 Welcome to the New America Foundation. I'm Peter Bergen. A lot of great pleasure to introduce Stan Claiborne, whose book, Kill or Capture, is spectacularly good. Dan is a special correspondent for Newsweek and The Daily Beast. He was Newsweek's managing editor from 2006 to 2011. He was the magazine's Washington bureau chief between 2001 and 2006. He was also a Ferris professor at Princeton University in 2010. So Dan is going to speak for 20, 30 minutes about the big themes of his book. I'll engage him in some Q&A and then open it up to you. Thank you, Peter. Hi. Thank you. You all hear me well? Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. Great. Thank you, Peter. Thank you, first of all, for having me here. This is a terrific institution. I'm thrilled to be here. I have to say, for all of you baseball fans out there, Miguel Cabrera just won the Triple Crown. But in my world, Peter is the winner of the Triple Crown for what we do. He is a brilliant analyst. He's a great reporter. What I love is that he's still a reporter. And he's a marvelous storyteller and manhunt. It's just a terrific book. And so I'm especially honored to be here and to be questioned by you. So thank you. I thought that since we're a month out from the election and national security has made a kind of dramatic late entry into this race, I would talk about Obama. He's the central character of my book. And talk a little bit about what I learned about him in the course of reporting the book. At the very least, I think he serves as a good kind of organizing principle to lay out the themes of killer capture and to illuminate the administration's strengths and weaknesses in prosecuting the war on terror. And the first thing I would say for anybody who sets out to write a book about this president, it's enormously challenging. He is a such an elusive and complicated figure. It's not that he's opaque. He's sort of an open book in a lot of ways. But he is, you know, he lives in a world full of contradictions and he embraces those contradictions. And he tends to gravitate toward nuance and complexity. And I think that was particularly true in his first year when he was trying to sort of searching to figure out his MO in his approach to the fight against al-Qaeda. And to answer a set of questions that are really vexing. And so what I tried to do with this book is to the extent that I could sort of lift the curtain back and get a sense of that personal struggle is to sort of reveal that and how he sort of wrestled with, and in some ways in very anguished ways, sort of pitting morality and law against security, politics against principle. And that's really sort of the story of my book, writ large. As I thought about Obama and as I reported on him, I sort of started thinking of there being more than one Obama for the purposes of my story, sort of three Obamas. And so I thought I would go through those facets of his persona. And they are just quickly Obama the law professor, you know, who promised to develop a new legal framework for fighting the war on terrorism. But who also, as a law professor, has a kind of a cerebral and at times detached side to him, which is relevant. Obama the Paul, and in some ways that might be his weakest link. He, you know, not temperamentally suited to the kind of jaw boning and arm twisting that is sometimes necessary, particularly in dealing with Congress. And that's part of my story as well. But also, and this is on the positive side, someone who could be pretty ruthlessly pragmatic when he was balancing many, many priorities and difficult choices. And he got criticism for some of that. But I see that as actually a good thing. And then there's Obama the warfighter. And that was naturally the least developed aspect of his personality. Because he didn't have any experience in that realm. And, but he did come in with certain instincts that I think that I think many of us didn't appreciate when he was running. We couldn't have because we couldn't see it. And I would say you can't disentangle any of these aspects of his sort of presidential profile. They are, you know, sometimes he drew on all of them. Sometimes they were more harmoniously in balance with each other. And other times he sort of doubled down on one aspect of his personality for good or for ill and less on the others. But they are all there and all part of who he was as president and who he is as president and as the commander in chief in the war on terrorism. So let me take them in order. Just talk very briefly about Obama the law professor. In his first year of his presidency in particular he really struggled with these issues. Particularly the issues of, you know, balancing security and liberty and some of the complicated legal questions surrounding the kind of reform that he wanted to make. Sometimes to the point of anguish, which really surprised me in my reporting. He was extraordinarily and deeply involved in kind of creating this, trying to create this new sort of legal architecture. I was amazed at the number of meetings he attended at the kind of legal seminars that he put on with his advisors. Hours and hours, you know, justice department lawyers would come over because there was an important legal brief that they had to file. We're talking about in maybe March of 2009. And