but >> and some of the contemporary issues that we are facing with regard to the military so blessed start about the book which is how the united states is dependent on military to solve problems. >> that note we are too dependent but we are very dependent one of the things that blew my mind when i got to the pentagon but when i

got there like many americans assume they prepare to fight wars in the traditional sense to blow stuff up been shooting at people but obviously the pentagon does do that but it was amazing how much else people now do whether planning programs to prevent sexual violence in the condo to programs encourage michael enterprise with afghan within or producing a radio call in show name it somebody is to get. but then this half amazing and inspiring and have scary >> you talk about your experiences and the pentagon but picked up on how it did you end up at the pentagon? [laughter]

your parents were activists and that was the last place they probably expected to find their daughter. so talked-about coming to the pentagon and what led you to write a book about that experience? >>guest: and never thought i would marry officer but in central park sitting on the grass celebrating the end of the vietnam war. and cut to protest what i was 10 bayonne requirement for the draft but what ended up happening that was very critical of the u.s. military is ended up working at law school were for a human-rights organizations and i found myself in places

like kosovo during the civil war because. and those forces used airpower to stop the eminent ethnic cleansing campaign. the intervention bring to a close the of brutal civil war. so i was meeting lots of people in the military and to be up close of the of military power could be used for good a and it shook apply own stereotypes and left be much more aware of uncomplicated story so for me that led to an interest of role of the military am post conflict reconstruction with the book that i did

previously of rule of law in the wake of conflict but with the pentagon i was so eager to work in the obama administration / ascending e-mail's to everybody i will sweep the floor or make the coffee to be a part of this one of the people that i ecl was nominated to be the undersecretary for policy issue was the first one to say okay we can make something work. >>host: describe your job for what range of issues.org is that this interesting portfolio. >> i worked obviously for human rights groups and military o dash minute training and laos also a writer with a weekly column

and when she brought me in she said i don't quite know what you should do but start by being dash speechwriter with congressional testimony and we will figure out as time goes by. for me that was a terrific education but the good thing for someone to say you have to learn a little bit about everything to go out and talk to everybody because of a move from an issue to issue a few are with afghanistan in your meeting be experts next week to meet

all the piracy experts so is a crash course of all the major policy issue so over time michelle was a fantastic boss that said what a deal want to be doing and why? how do you want me to help you? and overtime i said one-two work on human rights issues so i began to work on those as well which was satisfying >>host: in that set of experience obviously edie's ideas came throughout your history so what in the set of experiences crystallized that the love that you talk about with the first half of the dilemma? were their experiences there then started to crystallize

the problem quick. >> yes. one of the many portfolios scitex one at the pentagon was looking at the defense department's strategic operations program the defense department was doing everything you could think of from peace concerts' in africa to producing soap operas and comic books and more stuff in the covert realm designed to influence. i was impressed by this range of projects and the people but also couldn't help but think why is the pentagon doing this? that was the attitude of my colleagues at the state department and would get quite think why are you doing this?

you don't know what you are doing. we should be doing this. did play up front and central the pentagon is doing it because somebody feels united states needs to be doing it. whether that is right or wrong is another question. the civilian agencies usaid have ben defunded over many decades and have lost a lot of their ability to put on programs that maybe they had at the peak of the cold war that means the white house and congress turn to the military because you can send any buddy in the world ban on short notice they can settle what to go that is not true of civilian agencies. so the more we look around to say that note, and the

repackaged they come from sartre one dash cyberspace cyberspace, terrorism if we want to respond then united states has to be doing everything look at economic development and cyberspace. if you ask of military the less you need the civilian agencies the more you have to fund the military and give resources the less that agencies can do and that is a vicious cycle. >> secretary rice said reached - - secretary clinton try to strengthen the civilian rule in many of these areas are those

efforts doomed to failure? or it is there more we can be doing quite. >> have mixed feelings. like many liberals saying the military should not be doing this we should be rebuilding the capacity of the civilian sector it is how shocking little funding it gets compared to the military. if you talk maurer pessimistic but in the early years of the obama administration secretary of state hillary clinton a day allied of speeches that we have to restore more funding from the perspective of the secretary of defense they cannot do this job unless

they have civilian partners. we want civilians to do that well but nothing happened. but eventually have found myself but if not then except the political reality that congress will not wake

up one morning to say let's tripled of budget but, if that will not happen to take on the wide range of tasks with those areas of expertise to become resident within the i military with profound implications for how we recruit or train or manage military personnel. >> how you do that well above military is given a task for the trading in the reef -- resources where you are more worried quick. >> also things like cyber that is closer to traditional competencies.

