tv Key Capitol Hill Hearings CSPAN May 18, 2015 9:00pm-11:01pm EDT
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america anymore. you keep helping your enemies, we don't get it. we thought we were your friends. but you're helping the people at war with you. i mean, how could president george w. bush be expected to anticipate that that's the kind of thing that would follow his administration and completely destroy the situation in the middle east and in iraq and in the sinai and libya lebanon syria, massive migration into jordan jordanian pilots now to the point they would be burned alive, christians ranked persecuted, killed, all kinds of horrendous ways. jews ostracized, killed, who would have ever dreamed we would have an administration come in
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and take the success after the surge and turn it into the chaos it is today? . so i'll be interested, mr. speaker, in the days ahead as people seek to lead this country to find out which leaders would have gone ahead into iraq knowing the chaos they would create in the subsequent administration. with that i yield back. the speaker pro tempore: the gentleman yields back the balance of his time. does the gentleman have a motion? mr. gohmert: at this time i move that we do now hereby adjourn. the speaker pro tempore: the question is on the motion to adjourn. those in favor say aye. those opposed, no. the ayes have it. the motion is adopted. accordingly, the house stands adjourned until
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provide services for victims. later in the week, several science related bills. the new congressional directory is a handy guide to the 114th congress with color photos of every senator and house number plus contact information and twitter handles. also, district maps, a foldout map of capitol hill and a look at congressional committees, the president's cap, federal agencies and state governments. order your copy today. it is $13.95 plus shipping and handling through the online c-span store. up next, former cia deputy
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director mike morell discusses u.s. intelligence, nsa surveillance programs and the militant group isis. then hillary clinton campaigns in iowa. later, conversations with potential presidential candidates senator lindsey graham and former texas governor rick perry. >> here are a few of the book festivals we will be covering this spring. we will close out may at book expo america at newark city -- new york city. then we are lie for the chicago tribune printers room, including the three-hour live in-depth program with lawrence wright and your phone calls. that is this spring on book tv. >> former cia deputy director mike morell spoke at the
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national press club about u.s. counterterrorism efforts and the threat of isis and al qaeda. he also responded to a recent article about the killing of osama bin laden in pakistan in 2011. this is one hour. >> good morning and welcome to the national press club. i'm an and a writer with b -- editor writer with bloomberg. i will be monitoring today's newsmaker with our guest former ca jeopardy director -- cia deputy director mike morell. before i start, as i said before please set your phones to vibrate. second the format will be that i ask questions for about 30
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minutes and then i will open the floor to questions. i will give priority to reporters because they are here for a job. once the reporters have asked their questions, i will open it up to others. third, i request that you ask the question, give us your name and your affiliation. we all remember may 2, 2011, the day osama bin laden was killed in pakistan. what are some of the other cia's counterterrorism successes and failures over the last 20 my guest today mike morell is a good person to answer the question because he was probably involved with most if not all of them. mike morell is one of the country's most renown security professionals. he served as cia deputy director and twice as an acting director.
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mr. morell played a central role in this country's fight against terrorism and has over 30 years with the agency. he participated in the read and killing of bin laden in 2011. since november 2013, he has been the senior counselor at beacon global strategies llc. welcome. mike: it is great to be here. thank you. >> as i mentioned before, the question as to some of the other successes and failures of the cia and counterterrorism area. could you give us and example of a failure the cia encountered during that time? mike: there is an entire chapter in my book on pre-war iraq intelligence.
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the whole chapter in the book on pre-qwar iraq intelligence or i talk about -- where i talk about the intelligence community's failure, the failure of every intelligence service in the world that saddam had weapons of mass destruction when we subsequently learned he did not. he got rid of the programs. it was the most significant intelligence failure i have ever been involved in. i think one of the most significant intelligence failures in the history of the organization. >> talking about bin laden -- were you on the team tasked with finding him? mike: there are two aspects to it. an extensive discussion in the
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book about it. a chapter calls it no mickey mouse operation. that was the codename for this operation. there are two aspects to it. one is the intelligence piece of it which was finding him. it literally took us nine years to find him. the particular thread that led us to that compound took nine years and there are various aspects to it and we talk about all of them in the book. there is the finding him which is an intelligent story and then there is a operation itself which is obviously an intelligence and military story. i was heavily involved in the first and significantly involved in the second.
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there was an expose published saying the pakistani military and intelligence knew about the raid beforehand. any comments on that? mike: he alleges a lot of things in this london review of books. he alleges the pakistanis were keeping them prisoner at the compound. he alleges we learned about bin laden's presents from a senior pakistani walking into the embassy in islamabad and telling us that in return for $25 million. he alleges the pakistanis were aware we were going to do the raid and allowed us to do the raid. it is all rubbish.
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almost every sentence in the article is wrong. i was in the room for every discussion about this at the cia and i was in the room for every discussion about this at the white house. i was there when our guys stayed on and followed someone we believe to be bin laden's courier to his home. i was there when our guys watched the compound for months and when they said we have come to the conclusion he is there and there is no information provided us by the pakistanis or others, by the way. in the media this morning, some confidential german sources are claiming the germans provided this information. not true. i was there when the president of the u.s. decided we were not going to tell the pakistanis in advance. not because we didn't want to. there would have been nothing better for the relationship between the u.s. and pakistan than to have worked together on this. we simply could not trust the pakistani system. not the pakistani government but their system to not have leaked the information and get back to bin laden and have him
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leave the compound before the raid happened. i was there when the pakistanis learned about this and were deeply angry with us. i was sent by the president to pakistan to put the relationship back together. everything seymour hersh says is wrong. he said he got this information from a former senior intelligence official who was very close to the operation. whoever that source was was not in the room, not in any room i was in. >> not only was he a single source, he was an unnamed source. speaking about the pakistani isi.
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on a scale of one to 10, how would you rate the cia's relationship with the pakistani intelligence agency? the week. -- mike: it depends on the day of the week. of all the places i traveled when i was deputy director, i traveled to pakistan more than anywhere else. it was an extremely important relationship for the u.s. two, the pakistanis have taken more al qaeda guys off the streets than any other country in the world combined. in some ways, they are our closest counterterrorism partner. they played a very significant role. we talk about this in the great war of our time. they played a significant role in dismantling al qaeda after 9/11. when al qaeda was forced out of
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afghanistan, they went to prearranged safehouses in pakistan. once the pakistani president made a decision to work with us, they were in large part responsible for taking the senior leadership of al qaeda off the streets by capturing them after 9/11. the third point is the pakistani government does support other international terrorist groups providing safe havens to the taliban and anti-indian extremist groups. at the same time they are a great counterterrorism partner they are a counterterrorism problem. it is a schizophrenic relationship. host: would it have been helpful
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to have publicized their help in combating al qaeda? or would that have led to a shakeup in the government at some point? mike: this is a conversation that i used to have with them. i had it with the pakistani military but the broader pakistani government. i think it would have been opportunistic for them to take more credit than they took for the work that we did against al qaeda. because at the end of the day, al qaeda is as much a threat to them, if not a greater threat to them than us. host: why do you think they did
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not want their role publicized? mike: it is hard to say. one of the things you learn is there is a lot of insight into what it is like to be an intelligence analyst and officer. one of the things you learn very quickly as an intelligence analyst is it is very dangerous to speculate about people's motivations. very difficult to say here is what this person was thinking when they did x, y, or z. you learn to not speculate because you're almost always wrong. i will not answer the question because i would just be guessing. host: i would guess that the u.s. does not play a lone wolf hand in intelligence operations or analysis worldwide. what relationship do we have or what are some of the best relationships with other intelligence agencies around the world?
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mike: i will not get specific for obvious reasons, but i will say this. what you said is absolutely true. we cannot do our jobs without the cooperation and partnership with other intelligence services and we are not talking about a handful. we are talking about many relationships. a big part of my job and my travel overseas and when i was here with visitors was to maintain and enhance those relationships. very, very important for us to do our job to protect our country and help them protect their country. there are three levels to an intelligence relationship or partnership. one is the sharing of analysis.
