once again for us the story has been all over the place but back to the war on terror the so-called war on terror is is which this is brought i think a reasonable discussion forward is it a geo political campaign or is it a domestic law enforcement issue that was one of the big debates after nine eleven you know is this an act of war or is this the act it is across let's ask our guests in tonight's bigger picture national security panel right now i'm joined by michael breen if you have director truman national security project the center for national policy that's not. shy hid batar executive director with the bill of rights defense committee and corey saylor national legislative director at the council on american islamic relations thank you all for joining us today we've been trying to stop coughing here forgive me. most of the media actually first of all. i'm curious show head to in your thoughts is it possible for us to fight terrorism

without infringing on civil liberties absolutely there are any number of novel policy solutions that the policy establishment hasn't even quite frankly seriously considered domestic agricultural policy right and subsidies for corporate agribusiness have a huge role in facilitating food insecurity in the developing world and this phenomenon of growing more corn for instance than we can possibly use dumping it below the cost of production in other countries driving their indigenous food production out of the market and then runners them subject to commodity price shocks and that's a recipe across human history for instability and revolution textile tariffs right we have a more favorable regime with respect to textile imports from the caribbean than we do from central asia and that's ridiculous from a security standpoint but nobody thinks about textile tariffs they were counterterrorism lens or agricultural policy or for that matter our military aid right before the arab spring i think it would be people didn't think so much about our propensity to arm dictators abroad and that's probably the single worst thing

we can do if we're struggling to win a battle for hearts and minds it's makes perfect sense michael to what extent do you think the blowback effect is you know we've we've. apparently decentralized al qaeda but. to what extent is our drone policy and and the policies that we just had this report come out last week saying that yes we committed torture. we committed crimes war crimes and that was the co number you know with the number two guy on the the co whatever leader of the report and he's an old republican hard core number two or three in the defense department during the bush administration i mean serious. concern the guy who went into it saying to take a lot to convince me currently they did to what extent of we. had to use a lousy better for the shah. ourselves in the foot with this sure my introduction to this is is primarily you know came in the form of being an army officer in iraq

and afghanistan one of the first things you learn on the battlefield whatever that battlefield looks like is that every action you take is going to have a consequence and that you are in a long term you know war is really difficult out of those things and whether you're up against you know a couple of small a couple of people in a law enforcement situation or europe against a thinking enemy who means you harm and in whatever sense it's a tit for tat game that goes on for a long time the decisions you make are going to have ramifications how you conduct yourself and a thinking adversary is going to react to all of those decisions. i think we've known for a long time it's it's been acknowledged in a new way recently as you say that unfortunately we didn't gauge and torture and that many of the things that this country did in response and their security professionals did in response to nine eleven were counterproductive meanwhile many of the things that they did did have positive impacts but i want to be really clear about this question of of a global war on terror and what that is. terrorism terrorism emotion and terrorism

is a tactic. i think we have found ourselves in a global conflict against an organization al qaeda which has changed among others but al qaeda is the core of that organization and the organization has changed in response to our actions it's changed because we've targeted effectively it's changed because it's found that certain ways of organizing and communicating are more effective against us than others and so as we've evolved they have evolved along alongside us that conflict continues to be real i have no idea of what's going on in boston today and i grew up near boston in most my family and law enforcement my dad works in the city of in this is personal for me and in a way that i know it's personal for a lot of people you know as our hearts go out to the people in boston is as we wish the best for the men and women in law enforcement in the security community or even right now trying to resolve the situation. we don't know what the. division's these two young men were we don't know who else they may have been informed by or working with we don't know if this has anything to do with al qaeda or associated

organizations so it's really important he doesn't want to yeah but but all that and not even making this about post making this about this larger concept of declaring a war on terror. should we should we in fact you know let me toss this to you corey if i if i may should we be rethinking the whole concept of how we react to other actors around the world whether they're state actors or whether they're non-state actors who are. who are reacting to us or who are acting against us in ways that we perceive as threats or as as dangers and we have the old fashion world war two model japan bombs us we go over we take out japan end of war. the world is changing in a whole variety of ways and we've historically done a lot of these things and in a kind of semi sneaky way ok let's let's subvert the government honduras for the benefit of the pineapple company or something you know that but you know so what