in some of these early briefs they were essentially laying out their positions on the war on terror. What they could do, what they couldn't do, who they could kill, who they couldn't kill, detention. And he was, you know, really involved in these questions. And, you know, about what authorities he had, fretting over the precedents that he might leave behind. And, you know, there are a lot of people out there who would criticize him for this, you know, pedophogging, you know, risk averse lawyer. That's not what we need when we're fighting against a brutal nihilistic enemy. I disagree with that. I think it was enormously impressive in a lot of ways and reassuring. After eight years when lawyers, you know, didn't get the memos, were left out of meetings and were effectively marginalized. I wouldn't say eight years. I should revise that. Certainly the first few years of the Bush administration in this area, lawyers were somewhat pushed aside. I think it was important for the president to set this tone, to restore lawyers to this process. You can debate about whether they got the equilibrium right, but it was an important thing to do. Just one quick example from the book. You know, fairly early on Obama's advisors realized that closing Guantanamo was going to be a lot, much more of a challenge than they had anticipated. They should have realized that before they came in. They probably should have realized that before Obama made the promise. But then again, John McCain was making the same promise and everybody else pretty much was. They were confronted with one insoluble problem from the outset in Guantanamo, which is there was about 50 detainees, I think it was 48, who could not be released or transferred either because they were simply too dangerous, there wasn't a case that you could make against them. You couldn't prosecute them because either they had been subject to brutal interrogation techniques or because they simply wasn't strong enough evidence against them. The intelligence was strong and that they were dangerous, but you couldn't make a case in court. So what are you going to do with these 50 or so detainees? Well, after a lot of debate within the administration, the determination among Obama's advisors and they believed that Obama was behind them on this was that they would simply have to be held indefinitely without trial. Well, that was going to be controversial. The base of the Democratic Party was not going to be happy about that, but there was really no choice as Obama's advisors saw it. So in a meeting in July of 2009, Greg Craig, the White House Counsel at the time, Jim Jones, the National Security Advisor, they bring Obama essentially an executive order. It's a detailed memo that lays out indefinite detention without trial for this set of legacy detainees as they called them, not for anybody that they captured in the future, but for the new detainees. And they expected Obama to sign it. They give it to him. He reads it over, leans back in his chair. He says, you know, guys, you've done excellent work. You've clearly thought this through. It's very impressive, but I'm not sure I can go there. I'm just not sure I'm prepared to do this. And here was the president as constitutional lawyer talking to them about what he thought was a policy that really violated basic principles of American jurisprudence justice. But he said an interesting thing. He said, I'm not sure I want to leave a loaded weapon lying around. And for the lawyers in the room, they were mostly lawyers, they realized that Obama was quoting, and not to get too academic here, but Obama was quoting Justice Robert Jackson's famous dissent in the Korematsu, the notorious Korematsu Supreme Court case, which was when the Supreme Court upheld the Japanese and German program during World War II. And what the president was saying, I think the quote is, precedent lies around like a loaded weapon. What the president was saying was, I don't want to leave those kinds of powers behind. If I sign this order, it'll mean that every president who comes after me will feel that they can do it. And I'm not sure I want to leave future presidents with that kind of power. Now mind you, he was supremely confident in his own ability to have that power. But he was worried about his successors. Then he said, a particularly prescient thing politically, he said, I'm not sure, he said, what, you know, Mitt Romney may be the next president. And I'm not sure I want to leave that kind of power with Mitt Romney. I think that is all impressive. Ultimately, he did sign off on a limited indefinite detention policy. It took another year, at least before he signed off on it, but he did. He has not enshrined indefinite detention in law. He's not gone, never went to the Congress. He has not held anyone indefinitely other than those who remain at Guantanamo. The downside of Obama's, you know, the sort of law professor side of Obama is that in this, you know, balancing of all of these difficult issues, whether it was detention policy or, you know, where to try the 9-11 defendants, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he tended to vacillate and temporize. And he bobbed and weaved between his advisors and played for time in the sort of ever diminishing hope that the politics would turn his