tell them you walked down the hall to the courtroom because that will be the only courtroom you get to see. when you get out of law school you are going to put on your best operation and get everything ready and stand in front and make your opening statement and say may it please the arbitrator. unfortunately that is really the case. i do think that we have really got to fight to keep the courtroom door open. there's a conspiracy on this country especially in civil court should the courtroom door because corporate america does not trust the jury. i gave a talk once. you don't need to go to law school, just watch the movies. what are your favorite movies? would you think of the philadelphia story? how many of you came to moscow to represent people's right? of the hands go. what you think of philadelphia

story? great story. i said there would be no trial on that today. because the lawyers who signed up the law firm signed an arbitration agreement. it is important these locals emphasize that theme and keep the ideas that we need to have the jury system. i ask to and all the time you know what the sixth amendment is? the right to jury trial. i said what about the seventh amendment? some of the main know what it means. the right to a jury trial in a civil case in a matter of $25 or more. it is lost on people in washington d.c.. >> among many other things that are lost we have a couple minutes left. i want to open up questions from the floor. anybody have any questions?

there are lawyers in this room and we have no questions? [inaudible] >> talk about these books to kill a mockingbird and compassion, at was struck by the prospective coming from a little girl and her friend and looking at her father being a hero and all and on the other side in the confession where you see procedure and practice and the football player being railroaded, the police were able to laugh and all these things. i am just wondering, they got some process and not process but in the larger legal issue seems like due process is being taken away by arbitration. but the drones killing people or american citizens without due process i wonder if we could

look at that. >> well. that is a fundamental issue to the integrity of our justice system is due process. i don't know that we can -- we are in a very complex fight for civil society in this world. i don't know that you can make it down to two processes so i don't want to try to do that with the drones and the like. but let me take your point and expand on it this much. you hit a nerve when you say we may be putting too -- putting due process in jeopardy. if you don't have that, then all

the other pillars of the structure and the justice system fall. that is a critical element. it is lynch pin. you have hit -- might be the achilles' heel of the justice system if you can't be assured that you are going to be treated fairly with the rules that we have set up and follow them carefully by police, prosecutors, by judges you get to where you should go. you may not like the outcome but you can say i got a fair day in court and that is important that if there is any way anybody can take a shortcut to avoid a person getting that opportunity then the system has failed. >> that is the tricky thing about the constitution. the question is who does it apply to? there are people who are in this

room and certainly in this district would say that the ground campaign is outside the context of the constitution just like guantanamo bay is. that is the fundamental question we have been wrestling with the last few years which is is it only limited to these very insular domestic settings of two american citizens? the kinds of things that become legal thrillers? what happens in the wider world when nations decide to avenge crimes committed against them? the reason we have the patriot act is because everything in it would be otherwise unconstitutional. that is why it is called the patriot act, so that everyone feels you have to be a patriot to support it and if you don't, what is wrong with you? these are things that would

otherwise be unconstitutional slow we take steps, government has taken steps to find a way around the constitution. the more complicated issue is when they tell you that it is constitutional. it would be so much better if someone were honest and says this is unconstitutional and that is why we have the patriot act and it would be a much more honest conversation and people could say the constitution doesn't work in areas of terrorism so we have these things called patriot acts. then we could have a conversation about what is really happening instead of the fiction that we always comport to restrict adherence to the constitutional standard when we don't. we didn't for the japanese in world war ii. we didn't for people with communist affiliations in the 1950s. we don't do it for pedophiles today. certain people to whom the

constitution doesn't apply. they're on a separate track for justice. the question is is that justice? let's be honest what we are doing. >> i would just add your problem is compounded because it is not simply that we are losing our rights. we are losing access to due process. people don't know and don't care. underlying your question is a much harder question. one of the bad things about being a supreme court reporter is when you say i am setting my hair on fire, they just change the pleading standard. you get glassy eyes tears. people go on screen saver. that is a problem because it is not just mandatory arbitration. not just pleading standard. it is all these incredibly boring jargon laden ways in which americans are less and less free and they don't know

it. i would just say one of the things that fiction can do is make americans know it and care about it in ways that even i as a journalist feel i am scraping to do largely unsuccessfully every day so it seems to me the real challenge is to convince americans that it really matters to them that there cellphone contract precludes them going into a court room. i don't think we are doing a very good job of that, just talking about those things in this country. >> ongoing to pass on those issues personally. i only went to two years of law school. two years undergraduate and i was out and couldn't even get in alabama state. i am not much into that. are just want to say this parting shot more than anything.

