putting them in a specialized program, that has its own set of rules and norms, and you are putting in charge up that analytical and interrogation expertise that is different from the standard military interrogation model. and i think the answer to that that it is probably pretty clearly shows that there is some doubt you added to such a program. now how much, i am not sure. .

and so i am hesitent to say that we have enough information at this stage to sort of figure out what the best hypothesis is regarding the role of coercion if general or any specific coercive technique in particular. i do, to answer, to address

john's question, i do think that there is a concern that this issue raises, which is if you do not have some programic answer to the question of what you're going to do with high-value detainees -- and i don't think the calculation here would have been different if there has been a programic answer to the question. this is an extraordinarily risky operation even as a kill operation or a kill or capture operation. and i think if you hadded an answer to the what do we do with him question, the calculation still would have been very similar, which is you're sending people into an extraordinarily dangerous environment and both for force

protection reasons and for a lot of other reasons you don't want too much -- you want the rules of engagement to be pretty relaxed, pretty open. that said, as a general matter i do think the less answer you have to the back end questions, what are you going to do with the person once you have him, how are you going to -- what is the legal status that they're going to be in, what's the ultimate back end question? what are you going to do with him after you've exhausted his intelligence. the less stable answer you have to those questions i think as a general matter the greater the incentive structure will be to more rather than less. >> i just wanted to pick up on this because i want to clarify a little the question that we're talking about here. because there's a lot of -- ben

took a much bigger picture from what we kind of came here directly to talk about and i think it's important for taos be clear what techniques we're talking about. i want to address what mark said about water boarding and torture. ok, i guess you can't say that it's indisputeable because some people dispute whether or not water boarding is torture. but the fact is that we have always called it torture when other nations have done that. in fact, we've prosecuted enemy soldiers for waterboarding our people. and that's a standard that we have upheld for many, many decades. i think while we're having a conversation about, i want to remind you my opening remarks emphasized that i am embude by the sense of what america

stands for. and perhaps that's not just because of my own personal upbringing but also because as an international human rights advocate i spend a lot of time talking with people outside this country who are putting their own lives on the line to advance freedom and democracy in their own countries. against repressive governments and they believe that the united states stands for something. and in fact, i recently had occasion to meet with some former soviet bloc countries, representatives, in particular a young guy from poland who was expressing how distraught he was that the united states was reengaging on the debate about torture and how prisoners ought to be treated, whether or not we would comply with the geneva conventions because he was formed in the crubible of looking to the united states as

the moral beaken, the city on the hill. so it's not just the question, i think it's a little glib to say are we going to feel better if we treat people nicer. it real sli a deeper question about who we are as a country. i don't believe it's irrelevant or i wouldn't have come to the panel about how did we get bin laden. what role our interrogation program played in that. i think interrogation and intelligence gathering is absolutely key to defeating this enemy in particular but it's always been key so i don't question that. we talk a little bit as though there's not a current program in place, and that in fact that there's not a high value interrogation group that includes experts from the c.i.a. there is. i've met with them. they are now putting together and they have for some time now put together what they believe is the best and the brightest

experienced interrogators to go after those who we believe are of high value in intelligence. so we have that program and i wouldn't want anybody listening here or watch withing to think that we don't have a way to interrogate or dealing with people who we capture. i think it's very important. but i do think that we should be listening very carefully to 2 message of general petraeus, in his let tore the troops in iraq which he issued in several years ago. we are as a country very seared by this horrible experience of the attacks of 9/11 and the ongoing threats of terrorism. in many ways similar to the experience that warriors face on the battlefield where they see the horrible treatment and brutality of our own people by

the enemy. but i would urge you to go back and look at this letter from general petraeus in which he instructs his own troops to reject the back and forth of politicians about this issue and he says, i quote, some may argue that we would be more effective if we saveragesed torture or other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy. they would be wrong. besides they are a illegal, history shows they are either neither useful nor necessary. it can make someone talk. however what the individual says may be of questionable value. and it goes on. i think one of the things that's striking about at the details come out of the program that led to the information that led us to bin laden is that some of what we discovered

after using waterboarding in particular was that people told the truth sometimes after they were waterboarded, sometimes they lied. and we can't have it both ways. you know, it's almost as though -- i'm not sure really what that proves. if it's no matter what the person says that it proves that torture works, then i'm not sure why we're interrogating these people in the first place. i mean, i suppose torture works in the way that a row boat to europe works. you know, it's incredibly slow. it's incredibleably risky and probably self-destructive. >> let me stop you there. i think we're going to stop but let me turn to general mccasey because this question came up during your hearings and you had to conduct a review of this issue both on the legal and policy issues. so you had to make a determination as a government official. >> and a legal issue.