kind of policies should we be looking at i want to go back to what you said in your opening because it was really important should we treat this as a global issue of should we treat this is a law enforcement issue and first and foremost particularly with what's going on in boston right now they murdered two women and an eight year old boy and now apparently at least one more police officer. that is a law enforcement issue if we make it anything beyond that we are essentially handing a small victory to them because they want to be seen as someone who can disrupt our society set us off course so we have to call them what they are they're murderers and of story now and so far as changing our politics around the world the most important thing that i always believe that the united states can do is if we are going to talk about certain principles and values that we have we must project those to the world i would say in the time since nine eleven unfortunately too

often we have projected our fears rather than our values so when we talk about we believe that everyone should have democracy that people should have democratic institutions we have to put our money where our mouth is and help build those even though sometimes we don't like the results that we see those populations choosing for themselves but we have never i mean we've used that rhetoric for a long long time that's the can yeah and yet we we helped bring the shah back we have you know we helped install. saddam hussein we we helped pinochet come to power we helped you know overthrow or kill. and you know when they did we were going to fight our wars for us yeah proxy war and then as soon as it was over we walked away and left two years by civil war so so nothing i mean nothing that's happened justifies boston but we do have to think about what it's like for the people we've left behind and the people that are subjected to some of these

missteps that we've taken and we have to rethink about how is it that we can make sure that we keep our friends in those areas we've been as our friends particularly in iraq where it's very important to show he had the japanese have been actually quite good at this there are among the world's largest givers of foreign aid very often they do in a way that works to their benefit here's some money please buy our products but. it is there so is there a lesson for us to learn and how we're interacting with the rest of the world i think absolutely and just to pick up on corey's point one of the particular elements to this debate that i think is really interesting and really looked at are the roles that our own agencies play in fomenting and perpetuating conflict and i think the cia is a great agency to look at here in the entire history since nine eleven is i think uncontroversially the cia's fault right i mean they trained the precursors to al qaeda in afghanistan the fight the soviets in the eighty's if we hadn't done that this genie would never have gotten out of the bottle and you know people debate

about whether or not that was necessary to destabilize the u.s.s.r. what have you but the point is you know that the cia essentially responsible for the threat to which our society is what it is on if they want to actually run this i have to tell you i think it's a tremendous leap to lay. nine eleven and the decade of war that we've experienced since at the feet of the central intelligence a little fifty percent just it is it is easy to sit here and tick off a little need examples of american actions in the world and not worked out well. it's easy to do that but would know what is going to lie and what is a canard might not agree me this is had we not had a policy since the thirty's that was based on middle eastern oil regardless of how bad or good we played it out that we wouldn't have secure i think there's no question that our need for oil or single source dependence on oil as a single source of transportation fuel has security ramifications and has for

a long time increasingly that's true as global demand increases even as american demand stay static and even as we produce more and more oil does that make sense i mean this is one of obama's one of osama bin laden's demands was that the you know who are concerned i think tom i got to tell you it's a long way from that to saying that the fact that we burn oil for transportation and that that has national security medications is the single explanation for all that has happened in the middle east or for nine eleven i think to i just don't i think that if the principal export of iran and iraq and afghanistan and saudi arabia and a lot of gas etc that region had been you know pineapples or bed bugs. would have been i would generally agree with you but the hole in the bottom of the bucket is that you know latin america's primary exports are include some of the agricultural products you mentioned pineapples certainly bananas right we've had plenty of illegitimate interventions there i mean you mentioned a and a and pinochet did you know hunger is quite a model of nicaragua right and philip i mean let's not forget we're talking about

a nation that entered the world stage in a really big way through world war two right we're talking about a nation who fairly uniquely in human history followed up the largest military victory achieved by anybody ever in that war with the largest democracy development and human rights building project in the history of humanity the marshall plan absolutely and we built japan and articulated a global grand strategy that was primarily about extending freedom and opportunity to others and imperfectly executed strategy immigrants. tell you that when we have departed from that we have suffered and so have others i fully agree with that is it well this is a short we do well we've done it when we've done it well many many times since then i think we also ignored our peril the reality that no matter what actions we took. there are elements in the world and there are people in the world i have met some of these people. who unconditionally. and not because of some policy or

wish death and hormones i remember that i don't doubt that and so let's not lose that as we sit here and come up with all of the different things we may have done in south america or in the thirty's is that inexorable led him or not all of those people like that and not all of those people are outside the united states to our side and i'd like to get to that conversation right after this break morris nights bigger picture panel discussion on national security. let me let me i want i wouldn't let me ask you a question. here on this network is what we're having the debate we have our knives

out. the truth is this right it was a space thing there is again here in this race we're being i don't want me to talk about the surveillance we. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything is. welcome to the big picture. isn't talking about the same story doesn't make it news no softball interviews no puff pieces new tough question right here.

