when the people of the u.s. monitored its intelligence community rather than snoop on the rest of us. today politicking almost twelve years since the nine eleven terrorist attack is the united states safe how much is the n.s.a. surveillance leak hurt the security of america we'll ask former senator joseph lieberman the co-chair of the bipartisan coalition for american security and former new york city mayor rudy giuliani it's all next on politicking. thanks for joining us c well the only former united states senator joe lieberman he's the two thousand democratic vice presidential nominee who did the first in one of the day got the nomination read and he's just been named honorine co-chair of the bipartisan coalition for american security which is what ok great to be with

you there you do wonderful things as always so this is a group that scott brown a former republican senator from massachusetts and i were asked to be co-chairs brought together by a group of people who are worried that there's the beginning of a pulling back by america from leadership in the world and it's not one part of the other it's pete pieces of the democrat and republican party and our position is that when america's not involved in the world we suffer we suffer and our security was suffer in our prosperity and maybe in the end we suffer in our freedom so another vandenberg the on with the foreign relations committee in the forty's said the politics stops at the water's edge do agree i sure do and i'll tell you something of all the bad impacts of the increasing partisanship in washington it's the way in which people have forgotten what vandenberg. said because foreign

policy too often has become partisan as well and when we're facing the rest of the world really we ought to be together for what's right for our country i mean the vanderburgh story is very instructive because during it he was an isolationist in his past and then the shooting yeah from michigan to billy rose to be chairman of the senate foreign relations committee after the second world war and when he saw the rise of communism president hairiest truman getting involved in some of those post words to to sions to try to take our former enemies germany japan help to rebuild protect freedom against the communists vandenberg joined with truman he in a sense he changed his position and that decision was a key to our ultimate success good enough here and we can't you can't be isolationist and you can't really be but i think people are tempted by it again larry and it's understandable it happened throughout our history at different times what we always pay for it happens particularly when the economy is bad and of

course it's been bad here in the country and when the american people are war weary and after iraq and afghanistan we're war weary but but if we're not involved in leadership in the world is a vacuum and it's probably not going to be filled by friends of ours it's going to be filled in places like syria by iran which will or enemy will has been consumed with security and valued your thoughts over the years where do you stand on this and a moral issue of privacy versus security yeah well the dilemma it's a dilemma and in the best of all worlds we do both i mean. it's a clash and sometimes they do security has to come first i mean even in the constitution the providing for the common defense is a is a primary goal of the federal government but you can't step on people's liberties and doing that and you know the whole tastes about n.s.a. surveillance and so. snowden and the rest of the make of that oil i was during my

time in the senate particularly because i was chairman of the senate homeland security committee i got briefed on those programs that he divulged and i take them my feeling was very different my feeling was gratitude that we had this technological capacity without violating people's privacy to track millions of calls see patterns were calls are going to somebody we have good reason to believe was a terrorist and then we never know what his phone would be tapped or e-mails would be read unless the government went back into court with evidence that there was probable cause to do that so and i know as people in the military have said that many many terrorist plots against america were stopped by those probably don't know of all let's stop right and this is the problem and that's why the to the extent that the government can reveal these cases where these programs helped us stop terrorist attacks against united states without compromises compromising the

programs that would it would help build public support for the i think the public gets this larry every poll indicates that the public supports valence yeah i think the public does because they know we're facing an enemy and these terrorist is different than any we've faced before that they're not in uniform they don't strike us from an airplane or a battleship they come from the shadows and they strike at civilians and everybody is vulnerable in this country and to have this capacity to track them down if they're used to so foreign or email is a tremendous capacity that doesn't really compromise the rights of every human so in the senate you knew that about this program we did we didn't do you think snowden is a traitor was a tough forward or well i mean literally i think is a traitor i think he's violated the espionage act to many other acts and. basically should be will be has been charged with a crime when he were about the most. well i worry about the muslim terms of our

security oh look the things that i was worried about is see to it what's fascinating now is that the the great nation states even the ones that we worry about china well china's not going to really threaten us a minute and yes we have to work with them we have to develop a trusting relationship they may take actions in asia pacific regarding some of our allies that could cause a problem but what i worry about it's these terrorists and the biggest sponsor of terrorism is iran and what i worry is that this strike the united states with a weapon of mass destruction at the worst a nuclear weapon but they have the capacity to hit us with chemical or biological weapons and you know that's enough to keep me up at night some of the things you said on armed forces yes and what do you make of this sexual assaults and all this misconduct going on. yeah it's it's disheartening. people can say it's part of human nature and all that but you know i was and i was for

a lot of time with the military there was so many of the great institutions in our society have lost their credibility lost people's trust government to say that business congress for sure. my buddy mccain says when you're down with the poll numbers a congress has now you're down to paid staff and close relatives so when i come back this is one of the few institutions in our society that still enjoys public respect is the military and it's big not just because they fight for us because they live by a code but when sexual assaults are going on in the military they're violating that code and the pentagon has to really crack down on the senate such a powerful place as only one hundred of you you know you must miss well you know i don't miss the senate i miss some of my friends but i wouldn't be leveling with you larry if i didn't say that some days i get up i watch t.v.

