 Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome. I'm Susan Collins, the Joan and Sanford Wildean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. And I am just delighted to have all of you here with us this afternoon. This is the first of our policy talks at the Ford School lecture series for this new academic year. We are very, very honored today to be joined by retired US United States Air Force General Michael Hayden. Many of us tomorrow will get a chance to welcome the Air Force to Ann Arbor as the Falcons take the field in the big house. And in advance of that, I would just like to have you join me in doing an advance welcome. So to the Falcons, I'll have the pleasure of introducing General Hayden more fully in just a moment. But I'd like first to say a little bit, to begin with some brief history of what this lecture series, what it comes from. Josh Rosenthal was a 1979 graduate of the University of Michigan, who went on to earn a master's degree in public policy from Princeton. He worked in the fields of international finance, and he died in the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11th in 2001. Josh's mother, Marilyn Rosenthal, was a long-term Michigan faculty member. She wanted to shape positive meaning from what happened on 9-11 and to honor her son's optimism about the world and about how mutual understanding, dialogue, and analysis can improve communities both here and abroad. Marilyn and many others established the Josh Rosenthal Education Fund, which enables the Ford School each year to bring leading public policy figures to Ann Arbor each September. And I know that there are some members of the Rosenthal family with us today, and we are particularly grateful to be joined by Josh's aunt. Harriet Burke, thank you for coming. We are very grateful for your family's continued support and inspiration in the Rosenthal lecture series. Marilyn Rosenthal died in 2007, but I know that she would have been so pleased and honored to welcome the very distinguished general Michael Hayden as this year's Rosenthal lecturer. During his 41-year career in the Air Force, General Hayden served as the country's first deputy, first principal deputy director of national intelligence, the highest-ranking intelligence officer in the armed forces. He was director of the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005, and in 2006, he was sworn in by President Bush as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. General Hayden has two degrees in history from Duquesne University and was a distinguished graduate of that school's ROTC program. He did postgraduate work at the Defense Intelligence School. General Hayden has graciously agreed to take questions from the audience after his remarks, and so at around 1.30, members of our staff will come down the aisles to pick up question cards from each of you, and I hope that you will share your questions with us. Professors Bob Axelrod and Alan Stam will select questions along with two of our graduate students, Christina Hajj and Cynthia Rathanasamy, and then we will be able to have a question and answer session with General Hayden. And so with that, I ask you to please welcome me and join in inviting General Hayden to the podium for his remarks. General. Well, Dean Collins, thank you very much for that kind introduction. You may have noticed in the short biography that I am not a graduate of the Air Force Academy, all right? But I would ask you to take it easy on those cadets because in a year or two they'll be defending you. Thanks for the opportunity to be with you here this afternoon. It's really an honor to be part of this distinguished lecture series, and so I wanna be worthy of that honor and I wanna do and say something here this afternoon that adds to our national discussion and our debates about the world in which we find ourselves. And given the 11th anniversary of 9-11, I've asked if I could talk about law and policy and the war against Al Qaeda. And let me, in our military profession, we generally do bottom line up front. What I would hope to show to you in the next 35 minutes or so is that despite all the long knives and sharp political rhetoric, we have broadly arrived at a consensus as to how we wanna defend ourselves against this particular enemy. But that's the end of the story. Let me start it at the beginning. Let me start by actually referring to a mentor of mine, Brent Scowcroft. I worked for General Scowcroft in Bush 41's National Security Council and we've stayed periodically in touch. General Scowcroft had an article that he wrote for the Atlantic Council about two or three months ago in which he kinda described the world in which we're located now and compared it to the world in which he did most of his professional work. And the way he described it was that when he was in government, practically all the pieces on the board that he was concerned with were comprised of nation-states. And the way he nudged pieces around the board was what you and I today would call hard power as opposed to the current terms of soft power and smart power. Nation-states, hard power. And what Brent then goes to point out is that in this era of globalization, practically everything that's happened for the last two decades, the telecommunications or commerce or the internet, practically everything that's happened has tended to weaken the nation-state as opposed to the era in which he grew up, the era of industrialization, where practically everything, culturally, economically, trade-wise, politically, seemed to strengthen the nation-state. Just think back, I'm looking at the audience here, not all student age. Think back when telecommunications were such that they were either run by the state or were run by a state government monopoly. Remember those days? Everything seemed to strengthen the state. In this current era, everything seems to erode the power of the state. And there are lots of expression of this erosion of the power of the state and the pushing of power down below the state level to non-state actors, even in the direction of individuals. Lots of expressions of that. And terrorism is one, but it's not the only one. I mean, if we were here for a different topic, I think we could fill the space up this afternoon talking about cyber dangers, where someone in their mom's basement or their dad's garage can actually cause great harm. Again, the product of globalization pushing power down. On another day, we could talk about transnational crime and what's happening in Mexico and what that means for national security. Certainly not a state actor, but clearly it has security impact, not just on Mexico, but on ourselves as well. The third area in which this broad phenomenon of globalization pushing power down is terrorism. Hey, look, I can remember the day when a religious fanatic in a cave near the Hindu Kush was not an item of concern to any one of us here. But they are today because of this globalization, connectedness, connectivity, and power down. Now, even though everything I think General Scowcroft said is right, everything's moving in the direction of weakening the nation state, it is nonetheless the nation state that you and I turn to to defend us. We still give the nation state the monopoly on the legal use of violence in our own defense. And do you see the tension I'm trying to describe for you here? We have threats coming at us from new dimensions, from new directions. And we have old forms, nation states, to defend us. That, at the level of metaphysics, is what happened to us on the morning of September 11th, 2001. And the struggle of the nation state, ours, to deal with this new form of threat is, frankly, what it is I'm here to talk about. And this has been a struggle. As I've already suggested to you at the end of the day, I think we've kind of broadly worked it out, but there's still a lot of roughness on