way. He was indecisive. He could not make these decisions. He had, you know, certain people, the political types whispering in his ear that he had to do these things. He had, you know, Eric Holder, the attorney general, or Valerie Jarrett, or frankly, I suspect Michelle, the first lady telling him that he needed to stay true to his first principles, and he had an extremely hard time making decisions. And he was elusive to his own advisors, and that created confusion about who was in control of policy, about what the president really believed. And in that vacuum, his advisors fought brutally over these issues, and each side invoked the president's support in his cause because they all believed that Obama was on their side. And that led to more delay. And I was really amazed at the amount of kind of dysfunction and animosity over these issues in the halls of the White House. In fact, one of the stories I tell is a sort of extraordinary confrontation between Eric Holder and David Axelrod, where they nearly came to blows, I mean literally. And Valerie Jarrett, who was nearby, kind of materialized, her sense of decorum disturbed, and she got in between, literally got in between them and said, you guys have to take this out of the hallway. So there was an enormous amount of tension over these issues, not surprisingly in some ways, because they're very, very difficult, and, you know, but partly because people didn't know where the president stood on some of these issues. The other problem with that law professor side of his personality is he could, at times, it was sort of temperamental, he could seem detached in response to the threat to terrorism. He was, you know, sort of not enough, too much the law professor, not enough the warrior. And I think everyone remembers the underwear bombing incident, Christmas Day 2009, when it took Obama three days before he came out to address the American people. And David, when I interviewed David Axelrod, he sort of fell on his sword. He said, you know, I apologize to the president afterwards. That was my fault. I told him not to come out. You know, he needed to decompress after a very difficult year. Well, you know, that may be, but I think it was also Obama's instincts. I think it was his intellectualized approach to these issues. I believe that he sincerely believed, and I commend him for this in some ways, that we had to sort of, as he would put it, break the fever that moved beyond the politics of fear. And what kind of a message would it send if the president, you know, every time there's an unsuccessful terrorist attack, the president comes rushing out to the microphones. That's what happened during the Bush years. He wasn't going to do that. What he didn't fundamentally understand at that point in his presidency was the symbolic powers of the commander in chief to calm a fearful public. And that was a real turning point moment for this White House. I think it took a real psychic toll on Obama's advisors. And I think they sort of saw Obama's presidency flash before their eyes, because if that had been successful, and 300 some-odd civilians had died, they saw that as being, you know, the presidency ending. And so that had a tremendous impact going forward. And I think had something to do with the administrations, the White House as being less forceful in trying to deal with some of these complicated rule of law issues, having nothing to do with how aggressive they were in fighting the war, the kinetic war, which I'll talk about in a minute. And then there's related Obama, the politician. And you always have, I always had to remember when I was writing about this, because I am critical of him that he did inherit a, you know, a historic financial crisis. The economy was still in free fall. His advisors were telling him that, you know, in early 2009 that we really could fall into a depression if we didn't find a way to break the trend. And that kind of atmosphere that they were working in inside the White House, you just can't discount that. And you can't think about some of the other things he did in a vacuum. That context is important. And it is also pretty clear that the politics of fear still had a pretty strong grip on the American people and on Congress. And so the president, his political advisors, saw the, I mean, you know, hysterical reaction. I mean, I can't think of a better word, the hysterical reaction to some of the proposals that they were talking about in those first few months and on these rule of law issues. And this is critical. We're not just talking about the Republicans. We're talking about Democrats and not just Democrats, liberal Democrats. What you would hear, what I heard and learned about some of the behind the scenes meetings where, you know, Barbara Boxer and Mikulski and, you know, they were running for reelection and really worried about what, you know, how terrorism and the sort of fear around it could affect their campaigns. That was real. All you have to do is look at one of the very early Guantanamo votes having to do with restrictions on bringing detainees to the United States, 90 to 6. You know, Obama could muster only six Democrats in that vote. Could he have gotten more if he had been more LBJ-like? You know, maybe. But, you know, that was heavy, heavy lifting. Let me talk