what i was asked whether waterboarding was torture. and since i didn't know what the c.i.a. did that they called waterboarding i couldn't answer the question nouch the frustration of a number of the members of the committee. and afterwards i undertook to do a review of the olc memos which i did over a period of months with the assistance of two other lawyers, neither of whom knew who the other was so that i had input from two people who were independent of one another. and independent of me. and concluded that what the c.i.a. did did not violate the torture statute. now, you may -- the point's been made repeatedly whether the labels attached to waterboarding as practiced by the c.i.a. that it was torture. if that's what we're here to discuss, that's not the discussion i can really add because it doesn't violate the torture statute. if we are here to decide

whether torture the led to the capture of bin laden i think we can agree that it didn't because we didn't torture anybody to get any information. so far as people having been prosecuted for waterboarding u.s. troops indeed they were. and what they did, there's virtually no relationship, i would say no relationship to what the c.i.a. did. what people were prosecuted for when they waterboarded u.s. troops was forcing water down their throats until their some yacks and intestines became distended, very painfully, and then stepping on their some yacks and intestnd and forcing the water back up and doik it repeatedly over and over again or feeding them raw rice and then forcing water down their throats and waiting until it expanded. what the commer rouge did was to hand cuff people to the bottom of barrels and gradually fill those barrels with water until many drowned.

what the c.i.a. did was to tie somebody to a board, put a cloth over his face, pour water on him for no longer than 40 seconds at a time and the effect was in essence to increase the co2 level in his blood to the point where it caused panic. that's all it caused. and all three of the people who were waterboarded showed no ill effects afterwards. that's just a plain and simple truth. it is, you can call an 18 wheeler and a mini cooper both motor vehicles but i don't think that that creates a meaningful comparison between the two. >> i would just add to that, the technique that he described was called the tokyo rice treatment. there was no relationship between what the c.i.a. did and what the japanese did. so it's a false comparison.

i would add something, i'm on the panel with three lawyers. i won't give you the legal definition. i'll give you a common sense deaf niss. there are more journalists who have had themselves waterboarded to prove that it's torture than there are terrorists who were waterboarded and my common sense definition of torture is if you'll willing to try it to see what it feels like, it's not torture. none of these individuals offered to have themselves have elect rodse attached to certain parts of their body or have bolts put through them or have treetsdz drilled without nove cain or have their bones broken . i think it does a great disservice to people like colonel day to compare what the c.i.a. did. it does a service to real torture victims like colonel day and it does a terrible disservice to our country to suggest that we were in league

with what the japanese did and the nazis did and the commer rouge did which is factually incorrect. and secondly of all, the second issue that we learned that they said certain things that weren't true after waterboarding, first of all, 2 enhanced interrogations weren't a truth serum, it wasn't a point like you injected them and suddenly everything they said well they told you everything that you wanted to know. what they took a detainee who was in a state of total resistance, ksm when he was captured he was asked about planned attacks and also the other thing is the purpose of enhanced ter congregation was not to get information on ubl it was to get information to top terrorist attacks. it was not a technique that could be used, the person had to be somebody very high value who knew information that could lead to a terrorist attack and we had to stop and we didn't have the luxury of time. we had to get them talking

right away. it took somebody in a state of total noncooperation, and it started with a tummy slap and worked its way up to waterboarding. most of the people didn't make it to waterboarding. they gave in pretty early in the process. and after that the techniques had stopped. they resisted enough and were willing to cooperate. that means they didn't hide anything. there's no such thing as a truth serum in interrogation. pause restor the chief of intelligence group and who followed the army field manual in his interrogations, he estimates that none of these techniques were used in guantanamo. he estimates that he, based on providing snickers, bars and subway sandwiches, he got 25% of what they knew. when it comes to ksm, 25% is unacceptable. and the detainees who were in c.i.a. custody, those who underwent inef enhanced inter congregation, people draw the