fiction is great and to kill a mockingbird is great but the innocent man is just as great and it is a real nice situation and i hope this committee will consider books that are non-fiction too. who would not be moved by my life in court? those are probably more frequently written than fiction books that rise to the level of confession or to kill a mockingbird. yes? >> a farrah fawcett atmosphere when we talk about the united states supreme court but trial lawyers like me to who tried cases in different parts of the country i see the courts where the working people go and all people have to go to try to resolve their disputes, confronted with overwhelming issues. for lawyers it is expensive to practice law. the technology has changed. i had some common sense and

people you could talk to and investigators and things like that. the cost of practicing law with a uri big or small firm is enormous as are the burdens that face our trial courts all over the country. one of the challenges for us as lawyers and to write about the lot is to try to address the issues that are beginning to overwhelm the courts which is why they go to arbitration and mediation. takes years to bring a case to trial and costs of much money that people can't afford it and businesses don't want to pick southern economic issues are pressing to be point that states that there major problem is people have no lawyers. it is enormous problem that people are not represented by lawyers and lawyers can't afford to get their practice over to representing those people who may be can't afford them. it is an overall issue that i think we as a society need to confront. of courts are wonderful and our

system is the best in the world but the access to it is consistently getting more narrow because it is too expensive because the judges are overwhelmed with the volume of litigation and the onset of pro state litigants is taking everything from the legal system and turning courts into the dispute revolvers without time or resources. wearers as a profession and those otherwise involved in writing about lawyers or the court system needs to try to get as much creative thought responsible to try to make the court accessible to people and give people access to the justice system which really does function better than any other system in the world. >> anybody want to comment? >> i want to echo two things. one is when we look at how we fund the institutions that preserve the way of life we

have, the democracy that we are we think it is very special in our society. you don't do that by shortchanging the courts. they are and should be the weakest branch of government because they should be known political. but to take advantage of -- put them at a disadvantage position where only those who can't afford it have access to it is not american and it is not the way this country ought to think about itself as preserving this democracy that we have. the second thing, i think i am disagreeing with you in a little bit. i think we have made the system inaccessible and we are at fault as lawyers and judges. there are things that are not that hard that people should be able to resolve without the courts and we ought to make accessible to them in ways where mediation and other forms of

dispute resolution help people take the burden off the court because it is not that complex and empower them to a understand and learn about their problems and help solve them with the guidance of professionals as opposed to saying you have to put your life in the hands of professionals. we are changing. we are any evolving society and we have got to help and make sure citizens not only have access to justice but maintain the independence of our judiciary and our profession as critical elements to is system that holds others accountable because once you lose that it is toothpaste out the tube. it is not going back. that is our job. as guardians of the constitution and its trustees. >> anyone else? our panel time is over. of the elected thank the panel

for participating. thank you for coming in. [applause] john, do you want rebuttal time? >> i am worn out. >> i want to thank the panel. it was a great discussion. i should recognize make grisham for being with us. i want to thank the law school staff. susan newman, rebecca walston for this wonderful event. thank you for being with us. we are now going to have a reception. if you are exhausted now is time for a glass of wine. we are adjourned. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> is there a nonfiction of corbeil q. like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail at booktv@c-span.org or twitter us

