you didn't pass, so you get nothing. with the floods last year, a colleague who is now in the

university, we're looking at natural disasters. we saw the distribution of aid. it was vastly towards sadari's supporters. the view of getting assistance greatly increased. if you came from regions that supported parties, it was from the to coalition. if it was for the opposition, you got nothing. handing out blankets were driven by politics of buying things. same in the u.s.. turns out handing out federal disaster aid, we can predict which districts become a part of the technical literature about where to distribute aid. elections are just as important as wind speed, 3wu not to the same -- but not to the same extent as pack stan. in pakistan there's instances that if we break the dam here, we can run the water through this guy's estate.

he was a member of the cabinet, and he went on the bridge and said this is not going to happen. there's bad public policy, redrix with saving the -- redistribution of saving the few . >> guest: there's a distinction of categorical regimes, democracy, atoke sigh, and monarchies. fringe, we talk about this winning coalition drawn from a pool of people, the selected. all democracies have the characteristic that the selector is large, the pool of people, and the winning coalition is relatively large, but highly variable in size, and in britain to control the prime ministership, a candidate, the

two party race needs to win half of the parliament try districts, half of the votes. they only need 25% of the votes. 75% of the vote properly distributed could have gone the other way. in the united states, we estimate you can control the house, the senate, the presidency with as limit as 20% of the vote. what that means is when you dole out rewards, you're focused on who you have to have, not just on who backs you. in other systems, you need much closer to a simple majority of the vote. it varies all over the place. in pakistan, you need a small percentage of the vote to control the country. i think we estimated somewhere, i don't know the exact number, but somewhere around 10%. well, that fundamentally changes how much good you do and how much corruption you engage in. they are more corrupt than we are. are they particular corrupt than north korea?

no. kim jong ill depends on 2 million people rather than 20 million people. he can be more corrupt. he's in a position to steal a heck of a lot and allow his coalition of backers to steal a lot. that's why nay are loyal to him because they think he has better policy ideas. they are loyal to him because the blankets go to them and not the other person who was flooded and didn't vote the right way. >> host: so continuing the sort of u.s.-centric line of questioning here for a minute, what the u.s. now wants from pakistan is two things basically. one, keep a lid on terrorism so it didn't become an external threat not united states whether in afghanistan or elsewhere, and sort of a subset of that,

specifically go after these groups that primarily operate along the afghan border. is that -- neither of which pakistan has done fully despite promises, so if -- is it in their interest to stay in power, to follow the rurals of dictator's handbook to do any of those things? >> guest: just before this book, i wrote a book called "the predicter's game," and that book is about how much aid it takes the united states to get the pakistanis to pursue the pal tan and so forth -- the taliban and so forth. it's $1.5 billion a year. for that amount of money, we get optimal effort. we shouldn't expect them to wipe out the taliban.

we shouldn't expect them to wipe out al-qaeda and pakistan because if they do, the money will stop. we have no reason to give money to the objective if they fix the problem. as much as mubarak didn't educate egyptians to love israel because the money would stop flowing, so the government is more nuanced, but they were looking hard at tracking down and killing or capturing taliban or al-qaeda leaders. in february 2010, they killed a taliban leader and so forth, and so they were delivering enough to keep the money flowing. now, they have an additional problem to recognize, again, going back to the theory. there's not a pakistani leader, so he has his set of cronies,

the isa has interests, and the military has interests. he's not good at getting the isi on board, so there's questions of what it takes to change their behavior? more than we're willing to pay. their longer term interest is get us out of the way and go with these guys. >> host: the isi is essentially operating organizationally the way you lay out; right? i mean, there are ire relatively advancement, but they have -- irrelevant, but they have to know how they are going to be able to continue the power base and continue to the extent possible, and then you have to worry about india. >> guest: they're looking at for them, and they are doing a good job of it unfortunately. >> host: we were talking about