distinction some didn't go through it. they cooperated because they were in fear of enhanced interrogation. those who i interviewed estimate they probably got about 70 to 80% of what they knew. that's closer to what the master mind of 9/11 who was sitting there and telling you when he was first asked he said soon you will know. he admits that he has attacks planned and under way. and then he says americans are weak and deck dent and don't have the will to do what's necessary to find out and protect their country. and i think he found that we did have the will and we did stop attacks and in the process we also got bin laden.

maybe hopefully we'll turn to the question this administration -- you zronet to answer this but this administration clearly disagrees with the efficacy issue, i think this administration's view would be it could be as effective as you say but we're still not going to do it i think for many of the reasons mentioned, and i still wonder if this is a mistake or not but whether it causes the military intelligence agencies to conduct operations in a certain way. in other words, decreasing their flexibility. but you wanted to get in on what people were saying before we turned to that. >> i'm delighted to shift to the question you asked. so one of the things that is i

mean the debate in general, we tend to focus on the most extreme technique which is to say waterboarding. i don't think anybody really disputes this. i think this is undisputeable and indisputed. there's a very large gulf between what the field manual permits and the legal line. now, how, why do you think that gulf is and what does and doesn't fit under it? the army field manual is law for the military. under the mccain amendment but it is not the law for the c.i.a. and the c.i.a. is bound by common article 3 and it's bound

by the other terms of the mccain amendment which prohibit cruel and inhuman and degrading treatment. but the field manual was never designed to exhaust the list of lawful techniques that are not cruel and inhuman and degrading treatment. i'm not sure everybody but i think it is widely agreed that between the field manual and the legal line there is some degree of space. and we argue about how much space there is and what does and doesn't fit under it. but i think the argument that there is some category of, the word enhanced has a weird cannot toation now. but i mean it nonyou've mistically here enhanced over what the military is permitted to do under the field manual but still within the law is overprourlingly strong and the

question of why you don't, why the administration has chosen as a peru dential matter to go nowhere near the legal line even in the highest value cases is an interesting and important question. now, i think the answer to it as a practical matter is some combination of beliefs about efficacy. some combination of -- beliefs about reputational damage to the united states and as a sense of who we are as a nation. but third, i think there's oots factor that's really important in conditioning the entire thing, which is we are not operating in a crisis environment any more and we are not capturing large numbers of high value detainees and i think the atmosphere if you did capture a high valu detainee today is still so different from what it was in 2002 and 2003, and the sense of the that person's knowing something that

is, as mark describes it, simply unacceptable not to find out is a lot lower than it used to be. and so you may, as a pursuedential matter, choose to forego certain techniques that would be indispute bri lawful as a result of these other factors. and i think the point that will really test the debate between my fellow panelists is the point at which the threat environment is much higher than it is today and you are capturing detainees once again who it is simply unacceptable to be at 20% rather than 70%. that will not resolve the debate whether waterboarding is or is not torture. that's a legal debate. but it will put pressure on the decision to stop if the legal line is here to stop down here. and there is this space between

the legal line and the pursuedential line that is really quite broad and i think clearly encompasses some or many of the techniques that the c.i.a. is using whatever one thinks about them as a policy matter. and i think there will come a time when we will have to face that question again of whether we do or don't want to live in that space. >> john, you wanted to? >> yeah. a couple of semi-minor corrections, factual corrections having been on the scene at the time. but i think as you know the president's executive order of january 23, 2009, basically made the army field manual, the standards applicable a f across the government so it applies to all federal agencies. >> but absent further guidance. >> i'm getting to that. again, i'm at a disadvantage