very, how am I doing on time, by the way? Okay, okay. Let me talk very briefly about one episode that I think was a key turning point in terms of the politics and that is the story of the Uyghurs, which I'll tell very briefly. This is, the Obama administration realized pretty quickly that to close Guantanamo, the only way to do it was to convince our allies around the world to take some of these, a lot of these, detainees. They understood that if they were going to persuade the Germans and the French and, you know, whoever else to take detainees, we were going to have to do our part. And so there was a plan hatched early on to take a small number of Uyghurs. These were Chinese dissidents, Muslims who had been fighting against their oppressors in China. But there wasn't a lot of evidence, really very little at all, that they were wanted to attack America. And in fact, the courts had cleared them. They were all cleared for a release. And so there was a plan to bring a small number of them into the United States. There's a Uyghur community in Northern Virginia, and that plan fell apart. And, you know, I always thought it was amazing in some ways that Barakko, and I don't think I'm exaggerating here, in some ways Barakko Obama's efforts to reform the war on terror foundered on, you know, an obscure Turkic speaking people, you know, from the Northwest reaches of Central Asia. But what happened was it leaked to a newspaper, Frank Wolf, a backbench member of Congress from Northern Virginia, went to the House floor and started giving speeches about, you know, terrorists are coming to your neighborhood, he told his colleagues in the House. This was literally, this was the NIMBY explosion. This was the moment when Congress, you know, it was like a wildfire, just spread through Congress, and terrorists were coming to your backyards, and this is a terrible thing. And Obama just caved. He saw the reaction in Congress, and he said, we're not doing this. I'm not sure he'd been sufficiently briefed about it, although all of his advisors had signed on to it, Rahm Emanuel included. He said, no way we're not doing this. It's not worth the political capital. By this time they decided they were going to do healthcare reform, they weren't going to do it. Well, four Chinese dissidents who pose zero threat to the United States, and we didn't have the resilience to use a word that Peter and I sometimes use in this context, the political resilience to bring them to the United States. You could argue it the other way, which is what Rahm Emanuel was doing. We're going to let four Uighurs keep us from getting our domestic agenda through. Now there's no way we could know that. My guess is they could have walked and chewed gum at the same time, resettled the Uighurs, showed resilience toward Congress, but they didn't, and it was a subtle, maybe not so subtle sign to the Congress, to Republicans in Congress that this administration was not going to really aggressively engage them on these issues. It's hard to know what would have happened if they had at that moment decided, no, we're going to take on this fight, but they didn't, and I think that had some impact. I will start to wind down. I just want to say, Obama, the Uighurs didn't give up, but he, on these issues, I think he still believed that he could bring the country along, and he tried to do it in classic Obama fashion, which was to give a speech, and he gave a wonderful speech at the archives in the spring of 2009. It's really gorgeous, and I talked to Ben Rhodes, who described how Obama called him up to his office, to the Oval Office, and spent an hour literally dictating it to him, just unfurling it, paragraph after paragraph, because these issues were churning in his head, and he was thinking about them very deeply, and he said all the right things, but they didn't have the political muscle behind it, and ultimately it didn't really go anywhere. Ultimately the power of the president is the power to persuade, and he did it in his way to give a speech, change the political culture, but it fell short, and he was not able to do it, and here we are, four years later, Obama, Guantanamo, not closed, no real chance that it will close anytime soon, I don't think. Let me talk just briefly, and then I'll end about Obama, the warfighter. Obviously he had no experience, he had very little foreign policy experience, really no national security experience. One quick story in his spring of 2007, when he was just getting his campaign going, he invited Richard Clark over to talk to him about some of these issues, basically interviewing him, he was looking for a counter-terrorism advisor, and Clark tells this story about, Clark was very impressed with Obama, very much thinking along the same lines about how they had to fight a different kind of war, we'd compromise our values at Guantanamo and the prison cells of Abu Ghraib, we had to change the message to the Muslim world, we had to fight a much more sophisticated nuanced war against terrorism. What he didn't know about Obama was whether he was too much the kind of defeat intellectual and not enough the warrior, whether he didn't have this kind of in his gut, the sort of strength that you needed to have to fight this kind of war, the kind of, you know, the sort of, you have