i think a little worse if your goal is to. wipe out superman. radio guy for a minute. what. if you've never seen anything like this i'm told. while going back to tonight's a bigger picture discussion on national security i'm joined by michael breen executive director of the truman national security project in the center for national policy show which are executive director with the bill of rights defense committee and corey saylor national legislative director of the council on american islamic relations and let's get back to it while the media is mostly focusing on islamic terrorism next external experience you know extremists threats and whatever

and we've been discussing this foreign policy international policy we are probably right here at home we've had a history of problems right here at home you know from from the unabomber kind of thing to the oklahoma city bombing to the atlantic's bombing to the whole cause museum shooting to the to the sikh temple it's x. chord of the southern poverty law center the quote the number of conspiracy minded anti-government quote patriot groups on the american radical right reached an all time high in two thousand and twelve the fourth consecutive year of powerful growth and so i'm curious let me start with you corey on this one of the. one of the things i spoke a number of times with people from the southern poverty law center and others who are compiled these kind of stats and one of the things that seems to be driving this is this is the first time a black man has occupied the white house so there's

a racism element to it be we. had thirty two years now of a drumbeat basically since reagan became the first president ever to say being the president is an evil thing you know the government is not the solution the government is the problem. of thirty two years of a drumbeat of. in some cases both political parties saying government is a bad thing and people are starting to believe it what what's your sense of this what do we do about this where is this going and where has this come from. as you and i and if i set the table appropriately and it is as you point out really the southern poverty law center and organizations like the council on american islamic relations started you know we were seeing sort of leveling off and anti muslim hate two thousand and seven two thousand and eight then you get the election of president obama and all of a sudden things start going on the rise again southern poverty law center has talked about you know in spanish in white supremacist and anti-government groups

while we've been tracking an expansion anti muslim and islam phobic groups. at this point in time you know it's a cycle that unfortunately we go through every so often and. we believe that what needs to happen the focus as you say is on islamic extremism and we know we don't know in boston right now in boston what the motivation was these could have just been to people who wanted to see what happened although the evidence looks fairly convincing that they were inspired by groups by like al qaida. but we need to make sure that we don't take our eye off the ball so right now much of our security apparatus is senator around looking at is law looking at muslims and we have one guy in the department of homeland security whose job it is to look at right wing extremists seriously i was one guy had a discussion recently at the center for american progress and what they were talking about is particularly since the report that came out i think it was two

thousand and nine the discussed from the department of homeland security that discussed a growth in right wing groups they had to withdraw because the write. down and they were saying at that discussion that there is now one person whose job it is to look at far right extremism or white supremacist extremism anti-government extremism so if we're completely focused on extremism emanating from a minority religion and i'm not saying that there needs to be a concern about that absolutely i'm saying i'm saying that clearly. given that over the last two years this is the first casualty a casualty attack which is occurred apparently on the basis of muslim extremism we need to keep our eye on the right wing as well the white supremacist groups the anti muslim the anti-government groups because right now they're operating in essentially a safe space they're being allowed to go about what they're doing and that leads to

very relevant concerns about the type of attacks that they can carry out so the scrutiny needs to be placed on them shut it in my lifetime i've been around a while and i've seen arc of history in america that's fairly interesting and what really stirred up the john birch society i remember the the billboards of peach errol or warren in the late fifty's early sixty's and that really led to a crescendo that i think. we saw in dallas in one nine hundred sixty three. in some ways and at least there was a big ad the newspaper that day you know the drip to black you know welcome mr president. it was no welcome. the. a lot of that track back to brown v board that was that was earl warren the great crime and it's like things stir these folks up this this being racial integration and then you know it kind of slowed down

a little bit and life got back to normal or we got busy with other things the war and whatnot the government seems to work ok and then president obama comes into office as corey was pointing out and now the hornet's nest has been poked again as it were. we were talking before about how we deal with external threats or people who are hostile to the united states based on perceived wong's how do we deal with people within the united states who are hostile to the united states based on perceived wrongs if you even when those. perceived wrongs are in the minds of most americans extraordinarily illegitimate racism is one of the issues here we have a bill of rights for a reason it includes the right to speak for instance right when you start talking about assaults hate crimes would think that the criminal law deals adequately with those situations the tendency in the. incentive let's say to turn everything into an act of terror right in order to promote it i think does what corey was saying