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here is what we think, what do you think? what is most valuable is not where you agree, but what is more valuable is where you disagree. then you dive into why do we disagree and that conversation leads to and i talk in a book about how i was cia's representative to the british analytics community. those conservations about why you disagree, you lead to better understanding. the first thing is sharing of analysis. the second is sharing of raw intelligence. we collect intelligence, they collect intelligence. the second level is the exchanging of the raw information. that requires a little more
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trust than the first level. the third level of partnership is working together to collect information. cooperation on operations takes the most trust. these relationships are built on trust. these relationships are not only a tool for intelligence and a tool for security, but they are a strategic foreign-policy tool for the president of the united states. i tell some really interesting stories in the book about my interactions with the former head of the egyptian intelligence service and the former head of the libyan intelligence service where the president specifically tasked to achieve a goal. he uses the relationships a lot
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to further the foreign interest of u.s. host: speaking of libya, a two-part question. is our intelligence good, fair bad in libya? if it is bad, is that because of the lack of intelligence assets in libya? mr. morell: i don't know what it is today. i have been gone for a year and a half so i don't know. after the fall of the libyan government, the libyan military intelligence service fell apart. libya no longer had the capability to deal with extremists inside the border. extremism started to flourish. as bad as qaddafi was with human rights, the one thing he did
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effectively was keep al qaeda out of libya. he worked closely with us on that. i had been to libya prior to the fall of the government. one of the big jobs the cia had was to monitor inside libya with regard to extremism. one of the stories i talk about in the book is we were monitoring very effectively the rise of extremists in eastern libya in general and in benghazi and in particular reporting that to the administration and congress. i think this is a success story in terms of us watching very closely what these extremists, some of them with connections to al qaeda, were doing in eastern libya.
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host: you mentioned benghazi. embassy happen? -- why did the attack on the embassy happen? did we know about it beforehand? was there a way we could have prevented that attack? mr. morell: no, we did not know about it beforehand. there was absolutely no intelligence to suggest that folks are going to attack that night. and attack the way they did. the only way it could have been prevented i think would have been to have battlefield kind of intelligence.
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what i mean is to saturate the region with intelligence collection in a force protection kind of way. wherever there are u.s. troops in the world, there is a huge intelligence footprint around them in order to protect them. you are picking up everything from a signals perspective and human perspective. i think the only way to have avoided benghazi would to have that kind of footprint on top of them. we have to think that about going forward because the real lesson about benghazi is how do we protect american diplomats? how do we protect american servicemen and women overseas moving forward in what is a very very dangerous world? host: abu saif who was
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supposedly isis's oil minister was killed recently. based on what you know, if anything, do you think he was a very significant target for us to take out? mr. morell: a couple of thoughts. a very significant target. a guy who played a significant role in advancing the interests of isis. a guy who was very close to al baghdadi, one of his senior advisers. a very important person to remove from the battlefield. there are some real positives here. one is taking him away from the fight. two is all of the intelligence that was gained here. turns out not only he was
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working for isis, but his wife was also working for isis. it would have been better to capture him than to kill him so that we could have debriefed him and got additional intelligence. he died in the firefight, but she did not. she is being debriefed in iraq. the significant take of computers and documents are all going to give the u.s. intelligence community and our allies insight into the organization. insight into how it is structured. insight into how it is run. insight into how it is managed. it will better enable us to attack it. the third, and perhaps the most important, is the u.s. flying into syria, putting troops on the ground, and killing one
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senior isis person and grabbing another and grabbing a bunch of intelligence sends a message. there are a handful of what i consider to be important messages in the great war of our time. one of the most important messages is that you have to put pressure on the senior leadership of the groups. when you put pressure, you get them worrying more about their own security than about doing their job attacking us and taking territory and setting up the caliphate. the more pressure you put on them, the more you put them on the back heels, the more you make it difficult for them to plan and do their business. the psychological effect on them, particularly if we follow this up by taking additional senior guys off the battlefield is very positive. host: you mentioned isis.
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there are other terrorist groups in the middle east. al-shabaab in somalia. other groups in yemen. there are groups out there that we should be aware of and we should combat or we could have another 9/11 type of situation. could you mention some of the ones, and i would like to focus on two particular geographic areas. one is the middle east and two is east and southern asia. mr. morell: great question. let me start with a big picture here. in this war that i write about we have had a couple of significant victories, but so have they. our significant victories have been the protection of the home for them.
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despite significant effort on the part of al qaeda, no successful attack -- we had some lone-wolf attacks, but no directed attack by an outside group since 9/11. remarkable success despite effort after effort on their part. the second is the degradation, near decimation, near defeat, of the al qaeda senior leadership in the border areas of afghanistan and pakistan. the senior leadership that brought that tragedy to the u.s. on 9/11. those are our two great successes. their great success has been the spread of ideology across a huge geographic area from northern nigeria in west africa to other parts of africa into yemen syria, iraq, south asia,
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afghanistan, pakistan, india bangladesh. a huge geographic spread. that is one of the reasons we call this the great war of our time. specifically, this is a very important question because the focus on isis, there is a couple of significant threats from isis. probably the most important right now is to the stability of the entire middle east. isis threatens the territorial integrity of syria, iraq, and the potential for spillover to the rest of the region. that is the most important threat from isis right now. the second threat is the radicalization of young men and
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women in western europe, canada, australia responsible for the attacks recently. if they are allowed to have safe havens in iraq and syria and they will eventually reach out and attack us, they have told us that. they have told us they will do that just like bin laden said prior to 9/11. coming back to your question despite the significance or from isis, it is not the most significant threat to the homeland today. the most significant threat still comes from al qaeda and
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three al qaeda groups in particular. top of the list is al qaeda in the arabian peninsula in yemen. the last three attempted attacks against the u.s. were by al qaeda in yemen. christmas day bomber in 2009 kerry the printer cartridge that almost brought down in airliner on christmas day. the printer cartridge plot which was designed to bring down multiple cargo planes like putting a very sophisticated explosive device into a cartridge and into a printer. that was foiled at the last moment. then, the attempt to bring down an airliner with a suicide bomber. they have that capability. they have the capability to bring down an airliner in the united states of america tomorrow. i would not be surprised by that. al qaeda in yemen. the core is on group. which is part of the group in
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syria. it is associated with the al qaeda senior leadership in pakistan. it is a group of operatives that someone here he -- zawahiri. they have the external operations arm. they are attempting to attack western europe and the united states. they are a greater threat, a direct threat than isis. third, the al qaeda senior leadership, although significantly graded in afghanistan -- significantly degraded in afghanistan and pakistan still represent a significant threat. mr. hill: two more questions. in the group that you mentioned, you did not mention al qaeda in
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bogra. mr. morrell: they are a local threat. they are not yet a threat outside of the region. they could easily become a threat outside of the region. a couple of years ago, the french became so concerned that they were becoming a threat to france that the french military went into molly -- mali and took back a significant portion of territory. thereby weakening them considerably. could they become a threat someday? absolutely. are they right now outside of the region? no. mr. hill: why has isis in so successful in getting foreigners to calm and fight for them? did we ever hear this with al qaeda at al qaeda had 40,000 foreigners come to fight for them? why has isis enabled to be so
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successful? could we have a future group that could be even more successful? mr. morrell: great question. there is a history. a history for foreigners going to fight for al qaeda. for example, a rock. -- iraq. after the 2003 invasion, al qaeda stands up to fight the u.s. occupation. a lot of foreigners flow into iraq to fight for al qaeda. there is a history there. we have never seen it in the kind of numbers that we are seeing now. the flow remains significant. we may have slowed it a little bit but the flow of foreigners into iraq and syria to fight for isis is still significant.
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they have the most sophisticated narrative, social media propaganda than i have already seen -- that i have ever seen. i talk about it being madison avenue style quality. their narrative is powerful. their narrative is that the west, the united states, the modern world is a significant threat to their religion. that they have an answer to that threat to their religion, which is the establishment of this caliphate, and that they are being attacked as they try to establish this caliphate. they are being attacked by the united states other western nations. and by these apostate regimes in the region. and because they are being attacked as they try to set up this caliphate to protect their religion, they need support.