here because i was actually there at the time. so let me give you the best i can give you about what we were thinking at that point. if there was subject to further guidance or subject to -- we at the agency, it was informally suggested to us that we come up with a series of interrogation techniques that might be beyond the army field manual in that space you described. now, collectively 59 c.i.a. after seven years of being pummeled and investigated and accused, that collective space to us was no man's land. we were not going to turn on a dime frankly after being called tort trurrers and suggest to the new administration, well, how about this technique? would you go for that one? i mean, this was as best i can determine, this was the

unanimous collective view of certainly the career cadre at c.i.a. of which i consider myself one. so i mean, nothing you said is -- i'm not disputing. but i'm just trying to give you some context of some atmosphere to what was the agency's position or state of mind at that particular juncture. second minor fact tull correction. it is true that the if one were to rank from the beginning what was the first goal of the enhanced interrogation program or the c.i.a. program if general, it was to prevent another catastrophic attack on the homeland. but as i indicated earlier, there was a second goal and that was always again one from the beginning was to locate ubl and zawa heiri. i mean, they were twin goals

and those goals persisted for seven years even when the program itself was paired back. those are, i mean, basically broadly speaking, the criterion of which we decided whether a particular quality was in the high value detainee or snot. >> -- not. >> waterboarding whether it was a higher standard, maybe i'm wrong about that. i thought for waterboarding they had to have believed to have knowledge of imminent attack. >> well, they certainly needed to have that. again, we didn't tote up a shopping list at the time. but certainly terrorist attack was the first and foremost objective of the program. but again, i just can't emphasize enough the single mindedness inside the agency from the beginning as to getting information that could lead to the taking down of lynn

baden. >> 30 seconds. >> just to clarify on my part. i didn't mean to suggest that the decision of whether to live in that space was a c.i.a. matter. i think it's -- the decision not to live in that space is clearly a presidential matter and the decision to revisit that would have to be a presidential matter. i meant it as a statement about the government itself, that there will come a point when we have to decide based on the gap that exists between statutory law and the field manual, whether that's a gap that we do or don't want to continue to exist. >> so a few points on that very quickly. >> i'm going to move us to a slightly different issue. >> one i agree with ben that there's nothing magical about the techniques in the field manual as if they were the received was some and there could never we b any other technique that's compliant with the geneva convention. doy think it was a pru dential

decision to make clear what had become incredibly mudied to our people, military and civilian who are charged with this awesome task of getting information from very dangerous people, what the rules are. i think mark den grates a bit the field manual by implying that it's all about snickers and subway sandwiches. there's a lot of flexibility in the army field man. it was not written just for the low level interrogation officers of the army. and in fact, many interrogators from outside of the military have said i don't need anything outside of what's in the army field manual. there's a lot of flexibility in there. another quick point i want to make about the description judge muke cakice gave about what the c.i.a. actually did. i have to say that if this debate comes down to parsing whether or not we are more humane at waterboarding than

the cam bodions or the fill pinos were, it makes me heartsick that something that john mccain, who knows what he is talking about from torture has said is equivalent to a mock execution, all i can say is yoverage that's going to give much comfort to my polition friend who is looking to the united states for moral leadership in the world. and finally, just to get us to this forward looking question about the bush administration, the obama administration and what's different and where are we going, i think that it's a mistake to view this as a bright line between the bush administration's policies and the obama administration's policies. in fact, we did a lot of things as a count ry right after 9/11 out of fear, ignorance. we were not well educated about the threat of al qaeda. that we later came to our

senses about. and to his credit president bush was already starting to move in the direction that president obama ultimately moved, whether president bush would have gotten there with more time i don't know but i do think that it's not accurate to talk about this as a bright line that changed when president obama came into office. he did some very important things. closing the secret prisons and establishing a single standard for interrogations. but president bush had already started down that road by ceasing waterboarding, by talking about how we can go about closing guantanamo. so i think we ought to talk about what we're going to do next. but we should do that in the context of some historical accuracy about the ark of this policy even within the bush administration. >> i think we turning to

questions i would like to ask the panel to think about the future. we've seen bush policies, obama policy. do we have the opportunity to rethink policies we are going to use or are there an examples that policies should be kept the same? what would you do differently in terms of courpt terrorism policy going forward? so general mccasey, would you like to start? >> what would i do differently? i think at the beginning i said that we need an interrogation program that is lawful and classified administered by the c.i.a. that's one thing that i would do differently. another is to have a coheernts detention policy so we know who we doo tain, who we kill and on what basis.