the edges as to how we want to defend ourselves against a very atypical threat. Now, everyone in this room knows where they were on the morning of September 11th. Okay, it's burned into your psyche the way for my parents' generation, December 7th, was burned into their psyche. I was the director of the National Security Agency. And along the East Coast, I mean, it was an absolutely gorgeous day. I don't think it got above 75 or so in the Washington, D.C. area. It was an absolutely cloudless sky. I remember staying up late the night before to watch Monday Night Football. It was actually the opening of what was then the new stadium in Denver. And like most of us in the Eastern time zone, that meant you weren't to work a little tired because you stayed up watching the end of the game. Nine o'clock or so, my executive assistant, Cindy Farkas, comes in and gives that first report that probably everyone in this room has heard. A plane has hit the World Trade Center. And even though I'm the director of the National Security Agency and I'm charged, you know, one of the team charged with your defense, my instinct was the same as yours. That's probably an accident. Probably a small plane. Probably a sport plane. I go on with my meeting. About 15, 20 minutes later, Cindy comes back in and says, plane hit the other tower. All right. Immediately, you know this isn't an accident. I know it's al-Qaeda, but I'll get to that in a minute. I turn to my executive assistant and said, get the head of security up here right away. And as the head of security got there, oh, maybe seven, eight, nine minutes later, fellow named Kemp. Kemp came in the door in my office and he's coming in that door. Cindy again, the executive assistant, is coming in through her door saying there are reports of explosions on the mall. Now that, like most first reports, turns out to be not quite accurate, but it is a reflection of the plane hitting, hitting the Pentagon. Poor Kemp's coming in. He doesn't even have a chance to talk. I just say, Kemp, all non-essential personnel out of the building now. So he does an immediate about face, makes the announcement, and our non-essential personnel, I mean, we're headquarters in addition to being the national security agency doing work at Fort Meade in Maryland, non-essential personnel begin to leave. I don't know exactly how many left, how many stayed. We have about 15,000 people to come to work there every day. Easily more than 5,000 stayed as essential personnel. If you've ever seen those photos of NSA, if you can't remember it, go check out one of those Will Smith movies, Enemy of the State, okay? You got pictures of NSA with two kind of high-rise buildings, okay? Those are our headquarters buildings. And for reasons that should be obvious to this group now, 11 years later, I said try to get everybody out of the high-rises. And we moved into a low-rider building, a three-story building, which is actually was our original ops building. And I went down there and blessedly, that's where our ops center was. That's where all the wires kind of came together for global communication. So in addition to being safer, it was the place I would want to be anyway, okay? So I went down there about 1030 or 1045, George Tenet called me. George was the DCI at the time, the head of CIA. George simply says, Mike, what do you got? And I said, George, it's al-Qaeda. We can already hear the celebratory gunfire in some of the things we were hearing, not literally celebratory gunfire, but you understand the self-congratulatory kind of conversations. Of course, we all knew this could only be the work of al-Qaeda. So we began to fight the war from the ops center in the low-rider building at Fort Meade. Got to be about dusk. And one of my folks came up to me and said, you know your counter-terrorism folks are a little off balance right now. You probably need to go talk to them. I said, that's a very good idea. I should have thought of that. I went to our CTC shop counter-terrorism center, okay? Which was in one of the high-rises near the top. And they could not evacuate because I don't know if you know this or not, but we actually do work at Fort Meade. It's just not the headquarters. We actually do an awful lot of our mission. I mean, so these folks have headsets on if you know what I mean, okay? They are doing real-time work and we can't afford the break in coverage, the break in continuity. If we say, hey, we're gonna move all your stuff and your files and we're gonna take you down. I mean, just impossible. So they're there in the high-rise. I come through, it's just about dusk. I can see the sky darkening through the windows in the office. Most of these individuals were Arab-Americans. And so you can imagine the professional trauma, the personal trauma, the national trauma that all of them must have felt. So I went through and I mean, there's no time to interrupt them. This is kind of like hand-on-shoulder time and keep it up, okay? Appreciate you being here. Just made my way through the office. I'm almost without a sound, but just trying to touch each one of the operators. While I was there, part of the NSA, National Security Agency Logistics Force was in the room. And they, remember, it's dusk, they were tacking up blackout curtains on the windows of this office building. In Glen Burnie, Maryland. I couldn't see it from that room, but if I'd have been about 150 feet higher, okay, now the building didn't go that high, but if I'd have been about 10, 15 stories further up, I could see Fort McHenry, which was one of the last areas of the United States to be bombarded by an invading enemy. And I had the thought, is there putting up the blackout curtains? Things are gonna be really different around here tomorrow. We have entered in to an entirely new era. We were gonna go fight an enemy, and let me use a little bit of my own history background. We were gonna go fight an enemy that did not accept the Treaty of Westphalia, you know, the one that kind of parsed out the world in Brent Scowcroft's chessboard, nation states, frankly they thought nation states were in a front to God because it interfered with the direct connection of the will of God to the will of the individual. They also rejected Geneva. The primary tenet of the Geneva Convention is the distinction between combatant and noncombatant. This enemy did not make that distinction for those they killed, and interestingly, they did not make that distinction for even themselves in that all of their adherents were combatants, jihadists, and a very narrow meaning of that word in their eyes. So kind of harkening back to how I began, here's a security structure built on Geneva, built on Westphalia, meeting an enemy that was constructed on neither of those premises. Beyond that, beyond that, we Americans had figured out how to make ourselves both secure and free. We had this formula that worked for more than two centuries of the life of the Republic. We divided stuff into bins, okay? We put all the foreign stuff over here, and we put all the domestic stuff over here. We put all the intelligence-derived information over here. We put all the law enforcement stuff over here. And now, here was an enemy living in the scene between foreign and domestic, between intelligence and law enforcement. For God's sake, one of the crews that hit one of the World Trade Centers stayed at a motel about four miles from my headquarters. Prior to the attack. So do you see the challenge? New kind of threat, old kind of institutions. How do you adapt the old institutions to the new threat? Two days after 9-11, I gave a talk to the NSA workforce. Actually, I gave a talk to an empty room. I was in front of a TV camera. And NSA being what it was, everybody could see me globally at their workstation. I still have a copy of the speech. I said some of the things you'd expect. Number one, job one is