at twitter.com/booktv. >> next in knoxville, authors fred brown and jeanne mcdonald talk about their book john grisham 18. >> the title of your book is "growing up southern: how the south shapes its writers" and my first question is how does the south shape its writers? >> we ask that question to the 13 writers that we interviewed and what makes a southern writer? what is a southern writer? it is different from the a writer out west or in the east or something like that. they classified themselves as writers, they view themselves as southern writers because they live in the south but they are americans never the less. the very americans, very

southern. place is a big thing to southern writers. place, home, the west may be larger and larger themes. the south seems to be a little more compact. at least these riders we interviewed all were born before world war ii. that was their definition. i am a southern writer but an american too. i write about social themes that all americans can appreciate and enjoy. when we interviewed the great southern writer from memphis we asked the same question about being a southern writer and what is it about the self that makes a writer southern? shelby said when he was a child and he got into a fist fight or

something he said the fight you lose are the ones you remember. and of course the south was on the losing end of the late unpleasantness, the war between the states or the civil war and that is the one we remember. it creates tension. the south was wrong in that war but it didn't think it was and so we have a built in concept of tension already in our lives. most of these others my age, that generation we interviewed recall readily the civil war. they had grandparents or great-grandparents' who could recall having either met or talked to or heard or in shelby's case even interviewed

some of the civil war veterans when he was a youngster. it is that presence of mind, that connection to the land, the people, our history that creates this tension in this golf or it did or does. we tend to write about that. >> of sunni anecdote about shelby. we drove to memphis from knoxville. he lived in this house which sort of looked like an old mansion. i guess it was an old mansion. we came in this creaky gate and shelby leaned out a second story window. good morning, on will be right down. wonderful southern accent. i was looking around the garden over and over and there was a fountain covered with moss. when he came down eyes that i love your garden. it is wonderful. and he said it is -- the man who

took care of it has left. us that i am sure he will be back. no, i believe he shot a man. a lot of southerners are so matter-of-fact and accepting of things like that. there is a real closeness to grandparents and people who themselves were storytellers and a lot of the southern writers, the old people told him there's story and they say you tell me your story which made the think even more about their lives and growing up in the south. >> how do you respond to the criticism that people may say that southern writers gets too caught up in the past? >> it is like shelby said. that war that we lost is the one

you remember. that is one that southerners write a lot about but when we interviewed not betsy but lee smith and doris bets, they told us students today have a different style than they are writing about. they teach at the university of north carolina. those students may come up and write stories that are very southern and yet their places are strip malls in the cities that have changed dramatically since i was born and since those authors were born that we write about in this book "growing up southern" but it is still a seventh theme. those southern tensions are there. and i think shelby was really

write about this whole picture of how southerners do or are very close to our family -- family is big in the south and extended family, i have a newspaper friend who says we are all cousins in the south. i think to a certain extent that is kind of true. we may be looking back but our riders for the most part -- you can read william faulkner today and be just as stunned by what he is saying today as they were in the 30s when he was writing about the south of the past. the south of his grandfather which was the civil war. you can read those stories today

and those same themes that the readers of the 30s -- i don't know that we always look in the past. i know that the past has shaped as. the past is not dead. it is not even passed. we are haunted by what happened in the past and how we came through at the people. it made us stronger. are for one think that we are vastly better off and stronger for having gone through the civil war, civil-rights movement. and now if you look at the south i think we are very forward and we have been blessed to have had some of the writers we have had such as william morris and, and others who really helped us

reflect what happened to us here. >> i am michael aron, senior political correspondent with two esteemed colleagues from the media. josh margolin and made his name in this state but is now at the new york post and ted chairman who continues to make his name and most recently this series on the sewage commission which may not mean a lot to people down here but it sure mental what because he went after it and sort of turned it upside down and a hundred people fell out and haven't gotten back up yet which is what this book is somewhat about. it is about the downfall of a number of people who were not

expecting to be taken down and many have gone to prison as a result is lives have been ruined. and you all remember i am sure what triggered this book or the incident that this book is all about, the mass bust on a day in july of 2009 of political figures, mainly in northern new jersey and rabbis from the shore, from brooklyn, from the orthodox community. these two guys decided to write a book about that case and i want to start by asking them why. why write a book about this? >> nobody understood what happened, why it happened, when it first happened in july of 2009. we were as close as anybody who