when it comes to the governance and economic development that the military is floundering in part because it is just hard. but that being said, we obviously still recruit and train military personnel as if the world has not changed that much since 1955. plots of people try hard what to we need to do differently? but i got myself into hot water if you years ago i wrote a tongue-in-cheek column arguing military should start recruiting at a

erp conferences a. arp. i was joking but the u.s. military still recruits as if it is the 19th century and we need one young men. when some of the military personnel so what those infantrymen have done for centuries. eighty% aeronaut in combat. even those combat roles starting with that governance project for the development project but many

of the service members will be asked to do everything from writing computer code to designing video call in the soap operas. where we still focusing recruiting energies for treatment? with those schools that -- skill sets how do we make sure that lets us bring people in and out that lets that military personnel go out to white cotton kugel works then comes back in without harm to their career be. the system is not serving us that well at a moment in time we need much more flexibility with a wide range of skills spinet the other major promised is how

everything became more. and over time so with that issue and it was a complex landscape with the detention policy with the direct targeted attack with the war in iraq and of guinness and there's so much going on. what are the issues to get in there to make change back

>> as a bystander like many other people were who watched in some horror as the u.s. response to the september 11 attacks was purely a military response not so much they should not have been used but very early they made a decision to view all responses to the 9/11 attack to the legal framework within armed conflict. and the of legal framework in terms of international law and domestic law is really different from the legal framework during peace or ordinary life. sewed during peacetime the

state is not supposed to go around killing people usually kill them if you put them on trial ras of the leverage judicial process in peacetime we have a lot of safeguards. we are very intolerant of government secrecy and require checks and balances. but wartime is the opposite. in peace time you are charged with murder in wartime you could get a medal you are supposed to do that you don't get prosecuted for killing the enemy because you are supposed to sell once you shift to that legal framework we tolerate a lot more government secrecy secrecy, coercion and the full force.

once the bush administration said terrorism is within that box and the legal outboard will apply then you have the u.s. picking up people all out -- all but over the world bosnia and nigeria and the afghanistan to say we think they are terrorists and would send them to guantanamo they're not entitled to lawyers were due process. so early official said way. we don't know food day are but with love lot of war you don't have to do much. you can say it is a war and it happens get over it. we started to drift into a

world the magic act to call this war meant the u.s. government was doing things that in any other universe would have bent shocking as literally kidnapping people off the streets with countries around the world we are not at war to imprison them without access to the due process often not even a college dean who we are keeping or why and that shocked me. then-president obama campaign to on a platform to pull back the excess one of his very first acts after he was sworn and the tissue a series of executive orders banning torture saying he would close off guantanamo.

so i came to the pentagon thinking he will fix this. >>host: end in 2009 you take a trip down to guantanamo? >>guest: it was very strange have you been there? it is very beautiful but barbwire and mahorn guards with this incredible beauty is a tropical island. but what struck me most other they and the real qualities of the resort by the sec -- by the sea, what struck me most that the problem with guantanamo was

not guantanamo but the physical conditions for detainee's from the state side presents listen . there were allegations when it was over but what was troubling about guantanamo people at that point word 18 by the united states eight years. no charge for most of them. no trial. and in increasingly around governor research suggesting they were picked by mistake and should not be there but yet they were there with no prospect of free these. that still shocks me a abundant when president obama eventually embraced the adl of indefinite

detention. >>host: that is one thing that wanted to talk about some you come back from the trip and you write that you tried to write about this issue with your own chain of command but the alternatives to holding them indefinitely we could release them to electronic monitoring in the end of the risk of releasing potentially dangerous detainee's is outweighed by those associated with prevention detention framework. >> so you go want to talk about how they fought to push that you point inside the interagency process inside the pentagon but in the end after some time you said i will give up. i am not making headway.