defense, okay? Attack characterization. Is there a second wave? What else is coming towards us? We'll play offense soon enough, but we're playing defense now. Defense. I know a lot of folks had some difficulty with their family members coming to work. One incident about one spouse kind of throwing herself across the front end of the vehicle saying don't go. And so I needed to say something about the people who were there. And what I simply said was, I wanna thank you for being here. I know you probably have family members who are really worried about you. Look on the bright side. 300 million Americans right now wish they had your job. And finally ended up, I really did end the talk up with this. I said, look, all free peoples, all free peoples have to figure out where in that kind of continuum between security over here and liberty over here, where it was they wanna kind of put their banner. And I said, we Americans, blessed by history, blessed by oceans, blessed by circumstance, we've always tended to put our banner way over here, close to liberty. What happened two days ago is gonna cause an awful lot of folks to think about picking that banner up and moving it down that continuum in the direction of security. So let me tell you what your job is. Your job is to keep America free by making Americans feel safe again. Did a graduation address at my alma mater, Duquesne, back in 2007. And I related something to the story I just told you and then concluded to the graduates, the goal was to keep our nation safe without changing our DNA as a people. That was really hard work. That was really challenging. That was really, really contentious. You've seen this played out politically. You've seen this played out in the national press. You've seen it played out currently with politicians, perhaps on the right side, criticizing the current president for not doing this, not doing that. You saw the current president, when he was running for president the first time, talking about we have lost our way, we have lost our values. You have the current attorney general. In 2008, talking about there must be a reckoning because of the way the previous administration had acted in the face of this new and unprecedented threat. But let me repeat my hypothesis. Despite the frequent drama at the political level, America and Americans have found a comfortable centerline in what it is they want their government to do and what it is they accept their government doing. It is that practical consensus that has fostered such powerful continuity between two vastly different presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, when it comes to this conflict. Let me start with the most fundamental continuity between the 43rd and the 44th presidency of the United States. Both have said we are at war. Both have said we are at war with Al Qaeda and its affiliates. I was watching President Obama's inauguration and carefully looking for signals with regard to this very fundamental thing. And he actually said we are a nation at war, which was somewhat satisfying for someone from my background, my point of view, but not definitive. I mean, no one would argue we are at war in Iraq. No one would argue we are at war in Afghanistan. I wanted evidence. He believed that we were at war with the groups that had attacked us on September 11th. In August of 2009, my wife Janine and I were in Phoenix, Arizona for the VFW convention. We were there almost in the front row and President Obama was the speaker. And the president explicitly said we are at war with Al Qaeda and its affiliates. In other words, remember that foreign and domestic law enforcement intelligence, they're here in the scene, how do we do this? The president was going to use, like his predecessor, all of the authorities he had in his backpack. He would use law enforcement authorities when they were useful, but he would not limit himself just to law enforcement authorities. He would actually use his authorities as commander in chief to wage war against a foreign enemy. I'm sure you all remember in 2009 and after just a few weeks in office, President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. By and large, I thought he was awarded because he wasn't President Bush, okay? And the Europeans wanted to confirm that fact. Okay? Do you recall his acceptance speech in Scandinavia? Do you recall the scene? I do, I watched it carefully. He had the president kind of at the podium here and he's reading his speech and the camera shots coming from here, okay? So we're seeing kind of the back of the president and then you're seeing the Nobel Committee and all the other dignitaries that have been invited. And there was a remarkable scene. And I've actually tested this on other folks and they remember it the way I do. So this is just not me wishing a circumstance here. As the president's giving his speech, you look at the facial expression of the people who had just given him the Nobel Prize and it looked as if every one of their dogs had been run over by a bus. I mean, they had the most somber, sad looks on their face because President Obama fundamentally was giving them a lecture on just war theory and how from time to time it was his responsibility to use force to protect America and Americans. I was invited to the German Embassy in the spring of 2007. So I've been director of CIA for about a year. Ambassador Sheri Roth was a German ambassador. I have to explain this. The Germans were in the chair of the European Union back in Europe. So as a matter of courtesy, Ambassador Sheri Roth, the German ambassador to the United States, would about every two weeks have the other ambassadors to the United States from the other states of the European Union over for lunch, okay? Germans in the chair, ambassadors to America from the EU States over for lunch. And he would then have an American come in and be the lunchtime entertainment, all right? The American would kind of give the lunchtime talk. I'm not sure who else was there. I suspect Secretary of State probably was invited once. Secretary of Defense was probably there. So now he invites me, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. So I get invited. I figure, okay, I got a representative from every country in the European Union there. What would make an interesting speech? I got it. Let's talk about renditions, detentions, and interrogations. So I did, okay? And I began the conversation, and I had a great staff at CIA. You are blessed as a people with the talent and morality of the folks who are in your chief espionage service. And I had a wonderful staff. They made great speeches. It was rare that I would let anyone go without the most irresistible temptation of anyone as to fool around with someone else's prose. So I would make changes. But this one was so important that an awful lot of it I just wrote. And I remember about page two or page three of that speech, I'm there about midway through lunch and you got about two dozen people in the room. I said, look, to make sure we're all clear here, let me tell you what I believe, what my government believes, and what I believe my nation believes. And then I gave the gathered European ambassadors four sentences. I said, number one, we are a nation at war. Two, we are at war with Al Qaeda and its affiliates. Three, this war is global in scope. Four, I can only fulfill my responsibilities to the citizens of my republic by taking this fight to that enemy wherever he may be. Four, war, Al Qaeda, global, take the fight. There was not another nation represented in that room who agreed with any of those four sentences. Now, I'm not saying they didn't believe it for themselves, they didn't. I'm telling you, they didn't think it was legitimate for us to believe that. And yet, you've had two presidents, the American Congress and the American court system, in essence, sign up to all four of those