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and they need support in two ways. people coming to fight with them and people to stand up and attack. it's a pretty powerful narrative. we don't really have a great counter narrative. not because we are not doing our job, but because it's really hard to have a counter narrative in a conversation about a religion where we have absolutely no credibility. we really need the leaders of muslim countries, we need leading muslim clerics, we need muslim teachers to have this dialogue in those countries themselves. that is where it has to take place. one of the things i think the president has done well is to raise this issue in his society. and start to have a conversation with his own people about this. that's where it has to take place.
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host: his book is "the great war of our time, the cia's fight against terrorism from al qaeda to isis." i would like to open the floor to questions. >> there is a growing skepticism about whether the united states is serious about fighting terrorism -- isis, or isil, or al qaeda. from time to time, there are selective attacks like in syria. but how is al qaeda able to move freely in the large areas with all the surveillance and not detected and attack while it is
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moving? when other aspects of this skepticism is you mentioned al qaeda in yemen and in the peninsula. the united states is assisting saudi arabia in attacking the people who are fighting al qaeda in yemen. this group and the yemeni army were fighting al qaeda. that would allow al qaeda to expand and take more. how can you say this is an effective way or a serious way of attacking? one last thing about the cia. this is a military campaign or a cia campaign? which is more effective to conduct operations against terrorists? mr. morell: thank you for the question.
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here's what i would say. number one, there's a chapter in the book on the arab spring. that the title of the chapter is -- al qaeda spring. the arab spring was a boon to al qaeda. a boon to al qaeda. why? two reasons. one is it left some countries unable to deal with extremism inside their own borders. this is what i was talking about earlier with regard to libya. gadhafi was able to deal with al qaeda inside his borders. the new libyan government was not capable. they wanted to. i had many conversations with them. they didn't have the capability. when you don't have -- second.
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it left the arab spring -- it also left some countries unwilling to deal with al qaeda inside their borders. the best example is egypt under president morsi. the guys i worked with in egypt still had the capability to deal with al qaeda, but they no longer believed they had the political cover to do their job. as a result, the pressure was taken off of al qaeda. in egypt and guess what? al qaeda came back to egypt for the first time in 25 years. and they are still there. in both of these, your inability to deal with extremism inside
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your borders, or your unwillingness to deal with extremism inside your borders gives terrorist groups safe haven. and they thrive on safe haven. and when you have safe haven it's really tough to get at them. one of the things you absolutely need to be able to deal with these groups and keep pressure on them is intelligence. this is an intelligence war. i don't mean from the aspect of fighting it, i mean from the intelligence perspective. you can't understand these guys' capabilities, you can't understand their plans and intentions, you can't understand their vulnerabilities, you can't understand where they are without first-rate intelligence. and we are good at this, but it takes time. you can't just have isis all of a sudden do a blitzkrieg across iraq and then tomorrow say where is the intelligence on where these guys are?
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it takes a tremendous amount of time and effort to put together the intelligence you need. the other thing i will say is that the middle east is a complicated place. it's incredibly complicated. anyone who tells you they know what the middle east is going to look like a year from now or five years from now is lying or don't know what they talk about. there's a bunch of different dynamics going on in the middle east. one of the dynamics is this cold war, i think about it as a cold war, this cold war/proxy war going on between iran on one hand and the gulf arab states, on the other. and that war gets in the way sometimes of fighting the war against these terrorists. syria is an incredibly good
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example of that. because if you look at syria from one perspective, if you look at syria from one perspective, it's a war between a secular leader, assad, and al qaeda and isis. so who should we be supporting in that war? assad. from another perspective, it's a proxy war between iran and saudi arabia. who should we be supporting in that war? i think saudi arabia. you have two different perspectives pointing you in different directions on what we think they should do. yemen is a bit like that. there's a proxy war going on in yemen between saudi arabia and iran. iranians are supporting the one side. the saudis are supporting the president, who was a very effective partner of the united states against al qaeda. al qaeda is benefiting from the chaos in yemen.
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it's not benefiting from the fact that the president was in charge of the place. he was very effective against al qaeda. they are benefiting from the chaos that is there. and that goes back to the original point, these groups always benefit from political instabilities and chaos. it's very difficult to get your arms around. i don't know if that answers your question, but it's a start. >> can i follow-up about the issue of syria, you didn't address that, whether that criticism of the united states being selective and being serious, and also about the issue of the cia versus the military. this is an operation you mentioned. mr. morell: i'm going to purposely not answer the second question, but i will answer the syria question. i'm pretty confident, despite
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the loss of ramadi, i'm pretty confident that in enough time, iraq and the coalition will push back isis in iraq. there will be ups and downs in this fight. and ramadi is a great example of 's a down. but the fact is the coalition has taken back 25% of the territory that isis first took. so the coalition is actually not doing bad. i'm pretty confident that given time, given a mixture of airstrikes and kurds, shia militia, and retraining of iraqi security forces, i'm pretty confident that the strategy, the president strategy in iraq is going to work. i will be honest with you, i am less confidence about our strategy in syria. the strategy in syria is to train and equip moderate
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opposition guys in syria to take on isis in syria. to be the ground force, to go with the airpower and be the ground force that takes back that territory from isis in syria. there is not too many moderate opposition guys left, because many of them have joined al nusra because they were taking the fight to assad more effectively than a moderate opposition was. a lot of them have abandoned ship on to fights for either al nusra or isis. i don't think our plans -- our plans are not robust enough. you would have to train i think tens of thousands of moderate opposition guys a year in order to effectively take on isis in syria. i'm not sure we've got syria right yet. and i'm not sitting here like i have the answer to this question. it is really hard. i have some confidence in iraq
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mr. morell: i'm not acknowledging it because it's not true. it's a great miss that the bush white house or hard-liners in the bush of administration pushed the central intelligence agency the u.s. intelligence community and every other communions -- intelligence source of this issue to believe that saddam hussein had weapons of mass destruction. all they have to do is tell you this. the cia believed that saddam had weapons of mass destruction programmed long before george bush ever came to office. we were telling bill clinton that. >> one would not be following iraq to say the clinton administration never falsified information on iraq as well. in september 2002, when he was at a news conference -- this is just one example. there was a report saying that iraq was six month away from developing a weapon, i don't know how much more evidence we need. and then they said there is no such report, that was just an honest mistake. mr. morell: you would have to ask him. the only thing i can tell you is what we were telling them at the time. that's the only thing i can tell you. >> you, among other things, at
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your time of the cia had a role in zero dark 30, which glorifies the use of torture to gain quote unquote intelligence. i want to ask you about this case, who politics indicate was tortured by the egyptian authorities at our behest. mr. morell: your premise is wrong. >> and you can say that if you like. who was tortured in order to say that iraq and al qaeda were related. this is the latest in a report on torture. among other places. contrary to the mythology that torture breeds good intelligence or that it's immoral, and actually breeds intentionally useful but false information. mr. morell: i'm going to go back to your first comment about cia's enhanced interrogation techniques. you call it torture.
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i want to challenge that premise right off the bat. when the central intelligence agency used enhanced interrogation techniques to get information from al qaeda detainees, the justice department of united states of america on multiple occasions said it was legal, that it wasn't torture. so for you to call it torture is you calling my officers torturers. and the justice department of united states of america said they were not. so i'm going to defend my officers to my last breath, and people calling them torturers. i'm going to challenge your premise that the egyptians tortured libya our behest. not true. we never asked the egyptians to torture. what is your evidence for that?
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host: let him give you that evidence off-line. we have other people who want to ask questions. >> andrew craig, editor of the justice integrity project and also an author. my question goes into the past because we can't really know what happened last week, but we can look at the past. there are pictures, widely circulated of senator mccain meeting some people about two years ago, some alleged that one is al-baghdadi. senator mccain has denied that saying essentially that he didn't meet with isis. who did he meet with? mr. morell: i have no idea. >> two more. two of the greatest crimes in the last 55 years are widely considered 9/11 and the jfk assassination.