>> i got absolutely nowhere. >> so talk about now with hindsight is a somebody who wants to make changes comes in with that idealism with that legal background and training that you had to go down that gives credibility? how can someone make change inside that system quick. >> it is incredibly hard. i am interested in hearing your own thoughts the tissue also a position inside the pentagon struggling to push forward various reforms some more stock. qsr government is a massive bureaucracy there are good things about that in bad things but in many ways a break on crazy idea is

because presidents come and go and those political appointees, and go but people will be there for years and have a lot of experience and wisdom to put the brakes on craziness but on the other hand, they also put the brakes on good innovations and i think that particular issue of the detainee policy, it is hard to unwind that bureaucracy once created there was eight years of setting off the elaborate apparatus within the military to deal with the detainees people's careers deeply invested in that to rollback turned out to be very hard when people were interested how we change this process?

so it was bob down in the president ended up deciding he had other priorities like health care reform and the capital he would have needed he wasn't willing maybe that was the right decision realizing what he cares about and what he had to juggle with other fish to fry p. ended up dividing on this one. >> another area you were involved with the pentagon to apply the legal framework was targeted attacks most people think of the drawn attacks. utah in the book about drums but -- the drone's but talk about that legal um framework but where that is

troubling. >> it is the same set of reasons with the military does so many non-traditional things the world is complicated. the security threats now don't connie lee packaged it is rush-hour or china or germany. that increasingly facing the threats that have nothing to do with those formal decisions to have a loosely organized network. they don't look like what we think of as crime to cause death or destruction on non scale with the use of military force by states.

but if you decide, one way is to say we have a world of the whole continuum for the state conflict on one end it does look more like individual crime. how do we categorize that? we have a big area in between traditional war but we have legal system that does not allow for in between either picked one with this set or it is not in to get this set that are diametrically the opposite so if we decide and i don't know how, but what is an

armed conflict? what is a war? is that track a weapon? the airplane? the box cover? they killed a lot of people. what is a combat and? somebody who doesn't belong to any military with planning and supporting with any plot that will eventually hurt people? do have any special level? we have no idea so we have an arbitrary decision to consider this person a convent where some guy who may be up to something that we don't like? if we decide they are combatants in an armed conflict, there is nothing

new nothing different then getting off about two shoot you don't have to have a court sign-off. lawful wartime killings of the enemy combatants medical or legal problem. the united states kills them wherever that may be the united states just murdered somebody based on secret evidence it will not acknowledge. but if you want to know the difference cutback is the profound dilemma instead of piling more and more into the war category and is much

more convenient i don't have to give you the reason. >>host: one of the things that you write about of one thought this is up . airtime to close a chapter in the back to that war and peace dichotomy but your argument that it is not this isn't the gap between "war and peace" but it is an during. where do you think we go with this? dec of way we can get back to the old way if there ever was? orgy using we need to change how we think greg. >> we need to change how we think but the nearness of the vehicle categories was

always overstated even during the last state on state world war ii when on the margins definitional problems people who ignore the laws of war. but what has happened in the seven decades since then, is the have gone from the situation of a lot of exceptions on the margins of what is overwhelming the norm at this point. . .

operates but the new stuff is not going away. all the technological changes are pushing in the opposite direction and we are going to have to figure out both operationally for the military and legally and morally and politically how do we operate in a world, how do we preserve the values we care about democratic accountability, rule of law, respect for individual, rights for liberty, how do we preserve the values request the old legal african-american waxer don't give up solutions, how do we

come up with new sets of rules and that's hard, you know, i think that's the work of generations to figure that out but i think that if we don't do it, we are going to be in trouble. >> i'm thinking relatively recently of the case where the u.s. government we wanted to get out apple, for example, to be able to crack in into an iphone, of course, that went back and forth, the government said, don't worry, we found our own solution, that's one example of this space continuing. >> host: how do you think the private sector fit into this picture of what was traditionally a government fear? >> guest: right, it's going to have to fit in, if nothing else, other states including states that we view as adversaries such as russia are being creative, exploding the ill-defined space where you move between private

and public actors and you don't always know who is doing what and doing military force, it's all mixed together. we are going to have to get good at it, we are hampered by the fact that we are not an authoritarian state. we don't want to become one. that's the challenge for us that we don't want to become one and the price that we pay if we become authoritarian, we are going to lose. the public private line, civilian military line, all of these are lines that we drew, humans drew. god didn't happened them down and said only people with uniform can do that and this only counts as war and public sectors can do these things and the private sector can do those things. these are legal and political