sentences. There's a fellow named Salah Nabhan. He died in September of 2009. He was killed by Navy SEALs in Somalia. He was the chief of operations for El Shabaab, which is the Al Qaeda affiliate in the Horn of Africa. Navy SEALs approached his convoy on helicopters. The SEALs did not dismount. The SEALs, according to the press accounts, made no attempted capture. The SEALs fired with and from the helicopters, destroyed the two vehicles, landed long enough to, in essence, swab up enough of him to make sure the DNA would prove they got the right guy, and then flew back to their carrier. I am willing to hazard to you the judgment that there is not an intelligence service in Western Europe who would have given us the intelligence to do what I just told you we did if they knew that's what we were going to do because of this fundamental disagreement that we believe we are totally legitimate in conducting a targeted killing outside of internationally recognized theaters of combat. Let's fast forward. Let's go to May, okay? In Abadabad, okay? The death had been long. You all know the story, right? You know, you're familiar? You know, we followed the carrier network. We built that up over years. The carrier led us to Abadabad. Leon Panetta, my successor is building up the case, trying to give the president enough confidence without getting too close to the target that you actually scare the target away. The president, in the face of somewhat ambiguous information, has to make a decision. We decide to go. The helicopters go. The first black cock hits backwash, remember? It crashes, snaps off its rotor. They go in, storm the house. They kill one of the carriers, Ahmad El Kuwaiti. They kill one of Bin Laden's sons. They go up to the second floor. They see Bin Laden, and depending on what version you're following now, the one we got from the White House right afterwards are the one that appears to be being narrated in this new book by this Navy SEAL. In any event, they shoot Bin Laden, right? And then they radio Geronimo, E-K-I-A. Geronimo Bin Laden, enemy killed in action. An event we all celebrated. They're somewhat satisfying for all of us. Particularly satisfying for folks in the American intelligence and special operations community who've been following him for a decade. But just permit me, forgive me, let me rerun that tape. Let me describe it for you in slightly different way. A heavily armed agent of the United States government. Facing an unarmed man, offering no visible resistance, shot and killed him. An unarmed man, wanted in the American judicial system for crimes against the United States. If you do not believe we are at war, you gotta read it according to narrative B. Only if you believe we're at war, do you understand that what the SEALs did is a perfectly legitimate action. And it was, and it is. And I'm no way suggesting it was not. But you understand what I'm trying to say. There's an underpinning here, we're at war. And so we've seen all these continuities between two very different human beings, President Bush and President Obama. We are at war. Targeted killings have continued. In fact, if you look at the statistics, targeted killings have increased under President Obama. Renditions, that's the extrajudicial movement of suspected terrorists from place A to place B. Our policy under President Obama is the same as it was under President Bush, is the same as it was under President Clinton. Powerful continuity. Guantanamo. I know President Obama said, shortly after taking office, he was gonna close Guantanamo in a year, but he did not. And why didn't he? He didn't because of a bipartisan political consensus in Congress supported broadly by public opinion that he shouldn't close it. Back to continuity because we Americans have kind of agreed on courses of action. Indefinite detention. Eric Holder wanted to try Hallie Cheikh Mohammed, the architect of 9-Eleven in New York. That didn't work out, all right? He's being tried by a military commission, which I'll get to in a minute, in Guantanamo. But when Attorney General Holder was asked, what if Hallie Cheikh Mohammed is acquitted in the Article III court in New York? And the Attorney General said, oh, we'll continue to hold him anyway as an enemy combatant. Indefinite detention, the same as his predecessor. Military commissions, as I said, the same as his predecessor. I mean, there's powerful continuity here. State secrets. The Bush administration was criticized for invoking the state secrets argument when many of the things I've just described for you have been contested in the American court system. And the Bush administration, in my eyes, rightly, said we can't argue about that in court because it will reveal things that are still protecting Americans. And despite a campaign that was based upon a very powerful promise of transparency, President Obama, and again, in my view, quite correctly, has used the state secrets argument in a variety of courts as much as President Bush. Now, I am personally grateful for President Obama using the state secrets arguments to stop some of these court proceedings because I am personally named in some of these courts. The one in which I am most personally named is something called, what President Bush called, the terrorist surveillance program, which the New York Times called the domestic surveillance program. I'm seeing a few people nod. This is about intercepting messages entering or leaving the United States that we believe were affiliated with Al Qaeda. Big expose in the New York Times in December of 2005. Pulled a surprise for the authors in the Times piece. Let's talk a little bit about that, this terrorist surveillance program, because I think it actually enlivens something I'm trying to describe for you. Remember I said foreign and domestic law enforcement intelligence, and I got an enemy here in the scene? The 9-11 Commission recognized that. The 9-11 Commission actually criticized my agency, NSA, for being a little too timid when it came to trying to intercept terrorist communications, particularly terrorist communications that might involve U.S. persons. In other words, communications, one end here in the United States. Remember I told you at 9-11, and I'm down in the ops building, and we begin to fight the war, and we gotta play defense, and then we're gonna play offense. As the director of NSA, you've got a fair amount of authority. You can kind of dial things up a little bit, you can get a little more aggressive within your own authorities. Now you can't be haphazard about this, you've gotta be thoughtful, you certainly have to tell Congress, but you've got authority. Well guess what I did about 11 o'clock in the morning of September 11th? If I had the authority to ratchet it up, I ratchet it up. I dutifully called George Tennant, remember George is the head of the American Intelligence Committee, actually called the House and Senate Intelligence Committees too. Said hey, I'm ratcheting it up. He said okay, good. I told George, hey, Hayden's ratcheting up. You're getting a bit more aggressive. Giving us a higher probability, we would intercept those kinds of messages that would tell us about the next attack. So I tell George this, I don't hear from George for two or three days. Then George calls me. Say, Mike, I was in with the President and the Vice President. I told him what you were doing. Now George was making a joke here. He said, I told him you were going to jail, Mike. The President or Vice President says, okay, well, bell them out. Okay. What George was saying was I was being more aggressive and that I was doing it within my authorities. He was then asked, can he do anything more? So George calls me. And George says, hey, Mike, I was in with the President and the Vice President. I told him what you were doing. They said, that's great, but can you do anything more? And I said, George, not within my