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the cia has thwarted release of documents on both of those including the 28 pages of who funded 9/11 as well as the remaining documents that were supposed to be released under the jfk act. why is the cia fighting release of these critical documents? mr. morell: i don't know the specifics, but i will tell you a personal view. my personal view is that there is more room for the central intelligence agency and it senior leadership to talk to the public about what the cia does there is more room for us to release documents, is resource intensive. it's not zero cost. we have other things to do. so you have to balance these things. i think there is more room for us to put more out there
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because i do think it's very important, very important in a democracy, particularly for secret intelligence organizations to have as much conversations with the public as a can possibly have. just we don't get these misperceptions we're talking about here. host: gentleman in the back and then the woman the front. could you come to the middle? >> i am from the italian media. my question is about the syrian al nusra. is this affecting your action against al nusra? israelis signed with the sunni against the shia. mr. morell: i'm not aware of anything that the israelis are doing that has made our life more difficult vis-a-vis al nusra and isis. i'm just not aware of anything. >> i'm with bloomberg news, i've read your book really closely. how significant a setback is it for ramadi?
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mr. morell: good question. going back to what i said earlier, there are going to be ups and downs in this war. they're going to be battles one -- won and battles lost. this is a battle lost come a significant battle lost. going back to what i said earlier, i do think that when you look at the bigger context taken back to 5% of the territory that they took in their blitzkrieg, it looks pretty good. i do have confidence that the strategy that we have in place is eventually going to win back iraq. >> one of the things you criticize were the decision taken by the cpa -- we don't know. but the whole sunni-shia tensions that have an going on there for decades, is ramadi somewhat of a product of this issue?
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all be it 13 years later. and the inability to transcend shia and sunni divides. mr. morell: absolutely. here's the story of the rise of isis. very quickly. when we left the country at the end of 2011, al qaeda and iraq was really at its nadir. when we left, two things happened. the first thing that happened was the military pressure was reduced significantly on aqi. the military was assisting the iraqis and keeping pressure on them. they benefited from that.
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the other thing they benefited from were the policies of the former prime minister. the moves against sunnis, the significant disenfranchisement of sunnis, driving moderate sunnis into the arms of aqi. and also benefited aqi. then they go across the border into syria and change their name. isis is aqi by different name. they go across the border they benefit from recruits, weapons assad's stockpiles. they benefit from the money. they become a significant organization. part of the story is the politics of iraq. no doubt about it. >> so you are saying the invasion of iraq where you said there was no imminent threat was in retrospect setting the stage for the rise of al qaeda and isil? mr. morell: there's no doubt that the u.s. occupation of iraq created al qaeda in iraq.
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and had al qaeda the organization kind of throw all of its resources into iraq to take on another u.s. occupation in the region. no doubt about that. but we also beat them back. and one of the things i try to do in this book is not judge previous decisions as right or wrong. so i don't say president bush's decision to invade iraq was the right thing with the wrong thing. i don't. i don't say that enhanced a interrogation was the right thing or the wrong thing. what i try to do in both those cases is, and a lot of detail in the great war of our time is to paint the context of the times. to paint the context in which president bush made the decision on iraq, to paint the context in which george tenant, condi rice and the president made the decision on it has to
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interrogation techniques. to really important for people to understand the context. it's very easy to look back with 20/20 hindsight is of a good thing or bad thing. this is the information base that we have, some of its right, for some of its wrong in retrospect. you have to make a call. that's what i tried to do in the book, try to put people into the shoes of these guys as they make these extreme a tough decisions. >> a few reports have come out a big one from poland on the polish governments having to pay detainees about a quarter million dollars in reparations for being held at cia transferring interrogation sites. there also been reparations demanded of the macedonian
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government's, the former president of romania came out and said that he regretted allowing the cia to use territory this country to interrogate detainees. what is your response to this? will there be any recourse by the cia, by the united states government? as these other countries, under pressure to pay reparations, come under pressure from europeans and human rights courts. mr. morell: i'm not going to talk about any specific cases for obvious reasons. countries where we may have or may have not held detainees. but it will say this -- the countries that supported this program -- the leadership of those countries was aware. it wasn't some rogue operation
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inside the borders of these countries. they did so, they did so because they thought the mission of protecting united states and the west and their own countries was an important one. and because they thought that we'll be able to keep all of the secret, they wanted our discretion, they wanted our thanks. and we were not able to deliver. on the discretion part. >> two questions. the first one -- host: give us your name? >> stephen nelson. i wonder if you could clarify how many e-mails and records should be collected in the mission of antiterrorism.
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and could you speak in general terms what surveillance you think is currently being done -- julian assange and edward snowden. mr. morell: second question, i have no idea. the first question, i obviously believe that security is very important, i wouldn't have spent 33 years of the central intelligence agency i didn't. i also believe that privacy and civil liberties of americans is extremely important. i am a supporter of the telephone metadata program. it fills important gaps that were there before 9/11. i believe -- i can't prove this. i can't put a lot of evidence on the table to show this. but i believe that if the program been in place prior to 9/11, we might have seen some of the communication between the 9/11 hijackers.
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and maybe that would have allowed us to disrupt it, maybe not. we just don't know. but it was put in place specifically to fill a gap. i think it should remain. let's start with a telephone metadata program first. i think it should remain, and in some ways i think it should be strengthened because it doesn't include all phone calls made in the united states. it doesn't include metadata from e-mails. if there is an al qaeda cell in the united states, communicating with each other via e-mail, we wouldn't see it. we would not see it. if there was another 9/11, and they were communicating via e-mail, the american people would say why were you not monitoring? i think it should be strengthened. i also think that -- i was on the review group on snowden.
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the whole chapter in the great war of our time on this. we recommended that the program be kept would be reformed. the reforms that we recommended -- that the government not hold the data. and we recommended that the government be required to get a court or every time they wanted to query the data. not just be able to query the data anytime they wanted under one broad portal. so those of the reforms we recommended. those reforms were accepted by president obama. that is what the obama administration is pushing on the hill. it's essentially the bill that was passed through the house. i'm a supporter of the bill. and i think that the reform i'm talking about still allow us to query the data and we need to, for the purposes we need to, to see whether terrorists are talking to each other.
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begins is that capability, and also protects privacy and civil liberties at the same time. because i agree that kind of data in the hands of the government creates the potential for abuse. there was no abuse, we found no abusive nsa in this program. but it does create the potential for abuse and that's why we recommended what we did. i stand behind my recommendation the report. host: i'm going to take the moderators prerogative and asked the last questions. first, are there any terrorist groups in east/south asia that the cia should be looking at closely? mr. morell: i define south asia broadly. al qaeda in the tribal areas of pakistan, al qaeda in afghanistan, al qaeda increasingly getting foothold in bangladesh and india. that's a not well understood phenomenon.