categories that we create to achieve person purposes. we create them to help build the kind of world that we want to live in and we can change them, you know, the -- if -- if the line between public and private we worry about that, we worry about that because we worry about corruption and accountability and so forth but no inherent reason that you can't simply create different mechanisms for ensuring accountability and reducing corruption if you have have a more blended set of actors. you can but our limit is our imagination. the law says such and such and we get all tied up in knots and this is an invitation to us, i think, to have a different conversation, one that doesn't start with the law and political institutions and one that rather starts with -- what do we want

to be able to do and how -- what kind of legal and political framework would we need to create to do that while at the same time protecting rights and the rule of law. >> for the legal community i think it also required a shift in the type of skill sets and way of thinking from laymen's term, legal interpretation to legal theory or development of legal policy, have you seen progress inside the legal community particularly with regard to national security? >> i think there has been some and i think we are getting a growing through cohort of lawyers and legal academics who have experience also working inside the government, the pent gone, the state department, other places and who can kind of connect the dots between these different worlds. but -- and some of this is really hard, you know, reinventing international institutions, that's really hard

but some pieces of this, i think, are actually pretty easy and we sometimes let the fact that there are lots of hard problems prevent us from doing anything about the relatively easy problems, so fixing international law, hard. fixing financial institutions, hard, making u.s. targets, drone strikes more transparent and accountable, i think those are pretty easy. >> what are key things you would like to see? >> greater due process, some sort of independent commission. the assumption that you don't have judicial process when it comes to wartime use of force is premised on the idea that it's all like the invasion in normandy but when it comes to targeted strikes in most cases the u.s. has been tracking someone and building ineffective case against them.

decision space for weeks, months and even a year and it becomes feasible when the process is that long to add in additional layers of process that's outside of the executive branch. do you have issues about protecting methods, yeah, sure but you can clear people into it. you can clear out the mechanism. that one actually strikes me as pretty easy. there are half a dozen easy way that is don't solve -- don't address every last problem with every last case but get you 85% of the way to addressing the most common objections that president obama can find executive order and find tomorrow. >> do you see prospects for something like that? >> unfortunately no. he's made numerous speeches declaring his commitment to increasing transparency and accountability, he's taken a few baby steps including most recently some declaration of certain number of civilian casualties but he has done much less than any of the speeches suggested he would and at this

point, unless he has an 11th hour, this is going to be part of my legacy change of heart, i don't think we are going to see much progress. >> another area in the same is authorization for the use of military force. we've had an ongoing or episodic debate, really, inside the congress about whether there ought to be new authorization and it gets back to legal -- constitutional basis for what the heck it is we are doing in the world, whatever we call it. what's your thought on how that debate has progressed and where it needs to go? >> guest: it's another one where the problem is not the issue is just too complicated. the problem really is lack of political will, the 2001 use of military force was passed a few days after the september 11th attacks and essentially congress gave the president the authority to use force against the people and organizations that had

planned or abetted the september 11th attack for the purpose of presenting such attacks to the united states in the future. the bush administration right after the attack had asked congress to pass a very different authorization, one that said president can use force from whoever he wants to to respond to this and congress kind of gone, no, no, we want something that's narrow. we want to restrict it to use of force to go after who were responsible to prevent the same thing from happening against the united states in the future. over time, over the last 15 years that that seemingly relatively narrow legal authorization has been used most obviously and directly and appropriately to justify the u.s. legally justify the use of force in afghanistan. it was against taliban, against other actors and other states, against members of somalia's al

shabaab organization, against members of isis in syria, libya, iraq, groups that didn't even exist at the time of 9/11 that had nothing to do. >> host: not aligned with al-qaeda. >> guest: there may be bad people that we need to be using military force against but we can of shoe-horn all of this stuff into this paragraph authorization to use force in a way that has stretched it so unbelievably and i don't think there's anybody at this point in either party who won't acknowledge that including president obama who even as he relies on it has said it's overly brought and i think it should be changed but we are in one of those situations where you've got everybody saying it's overbroad, it should be changed but nobody including the president willing to say, yeah, we are going to stop relying on it because we think we sort of stretched the bounds of where we can take this and if he stops