or read the newspaper something's going on and i wish i could call up one of my colleagues and say hey let's let's put in a bill on this and probably will one day since i've been out that i most missed pink in the senate was when my friend mccain snuck it was sneaked into syria and to meet with the opposition because i know i would have been with him of i was in the senate and i would have been an important thing that friendship endures it doesn't door we talk to each other regularly we come from very different places different backgrounds but beginning early on when i came to the senate late eighty's ninety's we got interested in foreign policy things together defense things together we travel a lot around the world and he's a fascinating guy but much much more complex than most people their interest and got to know him very well i know you did joy he's joining with obama now on immigration you know they going to get that i i do. it's going to pass the senate and my guess is it's going to be a battle in the house but here here's

a coming together of what's right which is immigration reform the country needs that immigration's been good for our country great for our country but also what makes political sense because i think a lot of the republicans even if they're skeptical about immigration reform understand that they're basically everytime they were against it saying to the festus growing group in america hispanics and others asians growing rapidly where we don't care about your my fate meant to do not care about should we don't like you out on the whole way go away so i mean the latest on that and i this so it's a combination the circle is. simultaneous translation of a common sense good good judgment now so i think it's got a shot an appeal would not only be a tremendous thing in its own right because the country needs immigration reform but after more than two years without any really significant accomplishment i would say well congress can at least get together and get something done that's good for

the country so all the is the pleasure of knowing you thanks learning to use it well god bless you you to listen is every week on this show i want to show you a part of washington you may not know about last week i visited ben's chili bowl this is quite a place president obama and bill cosby are big fans see what it's like to take a look. at. the it was nine hundred fifty eight white hours and hours president and then still a bolo but it's a historic part of washington d.c. and we're going in. when the zombies some of them on their little kid he plays he's going to i was on his wife and tails off and i can barely reach them what they did to you know i think it's the longevity i think it's the personality of mom and dad that. i think it's that community spirit that we foster we've been in a part of this community for fifty five years and i think it's the late hours to

remember the six in the morning for breakfast we close at two in the morning on weekdays and four am friday is that this is that famous little hot dog and the just right and we do a chili craftsman so it's been kind of listed as the c. signature dish it's a half speed path for smoked sausage that we put in a bun put chili mustard nun's on it is delicious this is the only thing the bill cosby says he's becoming since nine hundred fifty eight his wife used to actually dacier in our booth and are still original and that's what president obama had enough from president sarkozy have that's our thing. did it take all prettily this is the success when they did go you know it was because of the location i mean this area used for the black broadway complex broadway yes all the famous performers from played here and you had all these wonderful theaters this was it this was probably it's an amazing neighborhood and a great mix of new and old young people affluent people people from the administration it's the place to be met i mean it was a defeat and it is again and it's beautiful to see the legwork made your husband start the want to raise

a family and this was going to bring in the room so this was a business that you do every day you're going to come up with these people i'm energized right now more. people from everywhere oh what's the plan i have. my on the stage thank you my pleasure thanks thank you ben still a bowl a year in washington this is the place this is the voice. still a common america's mayor the former new york city mayor rudy giuliani. here is mitt romney trying to figure out the name of that thing that we america. it's called a dog and. i'm sorry i missed the guy who cares an awful lot but you sir are

a fool you know what that is my self. want to say to feature is a monkey on the ball and the crystal ball would just confuse the is about to. go over to distract us from what you and i should care about because there are profit driven industry that sell the sensationalistic garbage because of breaking news i'm abby martin and we're going to break that. close.

now welcome an old friend a dear friend rudy giuliani two terms mayor new york ran for the republican presidential nomination two thousand and eight we go back a long way we share a great love for baseball we drove to give

a to the opening game of the ten thousand world series which i will never forget anything else your reaction to the supreme court's ruling in the gay issue lots of it's what i expected it's sort of a classic compromise right i mean the chief justice decided that there was no standing on the california case so what that does is it leaves it to the states now to decide if they want gay marriage or if they don't so you're voids some of the roe against wade repercussions of the forcing it all in one fell swoop on everyone i think that was a sensible and wise way to do it i think if you're going to decide that you can leave it to the states and the defense of marriage act has to go down because but californians can marry now so california can you yorkers can never voted earlier i signed a law back in one thousand nine hundred ninety four that was the first or second i don't know of the first or second civil partnership domestic partnership laws and it was so controversial with the solenoid oh boy i got i got so much heat over that