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the intelligence committee is watching it closely. but it's not well understood outside the government. host: the defense department originally reese down to silicon valley to help it -- reached out to silicon valley to help them with their military systems. is there lessons the cia could take from that? mr. morell: we actually way ahead of the defense department. when george tenant was the director of cia, he created a not-for-profit private entity whose job is -- this is all public information. the job is to invest seed money in startups in which he could tell believes there is a technology that will be of use to the intelligence community and will be commercially viable
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so that the company will survive and continue to enhance the technology and service it. they have been incredibly successful over the years, 70% of its investments have resulted in products coming back to the intelligence community. it's one of the largest hedge funds now in silicon valley. it has been incredibly successful in bringing technology into cia and the intelligence committee. host with that, i would like to : thank mr. morell for his insightful discussion. with that, this proceeding is closed. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [indiscernible]
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>> hillary clinton campaigned in iowa today. that is next on c-span. then come possible presidential candidate senator lindsey graham talks about middle east instability and the militant group isis. later, a conversation with rick perry. the head of the faa and the president of the national air traffic control association will talk about efforts to modernize the air traffic control system. that is part of a reauthorization hearing on federal aviation administration programs. watch live coverage tomorrow beginning at 10:00 a.m. eastern on c-span three. later also on c-span three civil rights and law enforcement officials will testify about the use of police body cameras. that is live from a senate
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judiciary subcommittee on crime and terrorism at 2:30 eastern. hillary clinton spoke to supporters in mason city, iowa. she spoke about jobs and the economy. this is 30 minutes. [applause] >> thank you, thank you, everyone. you can be seated. we are so thrilled to have each and every one of you here but even more excited to have what i consider to be the person that is most ready for leading our nation because she has been tried, she's been tested. i've been telling people earlier this morning there's no other human being on the planet that has the resume that hillary rodham clinton has. [applause]
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>> before i introduce our hillary campaign staffer who's now living with us here in mason city, i want to welcome a few of the very important folks that do the day-to-day democratic business here in the greater north iowa area. and we have with us a list of people. as i call your name, would you kind of hold up your hand and step forward? so madam secretary can see you. and then hold your applause to the end of the list, if you would. and we'll let you acknowledge those folks. so if you're sitting, maybe stand. i'd like to introduce john columbo, chair of the franklin county democrats. he's below the light over there. hold your applause. state senator amanda reagan, our state senator from mason city district. d.o. kohning, former state
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representative from st. ansgor. and jay err daul, is he in the house? he had something come up i know and couldn't be here. phil doherty, our county supervisor. phil's right over here in the blue shirt. alex kund, councilman at large for the mason city council. pat right, our saragota county treasurer. and colleen pierce, our democratic saragota county reporter. we have another representative todd pritchard from the state of iowa. we also have with us two folks that have welcomed sarah to the community. and they're good friends of mine. and we were going to be gone for ten days when sarah landed and i says joanne, can you help me out, we've got a young lady coming working for hillary
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clinton and we need a place for her to stay and those two people who stepped up were jo ann hardy right here behind me and her husband russ hardy. there in the blue jacket. so thank you very much. a round of applause. [applause] about a month ago a young lady gave me a call and she goes hi my name's sarah, can i custom -- come talk to you? and i said sure, we talk to everybody. we're a welcoming household. come ahead. we sat on this white sofa that usually sits in a circular fashion here in the living room, and she told me about somebody she really was excited about and that she was coming here to live and start work. so it gives me great pleasure to turn the microphone over to our very own sarah marino. [applause] sarah: good afternoon.
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thank you all so much for being here today. for those of you i haven't yet met, as gene said, i'm sarah marino. and i am the organizer here in serogordo county. i also cover franklin floyd, , wikashee, howard, and mitchell counties. i think i got them all. i'll take a couple more if you want. as many of you know i'm new to iowa. i'm originally from bedford, new york. just a few miles away from chappaqua where our special guest here today lives. but i'm living right here in mason city, where everyone has been so welcoming and helpful. so thank you so much to awful -- all of you who have made it very easy to call north iowa my new home. so i'm involved with this campaign because i know that secretary clinton has been a fighter for american families and for women like my mom, my friends, my cousins, my aunts, my sister. my little sister maggie is 18. she's about to graduate from
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high school in a month, and she's heading off to college to marketing. and i've always been so impressed by her dedication and her drive to the subject that she loves. and i'm really excited to see the glass ceiling i know my sister is going to break not too long from now in her field. so i'm here to fight for her because she deserves, as she starts her career, to be paid the same as her male colleagues. [applause] and i am so proud to be working for a champion for young women like maggie. for that and many, many other reasons, i am so thrilled and proud to be here. but to build up this campaign we need the support and the input of each and every one of you in this room. we need your friends, your family, your neighbors, your co-workers to get involved to make this caucus a success. we've been starting to have community events like house parties, coffee chats, book
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clubs, pot lucks all across the state just to start the conversation and opiate dialogue about this campaign. and if you haven't already please fill out one of these commit to caucus cards saying you'll commit to caucus on february 1st for hillary. and if you have already filled one out please take one hoenl, have a friend fill it out because we're working to identify supporters all across iowa and we need your help. and those of you in this rjaz are the most equipped to help us identify support all across the state. you an also join us online. we have our hillary for iowa facebook page and we also have local facebook groups. so you can join northeast central iowa for hillary and northwest central iowa for hillary. and you can follow me on twitter. it's @smarino92. to stay updated. but of course you all aren't here to hear from me. so with that i am so honored to introduce our candidate, former senator, first lady, secretary
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of state hillary clinton. [applause] hillary clinton: thank you. wow. thank you. i am thrilled to be here with all of you. sarah, that was excellent. i thank you so much. and i hope you'll get to know sarah and spend time with her and help her as she works so hard between now and february 1st. and dean and gary, thank you for welcoming us to your beautiful home what a delight it is to be here with you. somebody asked me the other day, well, you know, you're going to these events where you're taking time to actually talk and listen to people, is that really what you're going to do?
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and i said, yes, it is. because not only do i learn a lot but i also feel like it's the best way to make those connections that will not o'ly give me a firm foundation in the caucus here in iowa or in a primary in new hampshire because it really is about people to people connections if we're really talking about what we want to do, but it will also i need to be an even better president. and i just had another example of that. you may know that gary's a radiologist, and right before we came in we w his work. he's an expert in breast cancer. and i aa)q" him about the mammography recommendation that's at least the women in the room i'm sure have seen over the last several years, and he was giving me some really important insight into the commission that made those recommendations and
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his expert opinion about them. i'm so grateful to you about that because it's the kind of discussion you can't have unless you have an opportunity to talk and listen with people. i want to thank all of you for i'm delighted to have this chance to talk with you. i think what we're going to do is i'll say a few words about the campaign and what i want to achieve and then we'll have a chance to talk individually and i'll be able to hear from each and every one of you. i have been incredibly impressed over the last several years at how hard the american people have worked to pull ourselves out of the great recession. people have made sacrifices. people have lost jobs. they've lost houses. they lost the chance to finish or go on with their education.
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and they did everything they could think of to do to get back on their feet. and i'm so relieved that as i travel around the country and talk with people there is a sense that we are on our feet. we're not running yet but we are on our feet. and we can see the changes that are happening in people's lives and put them in a context as to where we go from here now as a country. i'm very grateful to president obama for the hard decisions he made when he inherited the mess he inherited when he became president in 2009. [applause] and i know that he and i and everyone who was in his administration realizes that unless the american family and the american worker is strong everything we want to see happen for our country is going to be much more difficult. and so i come to this campaign committed to being a champion for americans and american
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families. that's what my work has been throughout my entire adult life. starting with my first job out of law school when i went to work for the children's defense fund. all the way through to the work that i did as secretary of state promoting women's rights promoting the rights of people who would otherwise be marge marginalized or left on the sidelines. and i know that although we have to -- it's still hard to imagine exactly how we're going to get to the point where people are not just getting by but getting ahead and staying ahead. because look, the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top. we know that. and so we have to be especially focused on how we're going to bring about the changes that will ignite opportunity for everyone willing to work hard
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for it again. so when i look at where we are as a nation and where we need to be, i see four big challenges that we have to take on together. and there are going to be fights. because if they were easy they would already be done. so i will posit that right now. number one, we have to build the economy of tomorrow, not yesterday. it needs to be innovative. it needs to be sustainable. it needs to be producing good jobs with rising wages. we need to get back into the habit of actually rewarding workers with increases in their paychecks for the increases in productivity and profitability that they have helped to bring about. [applause] warren buffett has said, it but so have a lot of other people. there's something wrong when the
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average american ceo makes 300 times more than the typical american worker. or when hedge fund managers themselves make more and pay less in taxes than nurses and truck drivers. in fact, i heard a statistic the other day that really made a big impact on me, that the top 25 hedge fund managers together made more money than all the kindergarten teachers in america. and when you think about value what it is that's going to get us moving again, i think kindergarten teachers are really important. [applause] [laughter] and we've got to make a claim on becoming the 21st century clean energy superpower. iowa has really helped us. the rfs, the renewable fuel standard, and a lot of the
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investments that have been made here has been one of the reasons why we have made some real progress but not near enough. and other countries are going to seize that title unless we do what we have to. it's also imperative that we give people the tools through education and job training and skills not just in rhetoric but in reality. so they can make the most of their own lives. and for me that starts at the very beginning. i have been a child advocate and a child development proponent for my entire adult life because it's what i really care about what i believe in. and i think we have to start before kindergarten. we have to have universal prek but we also have to do more to reach out to families so they know the tools they should use to be their children's first teachers. we've got this new granddaughter who is unbelievable. we were with her this weekend.