to almost have a kind of an adivistic warrior-like kind of thing, and he didn't know about that, so he said to Obama in this meeting, he said, you know, Senator, as President, you have to kill people, and he said, I'm not talking about just sending troops, you know, conventional armies into wars, you know the names and addresses of the people you have killed. Wow, well, Obama didn't say anything, he looked him in the eye, and very quietly, but very firmly he just said, I know that, and to Clark that was a moment where he sort of saw something, he saw a kind of a steeliness that he had not perceived before. A few months later, Clark helped him write the one counter-terrorism speech that he gave during the 2000 campaign, which Peter knows about and has talked about. This was at the Wilson Center August 1st, and there's a, the famous line from that speech is he said, if there's actionable intelligence and Musharraf in Pakistan, actionable intelligence to go after a high-value target and Musharraf won't do it, I will, and that was an important moment. It showed, you know, that as a Democrat, it had been a community organizer, and people had doubts about whether he was too squishy on these issues, that he was tough, he was going to do it, but there was another line in that speech that I hadn't noticed until I started researching my book that's as important and but less noticed. He said, I will ensure that the military becomes more stealthy, agile, and lethal in its ability to capture or kill terrorists, and we should have paid close attention to that line. I think people didn't realize how quickly, once he became president, how quickly and intuitively Obama took to the sort of the world of intelligence and special operations, and what I think Obama perceived early on was that these capabilities were very much in line with his basic approach to fighting the war on terrorism. You have to remember he was elected in part to end the wars of 9-11. He was going to end the war in Iraq, win decisively in Afghanistan, and then bring the troops home as quickly as possible. I think he realized already whether he was talking about drones or not, one of his advisors said he was already talking about drones, but the drones and seals and special operations would allow him to be more surgical, precise, and deadly in the face of these persistent and morphing threats while allowing the United States to lighten its footprint in this part of the world. That became essentially the Obama doctrine as people now talk about it. What he didn't want to do and what he's resisted, although not always successfully, and we can talk about Yemen and Mali and things that are happening now, is to get sucked into local insurgencies, civil wars. He wanted to remain, as he would later call it, AQ focused. He was a realist when it comes to foreign policy and national security. He wanted to be careful about identifying those interests and act accordingly. I think that has a lot to do with why he made the decision that he would personally sign off on many of the targeted killings, which is something that got a lot of attention that I write about in the book and that we can talk about. I have one last point. Do I have time for one last point? Okay. There's one last point, which is quick, but it does go to the larger theme about these different Obamas. This is one example where you might think that the law professor would overwhelm the warfighter, and it didn't. The Republicans early on in the first year, Dick Cheney in particular, attacked President Obama for having a pre-911 mentality, that he didn't fundamentally get that we were at war, that it was a criminal justice approach to fighting terrorism. By this time, we didn't know that he'd ordered whatever it was. You have the figures, twice as many drone strikes as President Bush had during the entire eight years of his presidency, and that he was well on the way to decimating the leadership of al-Qaeda. But this was the line from Cheney and the Republicans at the time. The best example of Obama embracing the war paradigm over a criminal justice approach was the decision to kill Anwar al-Aulaki, to put him on the kill list and then to have him killed. This was a fateful step for an American president, the premeditated killing of a United States citizen without trial or any judicial process. You might think that Obama, the law professor, would have been wringing his hands over this decision. To the contrary, this really surprised me in my reporting. I spoke to about a half a dozen people who advised Obama on this particular episode and very deeply involved in the decision. They all said essentially the same thing. Obama had no qualms about this. Now, this is something that will be debated for a long time. I'm not right now making a judgment as to whether that was good or bad. I'm just stating it as a fact based on my reporting that this is the way he approached this particular episode. He saw it as a necessary and lawful act of war to protect the lives of Americans. His lawyers at the Justice Department spent a lot of time studying these questions, whether you could do it under what circumstances, whether it was legal or not, constitutional, violated the Fifth Amendment, whatever. All of that work was kind of post-talk justification. He'd