current authorities, I can't. And George said, what could you do if you had more authority? He said, I'll get back to you. And I had it up with my people. We decided there were some things we could do, but I would need more authorization. It wasn't inherent in me as Director of NSA. We took it down to the President and the President using his Article II authorities as Commander-in-Chief, remember, we are a nation of war. We are against an opposing armed enemy force. Congress had already passed the AUMF, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, which is as close to a declaration of war as we will ever get in modern America. And the President, as Commander-in-Chief, then said, okay, Mike, you laid these things out. I think those are good. I want you to go do them. And I'm authorizing you to do them as Commander-in-Chief. And here's the Attorney General. He's signed off saying I have the authority to do that. I went back to Fort Meade and I took this question to my lawyers. Remember the framework we were talking about here? Remember, new kind of threat, old kind of structure. How do you adapt to the new reality? And I went to my three top lawyers serially, so I wouldn't get a group answer. And all three of them said, we believe the President has the authority to authorize you to do this. We believe the President, as Commander-in-Chief, can authorize you to intercept the communications we're describing. And operation, I can't go into details, but fundamentally, higher probability, you're going to intercept the communication, one end of which might be in the United States related to the al-Qaeda threat. The New York Times blew that story, as I said, in December of 2005. And there are tons of subplots. For those of you who follow this, remember the visit to Attorney General Ashcross Hospital Room at GW in March of 2004, and Al Gonzalez and Andy Card and Bob Mowers pushing back and Jim Coney, the Deputy Attorney General. I mean, if that intrigues you, write it on one of the cards, ask the question. In any way, this was incredibly contentious. Incredibly contentious. Now, was it legal? You bet. The FISA Appellate Court has ruled on this twice, and let me quote you one of the rulings from the FISA Appellate Court. It's called, in ray, sealed. We take as a given that the President has inherent constitutional authorities to conduct electronic surveillance without a warrant for foreign intelligence purposes. Okay, so in terms of lawfulness, I'm fine. Politically, this is a nuclear detonation. All right, going on in D.C. Okay, sorry, that's a long buildup. We're gonna fast forward the tape. We're now in 2008. Congress in 2008 is about to amend the FISA Act, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It's the law that governs everything I'm describing to you here. There are sharp debates. Senator Obama opposes the law, but later changes his mind, and votes for the amendment to the FISA Act. The FISA Act not only legitimated everything President Bush had told me, almost everything President Bush had told me to do under his Article II authorities as Commander-in-Chief, but in fact gave the National Security Agency a great deal, more authority to do these kinds of things. Sorry, that's a long and involved segue here to come back to the point as contentious as that was, as bitter as the fighting was in 2005 when the story broke. Legislation has passed three years later that not only legitimates it, but expands it. Why? Because frankly, I think we've got powerful, broad agreement that we've got to do some things differently. Now, I've made the point of the continuity between the 43rd and 44th President. Obviously, there are differences. The most primary difference, the most fundamental difference has to do with detainees. Recall when President Obama became President in one promise to close Guantanamo, something he was not able to do, but he also closed down CIA's black sites. The sites where we held al-Qaeda senior leadership for interrogation under special rules that were authorized by President Bush. That's a long and contentious argument and honest men differ as to the wisdom of that policy. Clearly, I was comfortable with it because for two or three years, we maintained the black sites although we had few people in them as I thought a necessary tool in the fight against al-Qaeda. President Obama on January 22nd directed that we close the black sites and also directed that all interrogations would be done in accordance with the army field manual, not in accordance with some of the techniques that CIA had approved. If you go to CIA.gov in your leisure time and go to our public affairs site and go to the messages to the workforce from January 22nd, 2009, I'm still the director, you can see my note to the workforce reflecting President Obama's executive order. What I said to the workforce was President Obama has given us exactly what we need. President Obama has given us clear lines within which he wants us to operate. These are different from the lines we had before but our only requirement is that the lines are clear and we will be as aggressive and as successful inside the new box as we were inside the old box. And so as director, one out of a sense of loyalty to the elected commander-in-chief, I was supportive but intellectually, personally I was supportive. What we need from the president is clear guidance. That's true and that remains true and I meant what I just said. But I never expected that we would actually get out as a nation of the detention business. I defy you to think of anyone we have captured and held outside of Iraq or Afghanistan since January 2009. We have given up detaining people. For those of you who've fallen closely along, there's been one, his name's Warsame. He was caught between Yemen and Somalia, he was kept on a US Navy ship for about six weeks. Other than him, I know of no other example. And much of our intelligence comes from detainees. This is the one discontinuity between the 43rd and the 44th president. We have made it so politically dangerous and so legally difficult that we don't capture anyone anymore. We take another option, we kill them. Now, I don't morally oppose that. This is an opposing armed enemy force and I certainly wasn't setting into our records my last two years as director because I only put two additional people in Guantanamo in 2007 and 2008. But we are losing the opportunity to interrogate and to learn about our enemy because I really do think we, plural, not just the president, not just CIA, we plural, this is the one area where we really have not yet worked out the consensus. And so we will not capture and detain and hold anyone that we are not convinced we can put into an Article III court at the end of the detention, which is a far cry from what the Geneva Convention, the laws of armed conflict, and the logic of being a nation at war suggests we should do. And so if I'm looking forward, all right, and I have a truth in lending here, I'm an advisor to the Romney campaign, but that's strictly it, an advisor, not an advocate. If we're looking forward, I actually expect there's gonna be some continuity between a president Romney and his predecessor, too, if that were to come to pass. I actually think in all of these things that seem to carry over from 43 to 44 will carry over to 45. The one additional one might be that we actually look for ways to capture and detain people without needing to be CSI Miami at a crime scene in order to create the predicate for a criminal case in an Article III court. I can actually envision someone considering, and please don't read this as the governor's intent, this is just me talking, I can actually envision someone saying, you know, we can actually put a couple more people in Guantanamo because we are a nation at war, and we do have the right to detain enemy combatants. So, as I told you, bottom line up front, amazing continuity. We've kind of found a center line. We're still arguing about this one thing, but by and large, we're kind of okay. Look at the targeted killing program. You know, the one I said most of our European allies kind of go this way, 72% of you think that's a good idea. It's hard to get 72% of Americans degree on anything. And 72% are strongly supportive of that effort. Let me give you one final point before we open it up to questions and answers, okay? And by the way, you just had a 39-year military officer talk to you for more than 40 minutes without a PowerPoint slide, huh? Come on. But if I had a slide, here's where I need it. And since I don't have it, I'm gonna do hand puppets, okay? If this is what we're doing now, everything I just described for you, there are renditions, the targeted killings, the state secrets, the indefinite detentions, the military commissions and so on. If this is what we're doing now, this, okay, that's kind of our level of effort, most of the things we used to worry about are up here. Okay? 9-11, up here. But what I'm saying is what we're doing now is stopping this kind of stuff. 