from france from a lot of republicans from a lot of a lot of different groups and i think it was probably. sixty seven percent unpopular at the time. but i thought it was the right thing to do you give equal rights to people and i thought i thought that civil union would be a good compromise but i always thought will eventually it's going to lead to basically you know where we are now let's get to some other issues reaction to the new bipartisan coalition for american security and we feel about the push for an end gays and proactive foreign policy i think we have to have an engaged in proactive foreign policy otherwise it would leave a vacuum and when we leave a vacuum then who feels that look at syria we've left a vacuum in syria because president obama could make a decision about what to do russia has filled that vacuum or ran as filled that vacuum if we if we leave these kinds of vacuums by not acting aggressively not

acting with purpose then we're going to have russia moving in we're going to have china moving in we're going to have been as a well moving in south america america has to be the leader otherwise somebody else can become the leader or you make of the snowden thing. oh i think it's clear that he's a villain particularly a given what he's done now and going to china going to russia just look at this they've got the guy claims he's in favor the first amendment he full disclosure human rights and he goes to china is the word that we seeking refuge in russia and the other the other places he's thinking about a vet as a weapon in cuba i mean come on we're princes compared to them so it seems to me that his purpose here is not some kind of pure vindication of the first amendment of first amendment rights it's more about some kind of anger at the united states some kind of anger maybe in this personal life. i don't know exactly what it is how do you deal with privacy and surveillance well it's really hard i mean it's

a balance it's a correct. discussion to have about how far can you go. the reality is that we're living in a very dangerous world with pretty complex groups of people that want to come here and kill us they have succeeded unfortunately as we know in september eleventh they succeeded in boston this is succeeded in london a few weeks after boston so it's not as if they haven't had successes so it's hard to detect of that's hard to find of so you have to have very significant surveillance at the same time and you'd just to go get everybody's records i'm a little uncomfortable with that i mean this should be some standards there should be some. probable cause reasonable suspicion. some set of criteria so maybe that's what this will all lead to but for him to just reveal this when this is classified information does tremendous damage to us it does tremendous

damage to us in ways that you and i even i can't can appreciate so i consider this man i don't know if i call him a traitor that's a pretty high that's a benedict arnold kind of thing but i sure think he violated the españa espionage act he certainly violated the law against giving up classified information which he has no right to do it think he should be prosecuted like anybody else with that we share a lot with nine eleven heroics two weeks later we were down in ground remember and then that you were on. as did so many things you think were more or less secure now . that's a very complex answer the answer is unfortunately answers one of those yes and no answers certain ways were more secure was certainly more secure in our airplane travel a lot more than we were before september eleventh. we're more secure against these large. international terrorist groups we have a much better handle on them not completely but we have a better handle on the many al qaida groups like that the or shoots of al qaeda

where we're less secure are these individual acts of sort of self initiated terrorism itself initiated jihadism like we had in boston like they just had in london the hard to slight merge hassan well that's what that's why it is that level of danger that in some ways is much greater than we faced before september eleventh because people forget bin laden encouraged people to do this he encouraged people and a lot to encourage people to do this this is not just a spontaneous you know growth this is something that's part of their plan to try to encourage people to become. muslim extremists on their own and then on their own with some help. some advice some guidance to go and commit individual terrorist acts this is part of a plan and it is much much harder to to detect these people they're not using by

and large international communications. the extent we have informants to the extent that we have undercover people we're basically not into these groups so they're operating more under the under the radar so it's going to require a different approach and it's going to require i believe a lot more emphasis on local law enforcement is a much bigger role here now for the local police not just the f.b.i. a reason gallup polls that for the first time since two thousand and five more americans view george w. bush favorably than unfair or or goes around comes around i think history is going to judge and i think they're going to judge president bush much better than unfortunately he was judged to the end of his term a couple years ago i had a meeting with president bush was just when he finished his his book in fact he was just putting the finishing touches on it and met with him in dallas we spent about an hour together and he people beginning to fume a little differently then and i said to him are you going to handle being popular. here like the fact that he never speaks against obama i believe that has

a lot to do with the turnaround in view of him tessie always has been you know him . irrespective of what you think of him politically i'm pretty much a political supporter of his. and i was and i thought he was a good president and i thought he was a courageous president many ways which some people don't but everybody says that knows him this is a very very nice man very genuine man a very honest man very good man a nice man and i think you saw that in the post presidency he was he understood how hard the job is he probably disagrees with half of what president obama does just being a republican but he keeps his mouth shut about it he you know he realizes in public respects that i think i like that and i've tried to do that as the next mayor of the michael boom. it succeeded me so i was fortunate i had someone that i supported somebody that i endorsed and somebody who largely looked at the world the way i did although we there are things we disagree about but i never go out of my way to