already made the decision by the time he got the legal opinion. He didn't lose any sleep over it. Thank you, Dan. One of the criticisms of the Obama administration is being that there were sort of selective leaks to journalists in order to paint the president as sort of either tough on Iran or tough on terrorists. Did you feel like there was an orchestrated campaign to inform you of these things or is that a fair criticism? No. There were times when I was reporting this book and wondering how the hell am I going to learn about how they make decisions about drones where I was hoping maybe I would be selected to be part of a White House campaign. But no, it didn't happen. I did it the old fashion way. I think people who make these charges, I think John McCain made these charges, a lot of politicians on the Hill, either don't know a whole lot about how national security reporting works or don't care and wanted to make a political point. The reality is that it's from the ground up. I've been reporting in this area for quite a long time, but I had to really work the national security bureaucracy, the intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies, and you work around the perimeter and you work your way in. If you're lucky and you get good material, eventually you can go to the White House and say, I've got this stuff and I'm going to tell this story and I'd like to get your perspective on it. In that situation, for the most part, the White House would not confirm things that were highly classified. I did not get that kind of help from the White House. The idea that this was an orchestrated campaign, first of all, to bolster the credentials, the national security credential of the president, well, to some extent my reaction is I'm shocked there's gambling in the casinos. The White House actually wants to make the president look good. Of course they do, but in my case, anyway, they didn't do it by leaking classified information to me. Right. The genesis of the book, David Sanger obviously wrote a book which covers some of the issues. He covers sort of more of the whole waterfront of national security issues. When you started thinking about the book, was it always your intention to focus on these kind of killer capture issues? Yeah, that's a great, it's an interesting question. You know, you sort of, this actually grew out of, and my agent Gail Ross is here, so she was very persistent and wouldn't have happened without Gail, but it grew out of actually a profile I did back in early 2009, the spring of 2009, summer of 2009, of Eric Holder, who I covered for a long time. I came up in journalism covering legal issues and I covered the FBI and the Justice Department and then over time started doing more national security. But I did a profile of Holder that was really built around his own involvement in making some of these national security and legal decisions. And the real tension and drama in that story was whether he was going to launch an investigation into the Bush era torture program. And it was kind of a window into those early tensions in the administration between the lawyers and the political people in the White House. Obama, as you may recall, didn't really want an investigation. He talked about wanting to look forward, not backward. And Holder, who's independent as an attorney general, felt strongly about, ultimately felt strongly about doing this. And so I wanted to sort of get at that tension. I realized that there was great drama in the conflicts within the administration over these national security decisions. So the book really began as sort of telling that story, but it evolved as the story, as what was happening out there evolved. And it became, I remember six months into it when I realized, oh my God, I'm going to have to tell the drone story. And frankly, I didn't have a lot of great sources in that area. So that was terrifying, but obviously it was a really important part of the story. So it then evolved in that direction. And it also became much more of an Obama story as time went on. Holder comes out of the book almost as sort of a tragic figure when I, as I read it, I mean, basically you lost every fight. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In some ways, definitely. He, it's interesting, you know, he survived. But I guess the question is, you know, is it the kind of survival that you necessarily want? He was ultimately, you know, he was in this area in the national security sphere, a lot of the things that where he put his money down, he wasn't able to achieve. The big fight for him was the decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in, in, in, in Manhattan. And that's an extraordinary story because he really had the Rahm Emanuel, very powerful chief of staff, trying to undermine him at every turn. And so much that he, that Rahm Emanuel was working with Lindsey Graham, a senator from the opposition party, to try to keep this from happening. And this was a classic example of the president sort of vacillating and floating above the fray and telling Holder one thing and telling others another. And, and ultimately it did not obviously succeed for Holder. I think he feels like he was able to keep his, you know, hold on to his dignity because he did what he believed was right. He lost but