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you know, we go and just stare at her. i mean, that's what -- it's wonderful and silly at the same time. but we also read to her. here she is 7 1/2 months old we're reading and reading and reading. and i imagine among her first words will be "enough with the reading" because between her mom and her dad and bill and i we're constantly doing that. but we're doing it not only because we love to do it and we love to see her begin to reach her hands out and grab onto the books, we're doing it because we know that it aids her brain development. that has been one of the great discoveries with brain research in the last couple of decades. we increasingly can see what happens when you are literally feeding the brain as well as the body of these infants and then the babies and the toddlers.
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that will help them be better prepared when they actually end up in kindergarten, and it will begin to close the achievement gap. because you know, we're going to do everything we can for our granddaughter. charlotte will get every opportunity we can possibly imagine. but what kind of country will she grow up in? and what kind of world will she enter? and what will happen to all of the other infants, babies, toddlers and children in our country today? so we have to look at education from the very beginning. then we have to make sure we are doing all we can to empower our teachers, to make sure that they have the support of parents so that they can do the job they have been trained to do to help prepare our kids. and then we've got to make sure that college is affordable. and that cannot happen at the rate we're going unless we change the way we fund college education for young people who wish to have that experience. many of us in this room i bet, as i did, borrowed money to go to college. but then we were able to pay it back because it wasn't such an overwhelming burden as it has become now. the average student in iowa
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graduates with $30,000 in debt and that then makes it very difficult for them to start a business or buy a new home or even get married, as one young man told me not so long ago. so we have to deal with the indebtedness to try to move toward making college as debt-free as possible. i'm 100% behind president obama's proposal for free community college. we've got to try to get that through, and then we've got to try to do everything we can to make college available and affordable to all of our young people. [applause] you know, when you think about our economy today, it is absolutely linked to education. it is also linked to strong families and strong communities. and that's our second challenge.
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because a lot of families and communities have been under tremendous strain. one of the biggest stresses in anybody's life is health care. i will fight to protect the affordable care act, and i will work to make the changes that are required. [applause] we are really now in a different world. 16 million people who didn't have health insurance who now do. we have to do everything we can to make sure that medicare is as available and protected and affordable as possible. and we have to be sure that where there are changes that can be made we try to find ways to work across the aisle to make them. i don't hear my friends on the other side of the aisle talking as much as they used to about getting rid of the affordable care act. i think the reason is because there are a lot of people that they may actually be encountering from time to time who have been helped. and we need to make sure to make the argument over and over again that, what will you do if you say to people we're going to take away the health care we
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finally have been able to provide for you? that is just unacceptable. but there are some problems. one of the problems, and i heard about this in iowa, is what happens when a 26-year-old becomes a 27-year-old and is no longer eligible to be on his or her parents' policy? that was one of the best changes in the affordable care act. and the fact is that a lot of young people aren't making the income they need yet to be able to afford their own health care. so we have to look out to see what we'll be able to do to help them. there are two issues that fall into this category that are huge strains on families. and i heard about them first. i heard first in davenport, and i heard about it all across the state until i got to council bluffs. one is the drug epidemic. meth, pills in iowa. and then i got to new hampshire. and at my very first coffee shop
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meeting i heard about the heroin epidemiic in new hampshire. in the past year i've been told reliably we've had more people die of drug overdoses in america than automobile accidents for the first time in our history. this is tearing families apart but it is below the surface. people aren't talking about it because it's something that is hard to deal with. i also heard a lot about untreated mental health problems. and so many communities, so many states turning their backs on people with mental health problems. facilities are being closed. even though we now require there to be treatment in the affordable care act, there's not enough available treatment. not enough resources. the other day i was in
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california at an event, and i just said what i said. i said, you know, mental health is not being treated. we claim we're now going to be able to help people with their health care problems but if we don't help with mental health we're leaving out a huge number of people. and a young woman came up to me and asked me a question. she said did you know we're having all these suicides in my high school? i said no, i didn't know. she said we've had four young people kill themselves in the last month. then i was in new york at an event this past week. said the same thing i said to you. i was visiting with people. and a woman came up to me and she goes, thank you for mentioning mental health. we have gone in the last six months to four funerals of friends of my children who have killed themselves. i have to tell you when i start running, when i started thinking about this campaign, i did not believe i would be standing in your living room talking about the drug abuse problem, the
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mental health problem, and the suicide problem. but i'm now convinced i have to talk about it. i have to do everything i can in this campaign to raise it, to convinced i have to talk about it. i have to do everything i can in this campaign to raise it, to end the stigma against talking about it. [applause] and we also have a challenge that affects everything we do, and that is to fix our dysfunctional political system, and that underlies everything that we can possibly hope to get done. i'm very committed to meeting with anybody, going to have any conversation, to try to find common ground. but we also have to stand our ground, and we have to try to figure out how we're going to get people to work with us for the betterment of our country, the betterment of people who
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need a good, positive support system. whether it be health care or aide for college or anything else. we also have to address the unaccountable dark money in politics. i think the supreme court made a grave error with its citizens united decision, and i will do everything i can do to appoint supreme court justices who will protect the right to vote and not the right of billionaires to buy elections. [applause] and you know, i think it's starting with a lot of legal experts. some of them think there may be way to get legislation through that will enable us to regulate this kind of use of money in our political system, which is so corruptive and corrosive, but others agree with former justice
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john paul stevens, who recently wrote a book in which he said it's going to take a constitutional amendment. i will work for that if that's the only way to fix this problem, because we cannot continue with the kind of fault on our democracy, on voting rights, and on the opportunity for us to know where the money is coming from that influences our political system. now, we have challenges around the world. as i was coming through the garage, there's a tv that dean and gary have, and they were talking about isis in iraq. we have threats that we know of that we can begin to try to figure out how to best address. it's not just dictators, also disease, climate change, which i think global warming is a threat to us. but we have to be confident and
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strong in understanding that there are many ways to approach the problems that america will be confronting in the world, and we must do so in cooperation with our friends our allies, our fellow democracies around the world. i am convinced that the 21st century can once again be a century in which the united states leads and helps to set the values and the standards. but we have to have an agreement, first of all, foremost, with our own country and in our own congress, about how to do that. i was outraged and said at the time that when a group of republican senators sent a letter to the iatola of iran, it essentially criticizing the actions of the president of the united states, i don't care what party you are, we have one president, and we should stand behind that president when he's trying to work out very difficult problems. [applause]
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so i know there are a lot of hard choices ahead of us. i've wrote a book called "hard choices." there it is. there it is. i'll sign that for you. but i think we're more than up to it. you know i am a confident optimist about where america's future lies. that doesn't mean i'm not aware of how difficult it is. i'm going into this race with my eyes wide open about how hard it is to be the president of the united states. i have a little experience about that, and i have to tell you, i find it, you know, very reassuring, because i do have that experience to know what's possible and how best to proceed. but i also know that we are living in an incredibly complicated time in american history. it is not a time for easy answers or glib answers or one-liners or applause lines.
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those are all great. that's part of campaigning. but at the end of the day, we need a president who has both the experience and the understanding to deal with the complexity of the problems that we face. and i appreciate what both dean and sarah said about the experiences that i have been privileged to have during the last decade. i really believe that i can go into that office on the very first day and begin to do what is required. so i look forward to visiting with each and every one of you. i look forward to working with you, not only as we move toward the caucuses. i would be honored to have your support on february 1st and then i would need your help as we move towards the general election because i don't want this election to be about me. i want it to be about us and the agenda that we want to set for our country.
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you know, when i campaigned so hard against then senator obama, i was, you know, working as hard as i could. he was working as hard as he could. and at the end of the day, he won. and then i went to work to make sure he got elected our president. and i was so relieved and happy when that finally happened. the sunday after the election, bill and i went for a walk in an area that sarah would know, a big kind of nature preserve near where we both live and we just wanted to let down because we'd been working so hard to elect then president-elect obama. so we're wandering through the woods, and bill's phone rings, which is sort of a miracle, because we have terrible cell coverage there, and he pulled it out of his pocket, and it was the president-elect, and he said, you know, i'd like to talk to you and hillary and we're kind of in the middle of the forest, can we get home and call you back? so we did.