third, and we haven't talked about this at all and it has to do with the commissions as of posed to article 3 courts. it's a binary choice now. i don't know that either one is attractive. i don't think the military is really in place to run a parallel justice system. we have done it before, we've had military commissions before but never long term. and i think we ought to reform that system. >> john, you also wanted to say a little something. but with a forward-looking gaze. >> forward looking. ok. now that i'm not there i can be very forward looking. like general mccasey, having been part of and certainly witnessed and observed the interrogation policies and programs of the bush administration, i don't see

that there's any real factual argument that it did yield huge benefits in terms of intelligence. as i said earlier, i think it is unknowable ultimately whether some or any or all of that intelligence could and would have been acquired without the enhanced interrogation program. that we'll never know. i think the country will benefit with a, an interrogation and detention program of some sort. frankly, the for better or worse, the program that the u.s. government has in place today is doesn't in my mind come close to whether you prove it as a moral legal standard or

not, simply cannot come close to producing the kind of intelligence as the previous program produced. i wanted -- and one could make a judgment that it's not worth it. but make no mistake about it the program today and for the foreseeable future is different. the one final thing looking ahead, and again, i km with this with seven years of experience, seing the political pendulum swing, from the date after 9/11 when the c.i.a. was accused and villified for being risk averse to december or late 2008 when c.i.a. was being villified by some of the same politicians for being human rights abusers and war criminals. i think certainly for the agency to embark upon an interrogation program or take the lead in the detention and interrogation program, i think first of all, if i was still

there ills advide my colleagues at the agency against doing that given the experience we've had. but i would urge, if there is a national will, if there is an administration will to involve c.i.a. directly in a admittedly risky, aggressive program of interrogation. the least the men and women of the agency deserve is consistency. tell them what they're to do, tell them, give them adequate legal authority and cover to do it. and for god's sakes don't change your mind six or seven years down the road. that's all. >> good luck, john. >> one other thing. i can tell you that president bush would not have ended up where president obama is. if you think back the period after 9/11 we didn't know ksm

wasn't the operational commander. we didn't know anything about how they were structured, their networks. what plots were out there. and it was through tin ter congregation of these detainees that we established this information. michael hayden has said that over half of the intelligence that we had through 2006 came from detainees about threats to the country. it stopped a series of terrorist plots and it also gave ause huge amount of information about the operations of al qaeda as we became more knowledgeable what mike hayden did in 2006 when the program had been stopped and president bush went to congress to get legislation so we could restart it. when he resumed if program, he made a conscious decision because we had gained a lot of knowledge about al qaeda's operations how their networks work and the rest, he decided to scale back the techniques and sacrifice some effectiveness, and he knew this, in exchange for political sustainability. meaning he wanted to have a

program in place that the next administration, republican or democrat, liberal or conservative, could continue without compromising their values and what they believed. and unfortunately we know what the details of that proom were. there were six seck techniques left. so the tummy slap, the facial hold, the facial slap, a diet of liquid ensure. there's one other i'm forgetting and the final one was mild sleep deprivation. and president during the transition mike hayden actually briefed the president on this program actually had a dni representative demonstrate the techniques to the president and his reaction was, that's it? that was all that was left in the program. the reason it still worked is because the terrorists didn't know that. know one knew that. and what president obama did that he canceled that which nobody could consider torture, eliminated that, mandated the

army field manual and released all the techniques to the world so the terrorists could learn the legal extent of what we could do in interrogation. so what the president could do looking forward -- >> some people don't want to look forward. >> to look forward you must look back. >> what we could do very simply is restore what he closed, what he shut down what he inherited. the gift mike hayden gave him. he said everything you think you need to do, we've already done, and restore that program. and he can do that in a very, very easy way. he can amend the executive order that he signed on the second day of office with a few words. unless otherwise authorize bid the president. when he limits it. he could announce that there is a classified anex to the army field manual that was added. it could be a blank page or the six techniques, the torture --