before and critically does the work that our enemies would want to do on their behalf we have criminal law for a reason it's adequate to meet the need even in the counterterrorism context if you compare article three federal courts with the military status review tribunals or guantanamo bay we actually have convictions from federal courts and the contrived military commission system is wallowing in this procedural confusion or the trying to invent law from whole cloth and doing a extraordinarily bad job of it so that the criminal law paradigm works for even these issues and these aren't actually new issues people think that terrorism is a oh you know it started on nine eleven and let's be frank now our nation was born from an act of terrorism right that's what the boston tea party was and the site british was exactly and that's my point precisely right and so this notion of the newness of this phenomenon is profoundly a historical and i do i dare say ignorance you know our founders contemplated precisely these questions and they adopted robust protections for individual rights

for a reason that we would not trade liberty for security and we have done precisely that and we have ended up with neither and i think that that's the most tragic shame of the last decade and even beyond the discrete assaults that we saw in boston this week in new york and d.c. twelve years ago and if i could just put a punctuation mark on that when you mention article three courts you know. so many people watching may not know what that is the first three articles the constitution are the first to the house and senate you know closest to for. the people the first among equals the second is the presidency of the executive branch and the third is the judiciary so when you see an article three court where you're talking about just a normal all american court authorized by the constitution as opposed to a military court that operates under the uniform code of military justice or something about them go through article three courts are hardly pro defendants right mean we live in the society that imprisons more people than any other on the planet including our you know large nemesis china that has four times our

population and if you think about the way the courts interact with the executive branch in the war on terror it's profoundly deferential just earlier this year the supreme court said we won't even consider claims against the national security agency's warrantless wiretapping scheme because we're just going to defer to executive secrecy so it's not as if choosing the article three courts is somehow you know some namby pamby alternative to real courts i mean article three courts are very deferential to be executive branch still secure convictions when the evidence is present in terrorism cases in this idea of and you know throwing the constitutional baby out with the counterterrorism bathwater to invent these whole we illegitimate systems of alternative justice i really do think does the work of our enemies for them michael to what extent do you think that during that time that you were in afghanistan and iraq if we had devoted the same level of resources and personnel to solve the real problems in the united states to educating our young people to providing jobs to people to making sure that poverty was reduced that we

would have a different and. we would be had very having a very different conversation right now about the nature of terrorism and and that we might not even be facing or and we might be facing worse i don't know. of a quote domestic threat to the question i think. i mean to be clear i mean i think we went into afghanistan in response to a very clear threat in a very very clear action and i think any theory that we in some way initiated the series of events that brought down the twin towers that we get out of what we all know i hope that was not implicit my had no course not put it but i think going into afghanistan was a necessary act i think what we've learned is a lot of tough lessons in spite of the courage sacrifice and i think very honorable service of a large number of people in iraq afghanistan here at home and in our intelligence agencies that. the methods we did used have not always been the right tactics that

sometimes to go after a small nimble globalized network your best bet is to deploy a small number globalized network of your own and that's that's worked fairly well for us fighting large land wars. counterinsurgency campaigns involving lots of people hundreds of thousands of soldiers in some cases has not been as effective. a tool as a set of tactics to use iraq is a very different we've talked about iraq before i was against it before it happened and wrote about that then in an abject lesson and in so doing the trold military worked going there myself and serving because i agreed to follow the orders of the owner chief i think iraq was a strategic blunder that's cost us incredibly dearly and i think it prolonged this conflict against the al qaeda network unnecessarily for quite a long time we would be in a very different position with regard to that network and our national security really large and we not done that we have to we have to wrap this up with this conversation could go on and hopefully will again for some considerable period

thank you thank you all. to see this bigger picture discussion on national security again go to our web site of conversations with great minds. and that's the way it is tonight friday april nineteenth two thousand and thirteen for more information check out our website at tarpon dot com free speech dot org. and who would slash in the big picture and don't forget democracy begins when you get out there and get active tag you're it. a clear image of iraq after inflation. twenty day taxi trip through the

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international at the very heart of moscow. at this very moment the massive manhunt for the second boston bombing suspect has moved into a neighborhood in watertown a city not far from boston swat officers have surrounded

a home residents are urged to stay indoors we're live with the latest information. plus the bombing suspects family is speaking out including an uncle who lives just north of washington d.c. he has passionately and emotional interview next. and the death toll continues to rise from that explosion in west texas at a fertilizer plant this as relief efforts pour in from around the country and new details emerge about the history of that fertilizer plant. it's friday april nineteenth eight pm in washington d.c. i'm maggie lopez and you are watching our t.v. well we begin tonight in boston where just a short time ago residents of the watertown area heard shots fired we are now hearing just this second that a second round of shots are being fired right now since those reports came out we have seen a large amount.