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and when we called back, bill called back, he talked to the president-elect and i talked to him. he said to me, i want you to come see me in chicago. i said sure, when? as soon as you can get here. i said, okay, so on thursday i went to chicago and he asked me if i would serve as secretary of state. and i said, you know, mr. president-elect, i really want to go back to the senate, i'm very flattered, but there are a lot of other people who can do that. he said no, i know what i want, and i want you to do this. i said well, you know, mr. president-elect, i really want to go back to the senate and that's where i think i can best work with you and serve you. he said, look, i don't want to hear from you again until you say "yes". [laughter] so i told him, you know "no" again, later and he said, don't call me until you say "yes". i told my husband, you know, he's so persistent. i told him no twice, and he keeps saying, you know, i'm waiting for you to say yes. bill said, yeah, well, i asked you to marry me twice before you
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said yes, so i guess there's a connection there. [laughter] so then i stayed up that night, and i thought, you know, suppose i had been honored to win, and i had wanted this incredibly talented american to be in my cabinet and i asked him, i would want him to say yes. so that's what i had to do. i called him and said, president-elect, i would be honored to serve in your cabinet, and we immediately got started to work. a few months later on my very first trip as secretary of state, i went to asia, and i went in part because everybody i called, all of the leaders in the countries that i spoke with were saying, you know, we just don't know whether the united states cares about us anymore. nobody's been paying any attention to us. you know, we're kind of feeling like we're not important to you anymore. i said, well, you are, the president feels that way i feel that way, i will come see you. so i went out.
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and one of the countries i went to was indonesia, in part because it's a very important country, but also president obama had a personal connection with it. and my idea was not only to talk to the leaders, but to talk to the people what's called public diplomacy, so that as i was out there talking to presidents and prime ministers and others, i would also find ways of trying to connect to tell people, look the united states really does care about the world we're trying to create together and that's part of my message from our new president. so i went on the show, i agreed to go on the show in jacarta, which was their morning show. it was a combination of mtv and reality show and all of that. i had no idea what i was getting myself into. so i go onto the set, people are jumping, they're singing and dancing. and it's called "the awesome show". so i'm on "the awesome show" and i'm talking a little bit to the interviewer and they ask people if they have any questions and somebody in the audience says, i want to ask you, we saw you
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campaign very hard against president obama. he campaigned very hard against you. he won, you lost and then he asked you to be his secretary of state. why? and i realized, you know, in a lot of these new democracies and other places, of course you run against somebody and you lose, you could get exiled, imprisoned or even killed, not asked to be secretary of state. so this was a very legitimate question, and i thought, i have to answer this in a very, you know, serious way that maybe they can understand and our democracy, you know, we do try to close ranks after we have hard elections. at least that's what we should be doing. i said, well you're right. we campaigned hard, he won, i lost. i then campaigned to get him elected. he asked me to be secretary of state. i said yes for the same reason, we both love our country. and at the end of the day for me
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-- [applause] -- that's what elections are supposed to be about. we can disagree, and we will. we'll have all kinds of arguments even about the best way to do things. but we should be coming from a place of wealth, of -- love, of loving our country and of respecting one another, and we have to rebuild this feeling in our country again. we have too much work to be done, we have too many people who deserve a better shot at a future for themselves and their families. i want to be their champion. and with your help i will get up every single day doing the best i can to make sure that the country we love is the country we deserve to have. thank you all. [applause]
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>> transportation and infrastructure issues, including the future of amtrak are being debated in congress. on our next washington journal, we'll talk to congressman david jolly of florida who serves on the transportation appropriation subcommittee. then a conversation with new york representative gerald nadler about whether conference should renew nsa programs that expire in june. later, a look at the effect the current drought in the west could have on the u.s. economy. jim tankersly joins us. washington journal is live each morning at 7:00 eastern on cspan. you can join the conversation on facebook and twitter. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015]
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[captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> 2016 presidential hopefuls are campaigning in early caucus and primary states, such as iowa and new hampshire. approximately presidential candidate senator lindsey graham sat down in new hampshire last month. they talked about climate change, social security sustainability, and the militant group isis. this is 25 minutes. >> good evening, everyone. welcome to our conversation with the candidates series. i'm josh mcelvin. our guest, senator lindsey graham. we'll be getting to know senator graham. i'll be asking the questions as always and after the break, we'll have the studio join in to ask questions in a town hall format. before we start with all that, let's get a quick look at the candidate. >> lindsey graham was born in central south carolina in 1955.
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he earned his undergraduate and law degrees from the university of south carolina and logged six and-a-half years of service on active duty as an air force lawyer. from 1984 to 1988, he was assigned overseas and served in germany. after leaving active duty air force in 1989, graham joined the south carolina air national guard where he served until 1995 and continues to serve in the united states air force reserves. he was elected to the u.s. house of representativeses in 1994 and to the united states senate in 2002, getting reelected in 2008 and again in 2014. graham is a strong proponent of a robust national defense, has worked on cutting spending and entitlementes. he lives in seneca, south carolina, and is a member of the corinth baptist church. >> with that, senator graham thanks for joining us. >> that was pretty accurate. >> you kind of relate to the primary party a little bit when it comes to considering this as far as the california goes, but
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you're going to be making up your mind on whether you're going to run soon. why did you decide to take this on after conversation? >> after my primary, which i got reelected in 2014, i think the world is curating at a faster rate than i've seen at a long time and i think my voice would be good to have in the mix if i decide to run on how to defend america. i've been a problem-solving conservative and if i do run, it would be about the big things. what do you do with 80 million baby boomers who are going to retire in the next 20 years. how do you save the country from being wiped out from those retiring. medicare and social security, somebody better come up with a plan to do it. my goal is to keep the world over there, so it doesn't come here. the big things drive my thinking and if i run it will be because of the big things somebody has to do. >> are you driven by foreign policy and national defense. is that your most motivating factor? >> yeah, i'm driven by the fact that our country is at risk more than i can remember. there's more terrorist
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organizations, more safe havens and more men with the ability to hurt us since 9/11. at the same time, our threat is growing. we're reducing military spending to all-time lows, which is nuts. somebody needs to straighten this mess out and i think i've been more right than wrong with foreign policy and something i'll be ready to talk about. >> let's talk about the controversial nuclear iraq and iran deal. first, do you believe that iran should have a nuclear program in terms of energy, and then if so. >> i'm okay with the iranians having a need to produce power. i'm not okay with the im making a bomb. you have 15 countries that have nuclear power programs that don't enrich urannium. canada and mexico. i would argue if you had to pick a country in all of the world
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not to trust iran would be on top of the list. without a nuclear weapon, they're wreaking havoc throughout the mid-east. they've killed 1500 americans in iraq with these i.u.d.s. it's this theocracy that has a dim view of the world and they're threaten inging the u.s. daily. how many centerfuges should they have, that have chanted death to america and israel day in and day out. i'd put this group on top of the list to make sure they had the least capability possible to make a weapon. >> given all of what you just said, how do you go about entering into what would be more or less a partnership to allow them to develop a nuclear program in terms of energy? >> okay. you could have a nuclear power program but your capability to make your own fuel would be limited, because the process of making commercial fuel can be easily converted to making a
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bomb. they can buy the fuel from russia and can buy it from us. so this idea, they have a right it enrich, i don't buy it at all. the united arab emirates have a nuclear program, but we told them you don't need to make your own fuel. i would tell the iranians, if you want a nuclear program, you can have are it but i believe you've been lying in the past 20 years and i don't trust you one bit and we won't give you a sophisticated new englandular ularular ularular ularular -- nuclear capability to make a bomb and if you want that, you're not going to have it. anytime, anywhere, would be the phrase i'd use. we would be nuts to trust these people, so inspections have to be any time anywhere and leaving this facility open at the bottom of a mountain that we didn't know about the 2009 as part of this deal i think is very ill conceived. >> how aggressive would you be in dealing with radical islam
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specifically isis. lindsey graham: the purpose of my presidency would be to keep the war over there. you can't cure your way into security. you're never going to have peace with radical islam. but some of us are going to have to do the fighting over there so they don't come back here. we'll need more american ground troops partnering with the forces in the region to create lines of defenses for us. this idea of destroying and degrading isil won't work if the region doesn't have the capability to perform that job. if you beat them in iraq, you eventually have to go into syria. i don't know of any arab army that has the capability of going into syria without some of us being there, because we do things they don't do. and here's the question for america. does it matter if we defeat them? i would say it does, because when you listen to what they're telling you, they want to purify
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their, destroy the state of israel and come after us. and it is in our national security interest to make sure that they are degraded and destroyed and it's impossible to accomplish that goal in my view without having some deployed elements of the u.s. military helping the people in the region, because there are 4400 fighters intermixed among these guys with western passports and it's just a matter of time until some of them come back here if we don't put them on the run. >> quickly one more question and we'll get to the audience. you've been in washington for a while as your bio alluded to. you know that there's frustration with washington. lindsey graham: we ought to be there. >> i can imagine. how as president would you somehow bring these parties together that just can't seem to get along on just about anything. lindsey graham: at the end of the day, we're running out of time to bicker among each other. you need a president of the united states that's going to get the republican and democratic party in a room and say listen guys, and gals, 80 million of us are going to
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retire in the next 20 years. it's time to do what ronald reagan and tip o'neal did, come to grips with the baby boomer retirement. younger people will have to work longer and people of income level will have to have subsidiaries and benefits that are going to fail if we do nothing. the republican has got to give, the democratic party has got to give. >> i'm going to wrap you up right there because i guarantee you the republicans will elaborate on that in a moment. when we come back, we'll bring the studio audience into the conversation. stay with us, we'll be right back. >> now conversation with the candidate continues. >> welcome back to our conversation with the candidate. tonight's guest, republican u.s. senator lindsey graham of south carolina. it's time to bring into questions from the audience. i'll jump in if needed to with a follow-up. let's get to it with the first question coming from ruth ellen mason of manchester. good to see you. >> thank you very much, josh.