9-11. Bojinka, airliner plot over the Pacific. East Africa embassies, up here, okay? 2006 airliner plot out of the United Kingdom, you know, the reason you can't take your aftershave through the TSA checkpoint, okay, okay? Al Qaeda really wants to do is that mass casualty attack against the iconic target. And because of this, you know, 11 years of this, I'm an intelligence officer, we're inherently pessimistic, so I never say never, but it's really hard to imagine how they pull this off, okay? So what are we seeing now? We're seeing some stuff down here, okay? We're seeing that mope down the road, Umar Farooq al-Dumitadab on Christmas Day, 2009. Remember? We're seeing Najibullah Zazi, driving from Denver to New York, to try to put explosives in the New York subway system. We're seeing a drive-by shooting at an Army recruiting station in Little Rock, Arkansas. We're seeing Major Hassan at Fort Hood. Do you see what I'm trying to describe? Secretary Napolitano, the Secretary of Homeland Security, would probably wouldn't put it the way I'm gonna put it, but what I'm gonna tell you now is I think a very fair assessment of what she has said publicly. Future Al Qaeda attacks against America are gonna be less well-organized, less complex, less likely to succeed, less lethal if they do succeed, because of this, because Hayden's left arm here. They're just gonna be more likely. And if you look at these kinds of attacks down here, I know we're gonna go watch an American football game tomorrow, but bear with me while I speak for a moment about what the rest of the world calls football, okay? This is penalty kicks, no matter how good our goalie is. Sooner or later, this ball is going in the back of the net. So now the question I have for you, you know, when I started this, I talked about consensus and continuity and new threats and old structures and we gotta make adjustments. Now I got one for you. Given what I just told you, not likely to happen, probably will, what do you want me to do with my left arm? That's I can move it. I can push it down. I can actually work to make this less likely than it is today. But the question I have for you is, what of your privacy? What of your convenience? What of your commerce do you wanna give up? As I push that arm down. I'm not a free agent here. I'm your servant. You gotta give me some guidance. Put very candidly, how much more you wanna take off? Take off when you go through the line at the airport. Okay? And what we need as a nation going forward is the continuation of the very tough, and sometimes overly bitter conversation we've had to get us here. Do you want us to get more likely to do this? Or are you willing to live with that? And if you're willing to live with that, and frankly if you ask me my personal view, I kinda am, if you're willing to live with that, we kinda metaphorically have to kinda shake hands. Because if we say no, this is about as far as I want you to go to guarantee my security. You've done some new and creative things and I'm broadly comfortable with most of them, although I'm probably some in the room or not, but you get the point. And I'm saying well I can do more, but you gotta let me know. And you say no, we're kinda cool, leave it where it is. Patriot acts far enough, okay? Then you have to have the understanding that when bad things happen, bad things happen. No one did anything wrong in terms of the people defending you, okay? Nothing's broke, it's just the natural consequence of balancing a free society's liberty with its security. That's where we've been, we've worked a lot of it out, we still have some homework assignments, and that's why I came to kinda share that with you, because only an informed citizenry can inform the government where it is you want your security services to be as we go forward in a world that is still quite dangerous. And with that, let me stop and I'd be happy to take any questions I may have generated. Good afternoon, sir. My name is Christina and I'm a master's student at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Thank you for being here. Thank you. I'm going to read the first question from the audience. There have been reports that al-Qaeda units have been operating alongside the Free Syrian Army in the Syrian conflict. Given that the U.S. was discreetly supporting the FSA, how does the U.S. and allies avoid supporting al-Qaeda? Everyone hear the question? Try it again, Christina. Okay. There have been reports that al-Qaeda units have been operating alongside the Free Syrian Army in the Syrian conflict. Given that the U.S. has been discreetly supporting the FSA, how does the U.S. and allies avoid supporting al-Qaeda? Okay. Syria, al-Qaeda growing in strength. You want to support the opposition to Assad but now part of that opposition appears to be al-Qaeda. What do you have to do? This is the kind of question that makes me delighted I am out of government. Okay. This really is a problem from hell. What you have in Syria now, and I'll be very efficient, but just a moment's background. What you have in Syria now is the opposition against the Assad regime, playing out on cell phone videos and you and I are watching it every night. All right? And then the popular image of that is the oppressed against the oppressor. And that's true, okay? But there's another storyline, and this is where intelligence comes in, telling the policymaker it's not just what you're seeing. It's not just oppressor and oppressed. This is Sunni Alawite. This is sectarian. And there are a bunch of other groups in Syria, Druze and Christians and Kurds, who have not yet voted. They are not yet part of the opposition. In fact, it kind of trend towards the Assad regime because it's the devil they know. Until those other groups vote, okay? Oppressed and oppressor, as true as it is, isn't the defining narrative. It's Sunni Alawite, al-Qaeda Sunni. This is an absolute magnet drawing al-Qaeda into this fight against the Alawites who are an offshoot of Shia Islam, okay? The longer this goes, in my view, the more the al-Qaeda character of the opposition grows, which is a really dark picture, which then would suggest to you, well then we gotta act more quickly before this becomes a real al-Qaeda flavored movement. But I've already told you, it's not yet just oppressor and oppressed, it's sectarian. You wanna get involved in another sectarian conflict? So it is quite a dilemma. The scenario you laid out is correct though. Al-Qaeda is there, and al-Qaeda will grow in strength. It wouldn't naturally grow in strength. These guys are prepared to die. These guys are prepared to kill. If you're fighting someone you think is your oppressor and somebody shows up saying, I'm ready to die, I'm ready to kill, you're gonna hug