relying on it, it would put congress on the spot and would have to come with something else. it's the game of chicken. he doesn't want to be the one that says, no more air strikes on anybody till you get attacks, although it would call their bluff. >> host: backdrop, dysfunction or lack of ability to make real political progress inside washington really fits in there, but with regard to, for instance, not being able to get authorizations for civilian departments to undertake and different bill and a vehicle for everything and in the sense of not being able to come to consensus in the national security realm around the rules that will guide us going forward

even when there's -- when there seems to be consensus. obviously that goes beyond where you try to go in the book but i wonder how much again back to the issue of if this is a chapter that looks a lot different. >> you know, i would really like to see the u.s. create some sort of universal national service program and i think that's the only thing that over time might help us break the kind of partisan gridlock and dysfunction and mistrust that has surfaced so much that has characterized relationship

between white house. >> host: what would that be like? >> guest: we have a myth of world war ii, it does have some truth which is the draft, mass mobilization, when you're a hollywood producer it has italian guy from brooklyn, jewish guy from new york, farm boy from iowa, immigrant from north dakota, they don't know each other and suspicious with each other and fighting fascism and nazis and at the end we are all americans and there's some truth to that. the mass mobilization did in many ways bind america together and gave generation a common experience and identity which i do think for the next couple of

decades help fuel bip and foreign policy. i don't think it's realistic and nobody wants to have a military draft and we don't need one in terms of military service at this point but we have so many problems in this country from infrastructure problems, to problems in public schools, not to speak of the law of foreign assistance officials and i would like to see program that's mandatory for 18 months or so, you had to do it some point between ages of 1818 to 24. repairing bridges or being in the army and i think that something like that that brought everybody in and mixed them up

geographically and ethnically once like the draft did for young americans, it will be very powerful. people say, no, no, that would be too expensive. it would be expensive up front to do but it would be a massive investment both in infrastructure reform and in building precisely the kinds of skill that is we want to have. we want to have nurses, we want to have teachers, et cetera, et cetera, and i think that's the only kind of thing that i can think of that really would shake things up and give us as fighting chance and getting past the bipartisan that has deny detrimental and destructive on some many issues. here the the amazing thing about the military.

the institution that's capable of marshaling so much human talent so quickly and effectively all things considered and there's another story i mentioned in the book major general told me at one point he was talking about being in afghanistan and realizing a certain point that it would be impossible to have an enduring piece of the taliban no matter how many people are killed if the afghans could not reform their agriculture economy, depend on opium and he we wanted to get civilian expertise to consult with leaders on agriculture reform projects and he -- i'm oversimplifying the story but calls the department of agriculture in washington, hi, i'm an army general, here i am in afghanistan, could you send agriculture experts out here and we need your help and the department of agriculture says, you know, we only have two of them and they're really busy and besides they don't wanting

to to afghanistan and the army goes, you know, big collective head-scratch and says, wait a second. the army reserve has farmers, people who work for agriculture companies, let's find them and bring them here. were they quite the right people, no, some of them were probably going, i had a garden, that doesn't mean that i can advise of agriculture production. what an amazing ability for a country to do that, and if we can take that energy and talent, the incredible talent and diversity that we have in this country and put it to work for the whole country, that would be so wonderful. >> so you've had your book out for at least a few weeks. >> one week.

>> you had written up wall street journal, new york times multiple times and other publications. what has surprised you the most and delighted you the most about the reception of the book? >> guest: what's made me happiest about it other than every writer wants to get attention and reviews, it's sad and depressing with when you buy a book and nobody reads it, but i think what has made me happiest is for the most part with a few exceptions, but for the most part the response has been nonideological. i don't see it as an ideological or partisan book at all. i see the arguments as ones that don't fill in neatly democrat, republican, liberal, conservative, i feel that by in large that's been the reception that i've gotten. i've gotten really positive feedback from people who were on the other side of the political

aisles and i've got positive feedback from military audiences, intelligence community as well as people from the state department, ordinary americans that don't work for the government at all and that feels really nice to feel like there is a community that doesn't see these as part of issue and just see these as issues that we need to care about urgently. >> how about inside your own community? do you feel like inside your community folks who are interested in legal issues with regard to national security that, you know, you're writing your work beyond the book itself that the timing is right for that community to sort of take that next step and move to developing some kind of framework that makes sense. >> guest: i hope so. what became -- what became this book was an article i wrote and published in 2004 and there's fundamental ways in which i have