as long as the terrorists don't know what they're facing the key to the success of breaking these people is they can't know what they're facing and if they do know they can resist it. ksm figured out the limits. he actually mocked his interrogators by holding off his arm and count off the seconds with his hand. he knew how far you can go. and when they know it is very, very hard to break them. >> i would like to suggest that the way to move forward is actually not to focus on interrogation right now. because interrogation presents probably the hardest and most devicive issue that has arisen in the post 9/11 era. and because for one reason or another and probably a multiplicity of a number of reasons we're not capturing large numbers of the sort of

people wholed be going into this program if we had it. and so while i agree that there is a long-term or medium-term question that we are going to have to confront on the interrogation front, i think the much more pressing short-term problem is the underlying detention question. which is when you capture somebody, are the -- you know, what do you do with them in the immediate sense? do you think of them as somebody who comes to the united states for criminal trial? do you think of them as somebody who gets held in theater and transferred to another country for detention or processing of one sort or another? do you start bringing people back to guantanamo as the chairman of the house armed services committee has now repeatedly suggested? these are questions with really no stable answer and they actually do affect a substantial number of people. i mean, people in the operating

theaters actually do capture people. and i think this is if you can resolve or bring resolution to the architecture that we're going to be working with, some of the interrogation questions will follow from that. which is to say once you decide you're putting somebody in the criminal justice system, a set of rules about interrogation follow from that. some of them are very per misive rules vis-a-vis the military interrogations ironically for example. in the field manual you're not allowed to threaten anybody under any circumstances. the f.b.i. people mentioned the lengthy criminal sentences that people could get every day. that's standard operating proor net bureau. some on the other hand some of the rules are very restrictive. you have to mirandize people. so when you make decisions about what system somebody is the going to be in, you make

very profound decisions about the nature of the interrogation rules that are going to be permitted. so i think there's a lot to be said for starting with the question of what the detention rules are going to be and then over time as you figure out what the long-term volume of high-value detainees and how cooperative they are or are not, in whatever detention environment you put them in, that will give you data that is not data from 2002 and 2003. but data from 2012 rand 2013 about what kind of interrogation techniques that you do need that we don't have now if any. >> very good. >> talk about [inaudible] >> i thought you had the last time. you want to finish snup >> i do think it's important to, it's been referenced here, the question about criminal trials. i think in fact we a lot of what we learned about al qaeda

that we didn't know we learned through the trials of the first world trade center bombing in this question about whether we look back or look forward. i have a lot of friends in the agency actually and afe huge amount of sympathy for the situation that they were put in. i wish more of our political leaders had expressed that kind of sympathy in advance before they led people who joined the agency to protect the united states and the value that is it stands for and led them to believe that they had to compromise their honor and our honor as a country to protect us and to do their jobs. i think that's what's criminal. i tind it stunning that a panel here at the american enterprise institute that we're not talking more about what this means for who we are projecting as our identity as a nation to the world. i think that the people that we ask to fight this fight make

huge sacrifices, as i said, we owe them a huge debt. but we also owe them clarity. and i fully agree with what you are saying, john, about what the rules are and that they can uphold their own honor personally and the honor of o our country while protecting us. i think that's violetly important. >> raise your habbed and we'll come over with the microphone and please say your name and your institutional affiliation. and keep the questions very short because we don't have a lot of time. you've had your hand up for 30 minutes. so why don't you go first. also i bias people who are brave enough to sit in the front row. >> john wolf, senior fellow discovery institute. two things very quickly. first, we don't know how the obama interrogation tech neekeds work so long as we're relying on part on intelligence gathered under earlier

techniques that are not fully dried up or until we go up against another terrorist group, i'm sure there will be some where we have no intelligence and that's years away before you have a market test so you don't know how it's working, no one does now or whether it's not working. the other thing, hypothetical for the panel. let us say an islamist group takes over in pakistan. a few-year-olds later a nuke goes off in an american city. president x snatches aq cannes. do you restrict yourselves to the army field manual in interrogating him to find out 23u don't have concluesive forensic evidence of the characteristics of pakistani nukes whether it was there's? or do we use enhanced techniques, the ones used in the bush administration or even going beyond that? >> very good. does anybody want to? john, you have your microphone on. do you want to respond?