them. And you're not gonna ask too many questions. And the longer this goes, I fear the more that's gonna be the reality. Hi sir, my name is Cynthia Rathinasami, also from the Ford School. Thank you for being here today. Next question is, as the US is fighting groups that do not wear uniforms or insignia, and do not honor Geneva, our response includes attacking targets that are often alongside non-combatants, especially when the CIA uses drone strikes. Are we not irreparably damaging Geneva? What could this mean for a conventional war in the future? Yeah, it's impossible for me to comment on specific operations, all right? So let me just couch my answer and I'm just talking about technology, all right? And so we're not doing specific operations by specific agencies and specific parts of the world. But as an airman, remember, 39 years in the Air Force, the drone, the UAV, I'm sorry, the drone's a popular term. We say RPV because we really do think there's a pilot. He's just remotely piloted vehicle, all right? It gives you an unblinking stare at the target. This is not a fast-moving F-15 or F-16 at 400 knots that has to make a decision in a matter of a few seconds to engage or not engage. An RPV over a target can be there for hours, if not days, and can give you almost a God's eye view of the circumstances. Are you sure that's who you believe it is? How are they behaving? Are there any non-military age males there? Are there any females there? When was the last time you saw females there? When was the last time you saw non-military age males there? If we were to attack this, what weapons would you recommend? Why wouldn't you use a smaller weapon? What if you use that weapon coming in from the northeast as opposed to the southwest? Give me the probability of death or injury coming this way as opposed to that way. I mean, do you see what I'm trying to describe for you? It gives you the opportunity to be almost exquisite in your precision. And so I think in one sense, I'm kind of rejecting the premise of the question that the use of RPVs, UAVs, is kind of a collateral damage engine. In fact, it's quite the opposite. It actually gives you the opportunity to be to an incredibly high standard to avoid collateral damage. Given that the war on al-Qaeda has focused in recent time on Pakistan and the diplomatic difficulties that have ensued, what do you think is the future of the strategic partnership between America and Pakistan? Most Pakistanis are concluding that the differences are now irreconcilable. Yeah, the question was about US-Pakistani relations. This is something we've worked on a lot. The current chief of army staff there, Ashfaq Kayane, was my counterpart. He was head of the Pakistani Intelligence Service for most of my time as director of CIA. Wonderful man, wonderful officer. As you might imagine, I went to Islamabad more than once during my time as director, because this is a very important relationship, a very important country. I would go to Islamabad for a variety of reasons. And I would generally fly with a C-17 and we had a little comfort pod in there. So it kind of had like airline chairs, even though it was a transport aircraft. They would give me briefing books like that. And I'd have all 17 hours in route to read the books and master whatever topic. We were gonna go talk to General Kayane or his successor, Ahmed Shouja Pasha, about. Now hold that thought. What constitutes Pakistan? What's the glue? What's the fundamental glue that keeps Pakistan together? You and me, we're together because of an idea, frankly. It's not blood. I'm looking out here. It's clearly not blood, all right? Not even history. It's belief in a political principle. And you get to be one of us by saying, yeah, I agree with that and I'll raise my right hand and I'll sign, okay? What makes a German? In that case, it's kind of blood, okay? I mean, you could be an individual of Turkish descent, third generation in Germany, you're kind of still a Turk. You could be a German living in the Crimea since the middle of the 19th century and you're a German. So I understand what makes a German. What makes a Pakistani? I come up with two things. It's not India and Islam. And I don't mean to make a lie to this and I'm oversimplifying it, so let me beg forgiveness to begin, but there's a point to be made here. It's not India and it's Islam. Okay, back to my C-17, right? My stack of binders. I'm mastering the case. We landed Islamabad. I go to Raul Pindi. I talk to General Kioni. No matter what's in those books, fundamentally, what it is I'm trying to convince General Kioni or his successor, General Pasha. Remember what constitutes Pakistan? Fundamentally, I'm trying to convince him of two things. One, quit obsessing about the Indians. Two, let's you and me talk about making war on this particularly valiant slice of Islam. That's a really hard conversation, don't you think? So fundamentally, that, I mean, this is really basic. This is almost primal. It gets in the way of creating a constructive relationship with the Pakistanis. It's just hard work. And by the way, I hope you understand, I'm not blaming anybody, okay? It's just the nature of reality at this moment. What effect will sequestration, if it actually occurs, have on our defense capability? Sequestration, what effect would have on our defense capability? Secretary Panetta has said catastrophic. I agree with Secretary Panetta. This is another half trillion over 10 years. The Department of Defense has eaten a half a trillion. And fundamentally, in a fairly orderly way, it probably can eat some more cuts, but it can't digest them the way sequestration says to digest them, which is take every account and take 11% out of it. Imagine your own household account, okay? You got less money, okay? But no, no, you can't juggle the money. You just gotta take 11% out of everything you have. Do you know what happens if you're 11% short on your mortgage? That's kind of what sequestration does to the Department of Defense, okay? If we are at war with al-Qaeda and its associates, how will we know when we have one and what will it signify? Okay, you see, I had notes here. You saw me going back occasionally, make sure I wasn't wandering too far. And right here, this is the last page, all right? How do I know I'm done? That is a really good question. That was gonna be the one after my left arm thing, okay? And I figured I'd used too much of your time and I wanted to leave more space for that. So I'm happy that someone brought that up. You know the real answer is? I don't know. And that's a really good question. And it's a question you should continue to ask folks like me, maybe not necessarily retired folks like me, but people still kinda doing what it was I was doing. How do I know that we are safe enough that it is time for us to shift out of that we are at war model and go back to more traditional ways of keeping us safe. That's based upon an intelligence judgment. It's based upon our judgment with regard to the resilience of al-Qaeda and the reach of al-Qaeda. Let me add additional thought. And this is Americans talking to Americans, okay? Do you know the degree of political courage that would be required of a national leader to say, I think we're done, we're gonna scale back on this thing? I mean, that's way up there in the real hard to do box. Because you make yourself, frankly, politically vulnerable. And therefore, if we ever get to that point, it really will have to be based upon a national bipartisan consensus. It can't be if I stop doing this, I got an exposed right flank because it will always be an exposed right flank, right? And so back to the point I was trying to suggest to you, this has gotta be the product of a very sincere dialogue among people. It's kind of like the left arm thing, you know? Okay, Hayden, I want you to raise your left arm this time. I know I'm creasing the