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senator, we're both baby boomers. dech although, we have been called part of the silver tsunami. so what is your plan to protect social security for our generation and to make sure that it's strengthened for our children and our grandchildren? lindsey graham: great question. when i was 21, my mom died, and when i was 22, my dad died. my sister was 14. we had a liquor store, restaurant and a pool room and my dad was a world war ii veteran and my mom was diagnosed with hodgkins disease it wiped us out financially and a year later my dad died. we moved in with my aunt who never made over $25,000 a year. if it weren't for social security survivor benefits coming to my sister from my parent's contributions about $300, it would have really been tough for us. i'm 59 not married and i don't have any kids what would i do to
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save social security? almost anything. at the end of the day, you prevent social security and medicare from being ride out, do something like reagan and o'neal and sensin bowls. to the young people in this country born after 1964, i want to make sure you have a system that works for you. at the end of the day, when i was born in 1955 there were 16 workers for every security recipient. today, there's three, in 20 years, there's two. the way you save social security is you extend the life of the trust fund. you're going to have to adjust the age of retirement once again like ronald reagan and tip o'neal and people of my income level, making $175,000 a year. my cost of living increase should be less than promised, take the money you would have given me to give it to somebody who needs it more. at the end of the day, we're going to have the means test benefits for operating income
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americans and we're going to have to ask younger people to work a little bit longer. if we don't do that, we're going to lose social security and here is the reason you don't want to lose it. half of today's seniors would be in poverty without a social security check, and a lot of people are going to outlive their 401(k)plan so you're going to need the social security check in the 21st century as much as you did in the 20th century. my goal is to get republicans and democrats in the room and do something like sense and bowls, to save social security and medicare from being wiped out and the only way to do that is to have compromise from both parties parties. josh: thank you, senator. this is coming from mike. >> thank you. many of us care deeply about the
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environment. my question, as president, how would you protect our energy environmental and economic security? senator graham: great question. energy would -- i would have built the pipeline from canada to the gulf coast because we're going to be using fossil fuels for a very long time. buying oil from canada is like buying oil from your cousin. the more oil you buy from people that hate your guts, the worst off you are. we're sitting on top of oil and gas deposits. let's extract them in an environmental sound way. let's build the xl pipeline. i would like more nuclear power plants, more bio diesel, ethanol. i'd like anything and everything we grow or produce here and at the end of the day i'd like to invest in technologies that can operate the economy with a lower carbon footprint. from the republican party point
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of view, what is our environmental policy? i believe that young people in the country are the most environmentally sensitive generation ever produced in america. i embrace clean air and clean water. with one condition. you've got to have a sound economy to get there. this idea of choosing between the environment and the economy is a false choice. the epa regulation controlling emissions is in overreach. the standards set by the epa regulation can't be met by existing technology. i would work with congress to produce legislation to lower admissions, but do it in a way to create jobs. i've got three goals, become energy independent, have the cleanest air and cleanest water of any place on the planet. at the end of the day, grow the economy in the process of transitioning from a carbon-based economy to a lower carbon economy. if you don't do it in an environmentally sound pro-business fashion you're
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going to fail. >> do you buy the science behind climate change. senator graham: i buy what's coming from operating cars and modern machines is contributing to greenhouse gases and greenhouse gas effect to me is a real phenomenon. but you're not going to stop greenhouse gases through a cap and trade system that destroys the economy. we've got two things to do at the same time. protect job growth and move the world it to a cleaner safer environment. climate change is real. cap and change as promoted by al gore is bad. there's got to be middle ground. josh: very good. the next question coming from alley of concord. >> i'm a senior attending the university of new hampshire. when i graduate i'll be facing overwhelming amounts of debt without the promise of a job. if elected president, what would
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you do to ensure that young people could have jobs when graduating from college that they would pay back their student loans. senator graham: great job. i would make it easier to create a job in america so you can get one. what's so hard about creating a job in america now? you've got a business. should i hire 10 people? what's my health care cost going to be? if you don't know the answer to that, you're less likely to hire them. if you're a manufacturer in new hampshire, will the e.p.a. regulation in carbon increase my power cost? if it does, by how much, and should i add new people? what will my tax bill be next year, because i don't know what the congress is going to do with its budget. the only way you'll ever get a job in america is if somebody outside the government creates it, unless you work for the government itself. so my belief is that economic certainty in this country will create better job opportunities.
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energy independence is one way to create jobs in america. if we built nuclear powerplants, there would be jobs. there are lots of things we can do on the energy independent side, but the reg areulatory and tax environment in america is so oppressive, most people won't expand their business because they don't know when the next shoe drops. i would go to flat tax, have a repertoiry reform that reflects a safe environment with the need to grow the economy and at the end of the day, tax policy and repertoirey policy really does matter but if you don't fix the retirement of the baby boomers, if you don't come up with an immigration system so people can hire workers they can't find here at home, then businesses are going to fail. the money you spent to go to college would be a wise investment over time. you don't think so now, but a college degree makes you much more employable down the road and i'm sorry you've had to borrow so much money, but it
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will pay off. josh: senator, thank you. thank you for your question. we'll switch it up and go to a social media question. coming from facebook. are you on facebook? senator graham: absolutely. josh: this is coming from bill ladd. a topical question. the question is, how will you strive to keep church and state separate? senator graham: how will i strive to keep church and state separate? well, at the end of the day, i respect the fact that we are a religious nation but we're a nation that you don't have to accept the particular style of religion. you can be agnostic, you can be libertarian or vegetarian or you can be a baptist like me. this whole issue about legislation and trying to protect religious freedom and at the same time not discriminate against same sex couples is a very complicated endeavor for a democracy. how many of you believe that you should be able to pray at a high
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school football game? josh: you can raise your hand or not raise your hand. senator graham: okay. how many of you believe you shouldn't be offered a prayer at a high school football game? establishing a religion is prohibited by the constitution. congress shall not establish a particular religion. the freedom to exercise your religion is guaranteed by the constitution. there's a limit on government and there's an empowerment of people. for 200 years, we'll be trying to figure this out. the one thing i will not tolerate is a national religion even though i'm a christian because that is counter to what we are as a people. and you see how religion is playing out in the mid-east? the strength of this nation has been that people can worship god on their own terms. freedom of religion and the exercise clause is p
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