he fought the good fight. He had an interesting kind of personal struggle going on in some ways, which is that some of you remember that he was deputy attorney general under Bill Clinton. And at the tail end of the Clinton administration, it was, it was Holder who had kind of green-lighted the, the Mark Rich pardon, that very controversial pardon of the financial fugitive, got extremely just very, you know, criticized for that. His integrity was questioned. People said it was essentially a corrupt act and that he had sold his independence, you know, for political purposes. And I think he felt that he needed redemption. And I think part of what he did in the second, in the Obama administration was try to win back that, that, that redemption. This drove the White House mad because they thought he was on a kind of, kind of a personal G-head. G-head. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Brennan, obviously, you know, it's, how would you school him in terms of his importance in this administration? And maybe you also kind of zoom out a bit further and think about how important he might be compared to other people in the National Security Council staff. He seems to have almost a complete lock on many of these decisions, right? Yeah. You know, I don't think Brennan veers out of his lane a whole lot. But if it is in any way related to counterterrorism or, so he was involved also in many of the discussions about the troop surge and what was going on in Afghanistan, anything that's related to that larger war, he is an absolutely critical player in this administration. And that's partly because of his experience, because it is 25, 30 years in the intelligence community, but also because he and Obama just had a real connection. I mean, they didn't know each other. They didn't even know each other during the campaign. It wasn't until the transition when people were talking about Brennan as a possible CIA director that they met that ended up not happening because of the allegations that he had somehow been involved in some of the controversial Bush programs. But during the transition, Brennan flew out to Chicago and met at the Obama's transition office in Chicago. And they met really for the first time and they spoke for an hour, an hour and a half. They had some similar experiences in their background. They'd both traveled to Muslim countries when they were young. But the main thing was they were very, very much in sync on the sort of basic approach to the war on terror. This whole idea of being surgical and precise. And there was a phrase, I can't remember it right now, but a phrase that Brennan and Obama would use about not having a kind of a sweeping approach, but to be as surgical and precise as possible. And in that first conversation, Brennan talked to the president about the intelligence community's capabilities and they talked about drones. This was in the transition. And that relationship just continued. I mean, it was they were finishing each other's sentences. So Brennan and Haas Cartwright, the vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also had a kind of a similar relationship with Obama. There was a real kind of trust there. It was the two of them who would go, you know, after the National Security Council, after they had these civets meetings, these secure teleconferences to decide whether someone should be killed or not in a drone strike or a targeted killing. It was Brennan and Haas Cartwright who would go and have quiet conversations with the president about whether to do the strike or not. And it was this kind of troika of targeted killings. The three of them, sometimes they would pull Obama out of a black-eyed dinner, or Brennan, what he least, his least favorite thing to do was there were times when there was a very narrow window of opportunity. There was an opportunity to strike at someone in Yemen, let's say. And Obama would be, you know, having dinner or doing something with his girls. And Brennan would have to pull him out of that time with his family to make these very grim decisions. As you point out in the book, probably about three years into Obama's term, he had authorized the killing of twice the number of people who actually had gone through Guantanamo. Yeah, that's an amazing statistic if you think about it. You know, one thing that you know as well as anybody about when you look at the pure numbers, yes it is true that he authorized many more targeted killings than George W. Bush did. But Bush started to ramp up his targeted killing program pretty late in his presidency, what, 2007 or so. And that's partly, I think technology had gotten a little better, but I think it was largely because it took that long before we had really good human intelligence on the ground in Pakistan, in the tribal areas. And as great as these drones are, and great I mean in terms of technically, in terms of precision and effectiveness, they, you can't do it without intelligence on the ground. And so, you know, you sort of have to ask yourself, I did when I was thinking about this, was this really unique to Obama? Was it something about Obama personally that, you know, that he decided and only he would have decided to ramp up the drone program? Or would George Bush probably would have if he had been there longer? McCain, I