>> well, hithes left over from before. that will teach you not to be ignorant of communicationings technology again. from the purely parochial standpoint of the agency, i feel fairly confident in saying the agency, the people in the agency will not proceed with conducting any certainly renewed techniques along the lines without the personal written imper mat tur of the president of the united states. >> if if you're president, would you authorize those techniques? get around the agency issue. >> in the scenario you doo scribed? yes. >> [inaudible] >> work on the rizzo campaign. >> i just want to say your

hypothetical is both once extraordinarily detailed and extraordinarily vague. and so it's detailed in some respect. but the question of what you know and how you know that aq cannes in that scenario actually knows something that is really valuable is extraordinarily important in deciding what interrogation tactics are or are not appropriate. so i think you're describing a scenario that has, that's very hard to respond to responsibly. >> my question is that debate has been going on for the last ten years why u.s. cannot get osama bin laden and now president obama goat him. the -- got him.

this debate will go on why we got him. two most wanted people were hiding in pakistan. aq can as the gentleman said and also osama bin laden which everybody knows well and pakistan kept denying for ten years. should pakistan pay a price for this? and should aq can also be brought to justice? and finally, around that mansion only the retirees from the pakistan isi and also the military people were living around that compound. and somebody, this is according to pakistanis in pakistan, knew in the military and also in isi that osama bin laden lived there. we don't know whether anybody else here knew or not but general mu schafer then and also isit who is now general keena knew about it. my question now, where do we go

from here and what pakistan should do or u.s. >> so i think there's two questions. one is, is it really possible that pakistan did not know that bin laden was there given the location where he was ultimately found, or was he being shielded in some way by the pakistani government? the second question is what should we do towards pack stab should that change our policy or not? not exactly a legal question but i think a lot of people thought about this problem. any? >> john, you don't have your microphone on. >> i'm not sure if i can give a full answer to your question. i think ostly it's a question that a lot of people are asking right now including in the obama administration. but it's really a question that we should have been asking immediately after 9/11. in fact, you know, going back to the huge hundreds of people who were turned over to the

united states by -- i mean, the contrast is striking. many, many people were turned over to the united states who ended up in guantanamo who the bush administration later released as irrelevant, nobodies, who we got from pakistan and yet during much of the time since 9/11 it turns out that the leader of our enemy has been in hiding there in open sight. so i think it absolutely must change the dynamic of our relationship. the dilemma that we're obviously in is that we also need a relationship with pakistan to fight this enemy. but i think we have to be very frank now with the pakistanis and i think congress will also start forcing that as the administration revises its relationship there.

>> all the way in the back standing up with the curly hair. >> thank you very much. nathan from george mason law school. first, thank you for joining us in the lion's den as it were. do you think, my question is do you think the army field manual should be the standard for interrogations conducted by nonarmed forces personnel? and if so, why? given how restrictive the techniques are? they're actually more restrictive as ben pointed out than the rules that apply in garden variety interrogations. you can't do good cop, bad cop without approval. you cannot threaten a source, you cannot coerce a source, you cannot yell which would come as a real shock to f.b.i. agents who point out that if you don't

cooperate you might be going to lynch worth. >> let me throw in, it's more of a policy question than a legal question. >> as asaid before there's no magic about the army field manual and i don't think it cr tains all of the techniques that are compliant with our values and laws. i think that's also why it's a good thing that president obama has created this high value interrogation fwrupe which has representatives on it from the c.i.a., the f.b.i. and the military in an attempt to make sure that we canvas experts from all of the relevant agencies to collect the most effective and legal techniques for gathering intelligence that we have. i think that was lacking right after 9/11, freanchingly, and it's part of the reason why things went so awry. so i think that's good. and that the high value

interrogation group as i understand their current activity, part of what they're doing is looking to see if they are other techniques that we want to suggest. personally, what i am concerned about is that our techniques are compliant with the geneva conventions and with our constitution. and i think that we ought to be able to stand firmly on that in front of the rest of the world and say not hide what we stand for or what we're willing to do. the idea that we can convince al qaeda and therefore the rest of the world that we might torture them, i don't think that's a good idea or a useful thing to do. so i think it was, as ben said earlier, pru dential decision to go with the army field manual as an existing document that has proven and testified to by many, many interrogators that it provided them what they