criticize him and even even when i disagree with him and say well i'm not sure i agree with that policy i always point out that i agree with ninety percent of what he's doing and i think it's been a very good night in boston happen in a smaller scale did you think to nine eleven at first first first moment i heard about it the first thing that came back to me was it was the number of the september eleventh. sure it was a different scale but you know for the people involved doesn't matter. of course if you got blown off you have your child or you lose your husband or use your wife doesn't matter if one person died or three thousand people died what worries you the most worry that what i said the individual self developed acts of jihadism if someone is planning something right now some individual can be hard to stop them right because putting something in a subway absolutely is going to be a if if al qaeda in yemen is planning something i don't say we have one hundred percent chance of getting it but i think we have

a very very high percentage chance of taking that up because of the coverage that we have. i think if somebody i did want to pick a city but somebody in some city you know like the guys in boston are sitting there planning it much much harder to pick a much harder which means we have got to rely much more now on local police. what i didn't like about the whole thing the f.b.i. found out from russia that this man was a man they should be suspicious about they did a certain amount of checking they did a certain amount of investigating but they never did the thing that i think they should have done they never notified the boston police not just to notify them but to ask the boston police what do you know about this guy that if anybody is going to pick up something suspicious about someone in the neighborhood it's going be the local police i remember a case that i had is when i was mayor when howard safer was my police commissioner and we caught these guys who were going to blow up the subway and the only way we

found out about it was one rookie cop who was suspicious of them turned them in to the local sergeant got the joint terrorism task force they came in and the next morning these guys were arrested and one of them detonated a bomb right in the in the in the house he was in at the time that the f.b.i. and the police caught him but we never would have caught those guys if it wasn't for one local cop the all the n.s.a. stuff all the cia stuff of all the all this vast surveillance was useless one sharp young rookie cop great story got some political things. from the yours says your party is in a demographic death spiral in terms of the future as it is unless you do a comprehensive immigration reform in group that well i don't know if i'd use the language that lindsey used but i agree with the thrust of what he said and i think that first of all i think the immigration bill is the right thing to do which is where you have to start to get the politics it's the right thing to do we have

millions of people here we have them here in this uncertain status most of them are decent people who are working most of them can make a contribution ok they made a mistake. who hasn't made a mistake they made a mistake for the right reason they wanted to come to america to be part of this great country i think you have to understand that and if you have to embrace that and understand we can do something good with that rather than keep it negative and i do like the idea of the of the increased security at the border and that isn't even so much because of illegal immigration i like that increased security because of my fear of terrorism because of my fear of things getting over the border without our detecting it could lead to you know some kind of catastrophic act in the united states. or a year party or is it going well you know you don't have that he's right demographically if you know if you don't. peel dilla tino's and women and blacks you almost look an american can't win well you certainly put yourself in

a very difficult position but. many many times in my lifetime and yours was predicted the demise of the republican party or the democratic party. goldwater republicans with dead they were finished they lost every state but one of them richard nixon became the next president when george bush got elected after eight years of ronald reagan the democratic party was finished their candidates were too when along comes bill clinton they were in charge then bill clinton we were going to have al gore we got george. bush nothing is the republicans will finish and oh wait they got the house in ten so. we have problems but they have problems to and the question is who's who's going to i'm going to deal with their problems better and also a lot of it's going to be how effective is the president obama what kind of a what kind of a not just legacy what kind of feeling does he leave behind has he been an effective president as you've been an effective president if he's an effective

president we don't have to solve as many of our problems kind of solve the floyd always good seeing you are the influences on wash with your yankee brain. never leaves it so we got to go again again yes sure aren't good as some of you let me know i want to thank my guests former senator joe lieberman former new york mayor rudy giuliani great to have them both with us politicking with larry king. the missions. couldn't take should three months for charges three.

months three. three stooges for the. old free blanquita cullum video for your media project a free media dog r t dot com. easy. to live on one hundred thirty three bucks a month before i should try it because you know how fabulous bad luck i got so. i

will tell you know that i'm still really messed up. in the old hurry so closely. a little more obscure for the little white house of a little radio guy and call up a minister of a kook hospital i want a large quote for about the both of you never seen anything like this on cold. welcome to breaking the set i'm your host abby martin you know it seems that on every issue important to americans the problem reaction and solution is always framed by the two dominating political parties in this country the problem is that these two teams democrats and republicans more closely resemble a single party one that stands for imperialism than corporate gain.