wasn't handcuffed and frankly we didn't understand. we come into the office on a muggy july morning having been tipped off the night before that something big was going to come down and in new jersey there's always something big. always getting arrested and a corruption case but my god, we are there and we are getting reports from our colleagues that are at fbi headquarters or in brooklyn and a dozen politicians or 2 doesn't work hasidic rabbis in their long black clothes with virtual fringes blowing in the breeze or deputy mayor of jersey city whose shows up handcuffed and wearing a look at dress. what is this? >> a former burlesque queen. >> we didn't even tell that. this will put together business

league in jersey city deputy mayor as she gets -- we hear there is an informant in the middle of it and the fed won't say who it is and no one understands how it came together and when we finally found out what it was that time everything together we still didn't understand it. why would anybody take you back? why would anybody trust solomon? he had been arrested already on $50 million bank fraud. we will go through the details which are extraordinarily hilarious and stupid and sad but he had been arrested already and people are taking bribes from him as if somehow he is not wired by the fed. >> we got to get into this. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org.

>> next from knoxville, martha rose woodward discusses the 1982 world's fair. >> the world's fair was in 1982 and expo 82 energy turns the world. they had exhibits from 22 states that participated in fares. there were states like kentucky and alabama and exhibits from corporations like bellsouth and coca-cola was here. over 200 businesses. what we're standing in front of was one of the major buildings that was built for the fair and is the same structure and it is supposed to look like the golden sun going through the air because all energy comes from

the sun. and the building you concede in the background was called the amphitheater and it was where they held entertainment venues and we had such a mess people as johnny cash and glen campbell and bob hope. over 200 famous entertainers. jerry lee lewis and the bluegrass boys, paul wagner. some of the most famous entertainers of the day were here during the fair. knoxville chose to make an application to be in the world fair. a world fair doesn't just take place. you have to apply through the federal government and also there is an international exhibition board the city had to apply through. you had to have a traffic pattern that would sustain the influx of cars and buses. you had to have the community

behind you. for this world fair there was the layer of money to millions of dollars. it came from loans and banks. the city put out bonds and loans--a grant from the federal government in loans. talking about having the world fair started in 1976 and if you will remember that was a time of high energy costs. there was an oil embargo. cars were stopped on the side of the street because there wasn't enough gas to fill the mop. a lot of people didn't have jobs. a lot of people were needing jobs. so when the major things the world feared it was brought jobs and it kept the city from going into a deeper recession that the whole country went into. so even though they were not high-paying jobs at least it put

money in people's pockets. >> i started to sell my book and every person worked with i had a rejection letter from which was kind of cool you go to a meeting and we love your stuff and what about this? >> in his nonfiction, ben mezrik talked about mark zuckerberg and the creation of facebook which was adapted to the social network bringing down the house followed a group of m.i.t. students who won million las vegas and his latest, sex on the mend cracks a possible astronaut candidate as he still a nasa save filled with men rocks. is your chance to ask the questions. :e-mail or tweak on in depth sunday, november 6th on booktv on c-span2. up next for vice president dick cheney talks about his experiences during 9/11 and the lessons he has learned since

then. he is interviewed by stephen hayes, senior writer of the weekly standard and author of genie. [applause] >> good morning and welcome to the american enterprise institute. i am danielle pletka, let me first remind everybody to turned off their telephones or 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. final housekeeping note. booksellers are available with the books in the reception after the end of the event.