needed to get the information from dangerous people. could bit changed? yeah. it's been changed lots of times. and in fact annually it can be reviewed, radio vised and techniques can be added. i would disagree with your characterization of how limiting it is. there's a lot of flex bibblet in there. too much flexibility that some people would say. but you've got the ability to isolate people to deprive them of all kinds of things that some people would argue violate the geneva conventions. i think it's a useful starting place. >> i would say we do want to hide what we're doing from somebody, the terrorists. i think we don't want them to know the limits of the techniques because they can train against them. so it's very easy for them to do that. the problem at least as mentioned several times this high value interrogation group and i would be interested to know who they're interrogating.

mike hayden said creently that outside of the battlefields of afghanistan and iraq there has not been one high value detention by the united states of a high value terrorist since president obama took office. we are simply not -- it's not a question of what techniques we should use against them because we're not at that point. we're doing battlefield interrogations in iraq and afghanistan. this is the most exclusive club in the world. this is the cream of the crop, the highest value, the people who had planned 9/11 and set in motion other ploots and there are people out there. ksm was replaced by other people. and this administration has been blowing them up with predators which is better than letting them go. but we're not getting any intelligence out of that. for president obama deserves great credit for making the decision to go and send boots on the ground into that compound and get bin laden because if he had not dobe

that, if we had done a predator strike that whole treasure trove would have been blown up, it would have been gone. and one of the excuses for doing predators versus these kinds of raids, was, well back in the early days when ksm was captured they were in big cities and they were in cratchie and the rest and now they've moved to the tribal regions so you can't get teams in there so you've got to take them out with predators. well, guess what, there is right now at this moment a high value terrorist captured just a few weeks before bin laden raid one of the last remaining at-large members of the ksm network. he was recruited to carry out the second wave of attacks t he had been hiding out in the phillipines for ten years and he was captured in abad bad. what was he doing?

obviously he was there to meet the guy we killed a few weekend later. he's not in u.s. custody. and in the bush administration that guy would be in a c.i.a. black site telling us who he was meeting a and what he was planning we don't have a place to take thim or a set of interrogation techniques to use against him. so we are in a big world of hurt when it comes to the most vital form of intelligence in the war on terror. >> i think with only have time for one really fast question. so how about you right here. wait for the mike. so ask you to keep it brief and everybody else to keep it brief. >> u i'm with abc news and this is for the general. since mccain gave his speech, it seems there's a word game going on. today you said the information was a nick name and the letter from the "washington post"

panetta said no detainee in c.i.a. custody revealed the facilitator or the cure yrs' full true name. is that what we're talking about here nick names versus true names? and do you believe that the administration is being misleading one way or the other? >> i'm not accusing anybody of being misleading and not here to play word games. i know what i said to be true and you can read into that what you want to read into it. i will go back to what i said earlier. it was part of the mosaic and the key issue is the one we've been addressing at the end here which is what we do going forward. we need a program in place. i agree with the people who said we need a classified program for the reasons we said it. we also need a detention program and some upgrading of what we do when we capture people we want to try. but i am not interested in playing word games with anybody

. least of all with a certified war hero who has a superb public record. but it's possible to be a war hero and to have an excellent public record and be mistaken about things. all at the same time. >> couldn't think of a better note on which to end our panel. so join me in thanking our panel. and we are adjourned. >> next live your questions and comments on "washington journal." then "newsmakers". and live at about 10:30 a.m. we'll have president obama's comments at today's apac

meeting. >> history as you know is much more than just politics and soldiers and social issues. it's also medicine and science and art and music and theater and poetry. and ideas. and we shouldn't lump things into categories. it's all part of the same thing. >> tonight on q&a part one of two weeks with david mccullo on americans who made the greater journey to 20th century paris. >> this morning, a reporter's roundtable on the 2012 presidential campaign with mark murray and politico senior congressional reporter jonathan