been saying the same thing for a dozen years now and early on everybody thought i was crazy when i say the boundaries of war and piece are breaking down. now, i don't get that anymore. now most of the time with most audiences i get, yeah, yeah, that is happening. that's true, you're right. the last five years i feel like there's been saying, that's true, i hope if the book becomes a small part of, you know, tipping that discussion over from going around in circles to yes, we need to change this, i hope that will happen. >> fifteenth year of 9/11 coming up, where do you see that next chapter going? do you think we have a continuing war on terror ahead of us in which, you know, many of the same issues would arrive, are there new horizons that concern you in this space of the gap between peace and war that

were not yet, you know, in front of. can you forecast ahead and give us guidance on what we should be thinking about now? >> i don't want to be a canarian . yeah. so i think what has become more apparent in the last few years which is a real kind of warning for everybody including people who have been kind of in denial about these issues has been that other bad actors, adversaries are adopting legal frameworks that the united states has done to do bad things that we don't like. on issues of sovereignty, i remember vladimir putin coming some years ago and in response to some u.s. unilateral actions that he didn't like. he said, this is a two-ended

stick and the other side will come back and hit you in the face and it did in ukraine in all kinds of ways and i think that one of the things that i've been saying for a long time m others have as well, has been saying, hey, wait a minute, when we say things in the united states like we can detain this person indefinitely because we have information that we don't have to share with anybody else, says they are planning something against us but trust us we won't make any mistakes and when we say, hey, we can send a drone or special operations to kill a person in a foreign country which we are not at war and we don't have to acknowledge that we did it, much less tell you why and share the evidence and allow you to evaluate it because trust us, we are good and we are the good guys. well, other people hear that and not everybody is a good guy and other people say, united states, if you get to say it's a secret,

it's national security, trust us, we get to say it too and we are going to do a lot of things you're going to hate and i think that many of us said for years watch out will come back to bite us and in the next few years they are coming back to bite us, i think if nothing else, one or two things are going to happen, either end up in a much more worse in which the precedent we have set about unilateral action, about the -- using force without having any buy-in from the un security council, the president has said about detaining people or killing people based on classified evidence that we are not going to reveal to anybody or reveal that we kill them. either that becomes the norm and that's a really scary world where everybody is acting that

way or it serves as a wake-up call for us and way, whoa, you're right, we want to be the country, we want to be the country that we have been been. we want to be the country that sets the norm and setting the example that other people should file that would make the world better. we need to get out there. we need to be saying to other states, yeah, we are going to be in this peace war forever, so how do we collectively come up with some kind of international rules and institutions that both recognition that those threats are real but don't throw human rights out the window and let's figure it out. so i don't know which paths we are going to go down but i sure do hope it's the latter path. >> you are writing a book at a time, we are about to transition administration, people would be

coming to you if they haven't already, should i go into government and follow your example and take my great principles and my background and try to make change, what do you tell people. what are the great things about going to work in the government and trying to make change and what are the hard parts. >> the great thing is you learn how the sausage factory operates and if you care about making change whether you think to yourself i want to spend the rest of my career in government or journalists or academic or work in the private sector, you have to know how it works, nobody ever really knows how it works. it's much too complex for anybody of us. even when i left the defense department after 26 months i felt that i was finally beginning to understand things of how it works and i expect people to retire after 40 years and they still feel that way but it was fascinating, i met wonderful people, i met awful

people, i left with a much clear understanding of how change sometimes can happen and why change often doesn't happen that i think has been really useful to me and how i talk to people and how i write and so forth and would be really useful to me again if i ever went back in a different administration and in a different place, so when people come to me and say, should i go do this, i usually say, absolutely. that doesn't mean you should stay forever but if you care about, you know, any public policy issue whether it's on the foreign policy, national security side or domestic side, if you care about being an advocate or activists or reformer, you will learn that it's valuable and your credibility would be forever higher if you go and learn how it works and how it doesn't work so i think it's a great thing to do, the one danger is people can

get cooperative and going in saying, i'm going to be part of the solution and becoming part of the problem, but that's something that i suppose is always true for everybody. >> well, it's a fascinating read and the experiences from the pentagon and hopefully you will be back. >> guest: i will leave that for other people to do but thank you so much. >> great. >> c-span, created by america's cable television companies and brought to you as a public