when arthur brooks who unfortunately couldn't be here invited the vice president dick cheney to join us to date it was with a view to remembering the attacks of 9/11, ten years later in and considering the lessons learned and those that were not since that day. but the first thing to recall about 9/11, the long war we are still fighting is the many who gave their lives, families who sacrificed beloved ones and the awful loss. first and foremost now is a time to remember those many brave americans who died at home, fighting men and women who risked everything so that we can live in freedom and the valuable allies from too many countries to name who share our cause. has some of you know, vice

president dick cheney recently published a memoir, "in my time" written with his daughter. we understand it will debut at number one on the new york times best-seller list. [applause] today he joins us with weekly standard senior writer at best selling author stephen 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 in the hour that we have. in the time remaining after that conversation we will have a q&a session moderated by steve. lynne cheney has been a scholar at a er for many years. dick cheney is a member of the board of trustees. we are so glad to have them as part of our family and we thank

them and you all for joining us here today. [applause] >> thank you. i won't interrupt. >> remember you are a reporter. >> i get my payback. a just wanted to say a word and turn it over to mr. hays. the book and wrote is a memoir. it covers all 70 years of my life, the early years are short but a lot of good stuff to write about in that period of time. the last half of the book focuses on the george w. bush administration and my years as vice president and the book open the prologue with recounting the events as i saw them on 9/11.

and then much of that last half of the book deals with what we had to do during the course of our subsequent seven years to keep the country safe and the controversies we were involved in on things like terrorist surveillance programs and so forth. that is a large part of the book, relevant with respect to 9/11 and the aftermath. i don't want to mislead anybody but there are other subjects going back, five republican administrations i worked for and worked closely with a fifth. original the reagan administration as part of the house republican leadership so i tried to cover all of that period of time. there is enough to try to make a living writing articles about

me. i will turn it over to him. >> thank you. thanks to danny for having us. just to give you an idea what i thought i would try to do this morning i am going to start with some questions about 9/11 specifically and push you in particular about your personal use because you love to put yourself on the couch like that. public self reflection. and i am going to go and talk about a number of different ways in which the policies that emanated from 9/11 that you think helped to drive and fill in some gaps. ice spent time looking at the interviews you have done. everett it twice and some questions i have remaining for you. that is, i would like to proceed and we will throw it open to everyone for additional questions that will be much better than mine. the first place we start is the

morning of 911. 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. >> i was in my office in the west wing with my speech writer when my secretary called in to report the plane had struck the world trade center. we turned on the television and it was after the first plane had gone in before anything else happened. the immediate reaction was how is it possible? a weird accident would perfectly clear whether. no way to account for it. as we watched we saw the second plane hit and immediately my mind triggered the notion that this had to be a terrorist attack. the next two airliners flying into the world trade center within minutes of each other and

not having be anything but a terrorist attack. shortly after that i talked to the president in florida. we talked about a statement he was getting ready to issue. a statement whether or not it was proper to talk about terrorism within that context and that statement and it definitely was. the words he used was probably a terrorist attack on the united states. within the relatively short period of time people began to gather in my office. secretary rice and national security adviser was there and chief of staff. probably seven or eight people in the room and all of a sudden the door burst open and my lead secret service agent came in and came to the desk where i was

sitting and he said we have to leave immediately. please come with me. put one hand on the back of my belt and the one hand on my shoulder. i didn't have the option of not going. and the reason he had done that is as he explained to me as he was taking me down presidential emergency operations center at the white house leaders will he received a report over the secret service radio-that there was a hijacked aircraft out at dulles headed toward crown at 500 miles an hour towards the white house. that turned out to the american 77 which came in and made a circle and went into the pentagon. that is why i was down in part

way -- had been got to the peacock yet and immediately use a telephone to place another call to the president. to let him know washington was under attack. the secret service strongly recommended that he not come back. are also recommended that he not come back believing it was important for us to stay apart so that we didn't become a ripe target. we didn't know that at that stage was happening. he didn't like that at all. for understandable reasons but he agreed to. if you ask what our reaction was, i went from that spot after i talked to the president, and