odds, but we're shaking on it. We understand, we're all in agreement. And that's fundamentally what that question is. And we are not at that point in my judgment. That point will come someday and we will have to have the courage to address it. What are other departments in our government doing in ways that are on a diplomatic level to deal with al-Qaeda? Is there anyone to deal with? Yeah. What are other departments of our government doing to deal with al-Qaeda and are there other ways to deal with it? I'm gonna take that question and run it about 20 degrees right here and just kind of answer the question. I wish that question was, okay? Yeah, you had me talking about targeted killings and renditions and Guantanamo and saying, hey, that's not gonna happen, we're really safe, right? What I'm describing for you here is that in dealing with today's threat, in dealing with that human being who's convinced he wants to do you harm, your government's really good. And it really is, okay? We really have kept the republic safe. We've kept it so safe, and this is the dark side. They often don't come at us. They come at other people now. They don't come here. That's a byproduct, it's not intended, it's a reality, but we have kept you safe. But in American military terms, we would call that the close fight. That's the one we're fighting today. That's about the guy who's already convinced he's gonna come kill you. There's a deep fight here. The deep fight is about the production rate of people who are gonna come try to kill you in six, 12, 18, or 24 months. And as successful as we've been on the close fight, not so good on the deep fight. Now, we did this in the Cold War, remember? Man, we had large armies in Europe. Ambassador, I know a bunch about this. We were defending the folder gap in southern Germany. Best army in Germany, the American one. Defending the best scenery, Bavaria, okay? But while we held the Soviets, we also had this deep ideological conflict with them. Did we not? And we won that one. Now, whatever it is you think of communism, I think it's a pretty bad theory of history, let alone a bad theory of government. You cannot argue that communism is a Western philosophy. It was written by a German in a library in London. And so in the Cold War, while we're kinda holding in the close fight, we're scrumming it up here in the deep fight ideologically and we got authenticity. This is about a Western philosophy. Now, fast forward to this war. We're doing real well in the close battle. These guys convinced them wanna kill us, we're stopping them. The production rate, though, back here, is fundamentally about one of the world's great monotheisms. It's fundamentally about Islam and what it really means. And we don't have a lot of authenticity in that thing. No, I know, I know. We're a multicultural society, but fundamentally, we have European and African roots and we're Judeo-Christian in our outlook. So it is very hard for us to get seriously involved in a dispute out here about the meaning of the Quran or the Hadith and telling the Ummah, the general body of believers, that they should believe something different. In fact, we probably make it worse as soon as we engage in that fight. And so for 10 years, we got bupkus out here. We're not doing much. And then 18 months ago, something happened. His fruit merchant set himself on fire in Tunisia and you had this wave of protests and revolution. Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen. The heartland of al-Qaeda. And al-Qaeda was absolutely irrelevant to it. I don't mean al-Qaeda won't exploit it, but it was irrelevant to the movement. And what was this movement about? This movement was about responsive governments, responsible governments, transparent governments, the rule of law, democracy, voting, wait a minute. Wait, we know some about this stuff. As disruptive as the Arab Awakening has been. As in the near term and midterm caused us some serious diplomatic and maybe even counter-terrorism challenges, over the longer term, it has created a new dialogue in this deep fight. A dialogue about which we have genuine legitimacy and can offer views. And so in my personal view, for the first time, we actually can engage in this deeper ideological conflict in a way that we never have before. So at the end of the day, what that means is other elements of the American government, besides your intelligence and security services, besides the Department of Defense and the CIA, need to get into this diplomatically, politically, economically in order, and again, it's not ours to control, it's not ours to shape, but at least foster a positive movement out here about which we never had an opportunity for the first nine years of this war. General, this will be the last question. How does the new phenomenon of homegrown terrorism fit into the enemy non-combatant categories? Yeah, that's a great question, because up here and here and a lot of these were homegrown. A lot of these, Faisal Shazad, Times Square, homegrown, US citizen, okay, not even Green Card, US citizen. Major Assan, US military officer. I guess the first thing I'd point out to you is that this problem is not zero, all right? This homegrown, self-radicalized issue is not zero. But whatever the number is, it is much smaller than it is in many other countries in the West. We do not share the kind of problem, for example, that the British have with their population. Why is that? Because your CIA's better? No. It is that way because of who we are. We are an immigrant people. We are far more accepting of immigrant groups. We are actually fairly well-practiced at assimilation. The average Islamic income in the United States of America is above the national average, all right? So there's no reason to despair about this, but there will be issues. This is where that we are at war, or is this a law enforcement problem, really becomes sharp-edged. In my personal view, it would be the incredibly rare case where a US, nah, let me be careful here, where American citizen doing something within the United States triggers the we are at war approach as opposed to the law enforcement approach. I'm trying not to be absolute here because I can't imagine all future circumstances, all right? But here, my sense is in that balance, okay, that going in position is, this is a job for FBI, not CIA, okay? This is a job for the Michigan State Police, not the Department of Defense, okay? By the way, by and large, most of the information we knew, okay, we knew about Umar Farouk Abdul-Muttalib, the guy coming into Detroit, was all foreign derived. I frankly think it was a mistake to mirandize him after 50 minutes because our base of knowledge of him is foreign intelligence. To me, the right entry point was, enemy combatant, nation of war, deal with it that way. On the other hand, if someone is discovered and prevented in an attack in the United States by the FBI, the roots of that information are law enforcement derived. The going in position is, we ought to treat this as a law enforcement problem and enter this into the American court system. I suppose if we stayed here long enough, we could think of exceptions, but in broad measure, my sense is that's how we should deal with it. Well, I hope I've made it worth your while coming here this afternoon. I hope you've left with more questions than you had when you came in, that was my intent. And thank you very much for the opportunity and go Air Force. Thank you so much, General Hayden, for your candid, clear and thought-provoking presentation and also for your insights on such very important issues. I'd also like to thank the audience for their thoughtful questions. In a moment, we'll adjourn and I hope that all of you will join us just across the walkway in the Alumni Center for a reception. But with that, please join me once again in a final applause to thank General Hayden. Thank you.