egypt about the sort of the gradualing withness of part-time to take greater risk to go against the government period. how does that contrast in libya where there were protests taking place, and in syria now, protests taking place in the face of horrific government violence that people are willing to brave. >> guest: well, libya's a case where gadhafi violated one of the five rules that bruce went through earlier. he made a classic mistake. he was too nice to the people. that's hard to believe because we live in the united states where our president is beholding to 35 million people. he has to keep a lot happy. gadhafi didn't have that problem, but compared to their

neighbors, he was nice. libya got more education than neighbors in tunisia, yemen, saudi arabia, jordan, and syria. he didn't need to educate the people. he made a big error. the oil was extracted by foreign workers. he didn't need to educate the people. big mistake to make. 2005 of the country i mentioned, he had the biggest restrictions on pressed freedoms, but by far outliar in terms of how draconian his restrictions were. 2010, he was fourth with saudi saudi arabia. all the elders had more price restrictions than him. he allowed people to talk. that was a problem. there was a spark. people said regimes are not strong as we thought. that's indications that it's safe and everything's going wrong, and so people took to the streets.

he'd give them the opportunity to organize. he had not been smashing in heads, and people took it as a sign of weakness. i don't think he was that weak, but nato military stopped him from being able to deploy people to break heads. he had phenomenal loyalty. there's still people backing him even though he is stuck in remote towns now, but there's still fanatic supporters loyal to the very end. >> guest: not a happy view of the world. >> host: well -- >> guest: picking up from here, you know, the sad thing is i think this has been a really poorly implemented policy by the west because the reality is the next group of leaders that come in they'll have unfrozen as -- assets coming in, the oil revenue, the country's washed with weapons. people will be fighting to become the moo notary public

plies in -- monopolist in power. from there, they will have supporters they don't need. we'll be back in the same type of system that we had before. we're going to have a leader who has wealth. a different set of people will be persecuted than those by the former colonel. he made an error of being too kind. it's unlikely the next guy will make the same mistake. >> guest: indeed, we are pessimistic about the future of libya, but optimistic about syria. in the syria case, so looking at an economy with 9% deficit annually relative to gdp.

very big. we complain that they are way, way ahead, and so he was facing an economy, again, with some educated people, unemployed. he had some natural resource wealth unlike libya's was rapidly declining, becoming smaller and smaller part of the economy. foreign aid to syria was slowly drying up, so all the economic conditions were bad news for him making the risk more astraightive to people. he's been brutal in that response to the risk. people continued to fight, and because syria does not have vast resource wealth, and if it was also not flooded with foreign aid when he finally falls, then syria will probably become a reasonablebly liberalized --

reasonably liberalized place if flooded with foreign aid with good intentions. the new leaders will be in the position to do the bribery necessary to shore themselves up, and no need to listen to the people. we have to hope foreign aid does not come except after performance benchmarks are met. have free assembly, free press, free speech, ect.. ..

>> potential follow ed keep your distance. >> it is a little more complicated. in general, one of the big effects of foreign aid is too significant the increase the probability of the power that has a significant impact on the survival of dictators. egypt is more complicated although that remains true the president has to play better against the impact of hostility toward his reelection prospects so basically it comes down not national interest but politicians interest sell in

that case, one of two things have to happen. we either have to pay a lot bigger price to israel if there is an election in the muslim herb -- muslim brotherhood in aligned with the military controlled country so we have to decide the pay that much higher price? is that worth it or to weave the bid to the israelis and others to manage the problem on their own? >> host: we only have one minute left you have given a little bit of advice in a letter to president obama but what is the single worst thing obamacare could do in the couple of years he has left according to your

theory? >> you use the term worst we always on to go back. are talking about the u.s. people or himself? he could spend all time and resources on making the u.s. great and that may not be such a great policy. i want to clarify your question is what the incentive he has to make sure that we haq of more education because they vote democratic. how do we tax the rich? they tend to be republican votes to redistribute. the best things is to focus

on his supporters and of course, the republicans want him out of office. we could say poor but we will say democrats. with tax breaks for the rich >> thank you very much. i enjoy the book and looking forward to a chance to hear more about it. it comes out today. thank you very much