high was presented by norm mineta who was the secretary of transportation, he had a list of six aircraft that they believed had been hijacked at that point. actually had flight numbers. of course it was only four but for a while we thought it was six. there are two major drivers in terms of what i thought about that morning as we work through the crisis that day. number one was we had to get all the planes down out of the sky so we could isolate what ever had been hijacked and killed for all the ones that had been hijacked and accounted for three of them. two in new york and one in the pentagon. that was a major part of the effort. the other thing that was very important that i focused on is the continuity of government. some of you are probably

familiar 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 union and we actually exercise that system on many occasions and it focused on having ways to assure that somebody in the white house successions survives whatever attack we were under so that when the dust settled we would have a president and the government functioning. that is what we referred to as continuity of government. that day it took the form basically -- one was to recommend -- was very important for us to stay separated. secondly it was the speaker has

stirred --hastert. we are arranged for him to be moved to a secure location because he was next in line to the presidency. if something happened to the president and me than he was in a position to take over function as president. those were the two major concerns that occupied most of our time. getting all the airplanes out of the sky and guaranteeing that there be somebody in the line of succession in a position to take over. >> speaking of secure undisclosed location, much of the time when the media was reporting you were in a secure location you were actually at camp david and that is where you went the evening of september 11th. i remember having a conversation with you much later in which you describe what that was like being at camp david late that

evening and the way you describe it was the family gathered around the television. you sat basically in silence for a couple of hours watching reruns of the planes hitting the hours and of the horror that they. what was that like? how long did you do that and what you thinking at that point? >> it was after the president had returned. we had a national security council meeting. he addressed the nation and when we finished that, win and i got on a helicopter in the south lawn and were flown to camp david. the only time i have ever taken off in a helicopter of of the south lawn without being the president. i have done a lot over the years that don't fly off of the south lawn except in extraordinary circumstances. when we got to camp david, they

took us to ask the lodge which is the presidential large but for security reasons, the secret service was focused on and concerned about the tax and so forth and aspin was the most secure facility at camp david. so we spend a couple days there at aspen lodge. we sat in the living room, watched television. i was accompanied by my wife and daughter. my daughter mary was out of tv d

began we have 3,000 dead americans and needed to treat it as an act of war and that meant marshal all of these forces of the federal government to be able to deal with a follow-on attack and deal with those who were responsible for what 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 on osama bin laden. there was a lot we didn't know about al qaeda. we heard so much about it for ten years that there's a temptation to think we know there everything there is to know about al qaeda but the day of the attack this was a group of terrorists who have a lot of key questions we couldn't answer. we didn't know who was financing them or where they were operating. there was a lot we needed to learn and we drove our search for intelligence that generated policies we put in place but i sat and made a series of notes as i thought about what we were faced with and how to deal with

it and chewed over in my own mind what we needed to be doing. we met at camp david, national security council. the attack was on tuesday and by friday night we gathered up at camp david, spent saturday and sunday with the president and pull together. what ultimately e merge with our strategy for global war on terror. >> days after the attacks we saw various public officials in very public displays of emotion. we saw president bush almost come to tears in the oval office. we heard a lot of condoleezza rice going to watergate and breaking down at one point because of the emotional toll. on a personal note i remember

coming back from new york driving across the roosevelt bridge and during martin sexton's version of america the beautiful and vibrant down crying. did you ever have a moment like that? >> not really. [laughter] >> you understand people will find that peculiar. >> my wife and daughter were with me that evening. lin was with me all day. she had been downtown when the attack started and the secret service brought her over from the west wing. she would be the best person to comment on what my mental attitude was. i was focusing on what we had to do. i was thinking in terms of what this meant to respect to policy

and military forces and what the targets were when i go after and how we might go after them and so forth and what kind of intelligence we were going to need to cope with this. that is what i recall. it wasn't that it wasn't a deeply moving event. it clearly was. but the other thing that influenced me from a personal standpoint was i had spent a good deal of time on the continuity of government program and the had been through exercises for the nature of the attack on the u.s. and what we actually faced on 9/11. maybe millions of people killed. so i had the benefit of having gone through those exercises over the years and training started to kick in in terms of thinking about what we had to do that morning and the next day.

>> let's get to those policies. specifically talk about the few everybody thinks of as the most controversial. terrorist surveillance program and enhanced interrogation on the other. can you describe -- there's a general sense among the public that you brainstorm to these ideas. they were your ideas. you had been the most fierce public advocate of them. can you describe how the terrorist surveillance program came to be? >> it is important to keep in mind they were initiated at different times. the terrorist surveillance program is something we moved to in days of our time after 911. the enhanced interrogation techniques really came in a year or two later when we were in the

business of capturing people like khalid sheikh mohammed. it was the capture of certain kinds of individuals that led us to the point we needed enhanced interrogation. back to the question of the terrorist surveillance program, the origin of the program came really from my people at the national security agency. george tenet was involved as well. there had been a conversation between two of them within a couple days of 9/11. the two of them had talked and george mentioned it to me. basic question being are there additional things we could do with our capacity to read the

mail? that would help us deal with the situation we now face? that led to a meeting in my office where mike came in and the head of nsa and head of the cia and george tenet and the three of us talked and there were thing that nsa thought they could do if they had additional authority and i took that package or that proposal basis and went to see the president and went through it with him and he signed up to it but with a caveat that he wanted to make certain he personally approved it. each step of the way. and they had to come back in for approval on a regular basis. would emerge out of that was significantly enhanced capacity for us to be able to intercept

communications originating outside the united states from what we referred to as a dirty number. capture al qaeda times. he has a computer or whatever it is with phone numbers on it and you wanted to know who he was talking to in the united states for example. the safeguard at the direction of the president involved the fact that every 30 or 45 days, the secretary of defense and director of the cia and the nsa had to sign off on continuing the program. they all had to say in writing to the president that they ought to continue the program from the

standpoint of national security. the attorney-general had to sign off on it. all of that went to the president adding that it worked for me with the responsibility of carrying it around and get all the signatures. once the president received input from senior advisers he would sign up and extend the program another 30 or 45 days. that is the way we operated for years. i briefed key members of congress. i had the chairman and ranking member of the house and senate intelligence committees come down every couple months to my office. mike hayden would come in and we briefed the key four members of congress who had jurisdiction over what we were doing and what

results this would produce surge they were wired in from the beginning. later on the controversy arose inside the program with the justice department. we expanded the group of four into nine. we had a majority and minority leaders in the house and senate and have all of them in briefing them as well and then i went around at that point and asked them all at that point, jay rockefeller, on the democratic side, asked them if they thought we should continue the program. they said absolutely. that i said do you think we should go back to congress for additional authority to operate the way we were operating? they said absolutely not. they were unanimous on both points. they were concerned and asked congress for a vote on the subject, the fact we were doing it was leaked and in effect

telling the enemy we were reading the mail. so it was well-known -- there was controversy later run but internally that the president -- i am convinced a key part of our success in terms of preventing further attacks against the united states and save thousands of lives by what we were doing. i think is one of the great success stories especially with respect to the nsa and house they put the program together to develop the capability and one of the great success stories. maybe someday it will all be told. >> you made the same argument about enhanced interrogation. you believe the policies, quote, worked. let's go beyond that part of the debate and talk about the effects of enhanced interrogation and the perceptions around the world

that it is torture. that the things we did amounted to torture. and the sense that the moral position of the united states was eroded because of the things we did. here in this country. how do you respond to those arguments? >> an invitation to argue? >> always offer you an invitation to argue. >> those are -- there are crazy critiques and more thoughtful critiques. i think that is a 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, talking not about your rank-and-file enemy troops

or soldiers. this does not involve the military. this does not involve the department of defense. this is a program that was authorized by the president, sign up to by the national security council, carried out with all kinds of safeguards by the central intelligence agency. we had a case where we had a handful of individuals who had knowledge of what was in the works from the standpoint of al qaeda. how they function, to the key members were. it was people like khalid sheikh modamm modammed. the idea that the united states was torturing anybody is