>> always start with the assumption when the politician or ceo says some and they don't tell the truth but the burden should be on them to prove it. >> khalid sheikh muhammed is

about four years old at the time. i search for the death records of his father died in 1969 and they did they keep records it just was not interesting to them so we have this account of his father's death note transcripts to back it up. his father dies and there is no welfare state your organized charity for foreigners at the time so his mother takes the job washing the bodies of the dead. to prepare for burial in a very low status job but it enables her to make a living. at the time she has nine children. years pass and he was doing very well at school and the

family decides that they have no money at all that to they the two brac $0.1 to get the education that is typical as is this period to support the rest of them and that is called the sheik muhammed critical to believe he applies to school in north carolina historical a baptist did either the family has saved many were more likely the muslim brotherhood has agreed to sponsor him. the joined after two older brothers had joined at age 16. he arrives in america roughly 18 years old. and is unprepared for what he sees.

what he remembers years later, the memory is that he was surprised by what he saw. first of all, surprised by the geography and in of greenery in kuwait trees a usually behind walls but here they were everywhere. more surprising and more strange were the people and what they were doing. sifting and launch shares visible from the road in playing with their kids. taking a host of the bushes but what surprised him was that so much of the american family life happened in public. this is not what would happen in the arab world. the more time he was

persuaded that americans were backwards. they did things that should be private and public and trusted each other very quickly. and did not go out after nine but most social occasions happen after dark in the united states and in 1983, murfreesboro had one pizza parlor. no bars. the pizza parlor closed at 9:00. the town was asleep. so far from the night being alive, it was silent but it was during the day when they were busy. the became more alienated because it was not an arab country. these things by themselves do not make them a terrorist but does put them at odds with the country.

nothing they did other than make him part of the larger community and one of the things i learned in 19 mastermind nothing the college's due to integrate foreign students to explain the country to them. we take it for granted they know these things. ran the fbi searched the car of the 9/11 hijackers they found a small spiral bound notebook and a careful arabic script there is a description explaining the differences between shampoo, conditioner, body wash. from another culture at another time, we are puzzling. maybe an explanation is in order for foreign students. naturally k. sims spent most of his time in college not just with other arab students but kuwaitis. he did not even mix with the

non kuwaiti arabs. after a semester he transfers to north carolina, jesse jackson, matter and steadies engineering with the social network is very limited. hall are muslim over kuwait the arab but he emerges as someone who is known s a mullah but what they mean he is the enforcer. he makes sure the other students and his group did not violate the very small and obscure tenets of islamic law for what they believe to be. for example, the cuff of your pants can never cover your ankle and never to wear shorts to expose the niece and even if they go to the gym to work out they would be fully covered.

sell these differences kept them apart from the american college campus nine that a dozen people that went to ksm and mostly remember him fondly. he was a comedian and on the friday tonight show putting on plays and diskettes to imitate the other leaders by his audience was other arab students. i could not find anyone who was not a kuwaiti arabs who was a muslim who knew him well in school. his lab partner remembers him as a person with broken english and his professors remember him being very good in math and science but not a substantive conversation about anything that did not involve molecule's or formulas. he was there almost four

years but came into contact on a glancing basis. as if you are changing planes and walks to the airport. have you met the people of cincinnati? not really. and isolated himself in police to the borders and perimeter to limit contact with americans. one of the things that i've learned is he had a criminal record. surprise the government did not turn it up but you like to drive at high speeds with an expired driver's license and would or to the streets in other parts of north carolina. and occasionally he would crash. one day to women are talking in a parked car.

the car was smashed by eight khalid sheikh muhammed. the injuries are so severe that they sued him and i found a copy of a lawsuit. ll's name is kristian. kristian vs. mohammed. [laughter] ultimately they win the case. they are awarded more than a substantial sum of money at the time the injuries were fairly severe. he never pays a and dodges the sheriff in plots the law but talky 21 attorney they remember him bursting into the office with a translator to lecture about the iran and iraq war and why america it is wrong about israel. it turns out