suspect, would have if he had become president? Hard to know, but that's my best guess. You know, and I think Democratic presidents probably would too. Very hard after eight years of war occupying countries, you know, large numbers of casualties, you know, for president I think to resist this capability, where, you know, you don't have to send hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground. And so, you know, I think it's extraordinary in a lot of ways. It's a very important part of his legacy that he did this. I wonder, I just raised the question how unique, we'll see what happens. We'll see what happens if there's a president Romney or future presidents. Thank you. What if there's a second Obama term? Would any of the things that you've been discussing, would there be any substantive changes? Yeah, it's a great question. I would hope, one thing I would hope would happen, it already has started, is that there'll be more transparency about the program. It started, you know, various people giving speeches. Brennan and the Attorney General and others have given speeches, kind of laying out the legal framework for the drone program. That's good. But that's just a start. There's a lot more that we ought to know about the vetting process and how they make these decisions. I note that the relatively new president of Yemen just said recently, acknowledged publicly that he allows American drone strikes in his country. He also said it was a good thing. And he said it was a good thing. And part of the reason that the CIA has not wanted to talk about this, and the administration has not wanted to talk about it, because they wanted to preserve some, you know, level of deniability for these countries, they're worried about the political implications. Well, when the president of the country says, you know, they're doing it and it's good, it takes that argument away. The other thing that I think we're, you know, we're going to see change and we already have is one thing that Obama tried to do for the first three, three and a half years of his presidency, and I alluded to this before, was to, you know, he made a decision, for example, that he wasn't going to authorize these signature strikes in Yemen and Somalia. And they were, and you all know the distinction between a signature strike and a high value or a high value personality strike. In a signature strike, you don't necessarily know the identity of who you're going after. There are people who bear certain characteristics associated with terrorism, but you don't necessarily know who they are. And so you're going after, in some cases, a large number of people and you don't know their identities. And the president was very uncomfortable with that idea. There was an early meeting, literally, I think it was three days after he became president when he was CIA. There was a strike that had gone badly, and I write about in the book and the CIA came in and Steve Kappus, then the CIA director, explained to him what a signature strike was. He had his mind around this at first. And he ultimately authorized them for Pakistan, but he held the line. He wouldn't allow them in Yemen or in Somalia. And there were a number of occasions where the military would come to him and he would say, no, we're not doing this. We're staying AQ focused. I only want to go after people who I know to be demonstrable threats against the United States. And he held that position for a long time until, you know, the summer of, I guess it was really quite recently, this year, when after the Arab Spring was raging and all the turmoil in Yemen and AQAP had taken a lot of land in the south, and ultimately he was persuaded that they had to get more aggressive and help the Yemeni government seize back that territory, and he authorized signature strikes. They changed the name from signature strikes, which had a bad kind of odor, to something called TADS, terrorist attack disruption strikes. So, you know, a little bit Orwellian. I mean, it was sort of a strange thing, but they're essentially the same thing. And he authorized them. And now the question is going to be, I think it's a fascinating question is with what's been going on in Libya and Benghazi attack and the potential involvement of AQIM. There have been a lot of debates about doing strikes in northern Mali where Al Qaeda has a growing foothold and whether Obama will agree to that because that means opening up a new front, which is something that he had been, which he had resisted doing and I think really didn't want to do. So that's something to really keep a close eye on. Let's open it up to questions if you could just identify yourself and wait for the mic to lay you in front. Thank you for your comments. Yava Natourneau with the Interactivity Foundation. I have a question in light of Obama's policies that, you know, to change a message to the Muslims and to be more surgical and precise on these different levels. How do you think that is working or might change more in light of what's happening, you know, with recent killing of Ambassador and uprisings in other countries or attacks upon embassies? Thank you. That's a really good and really important question. And, you know, you look at the polling and it's not very encouraging. I've seen some polls that even suggest that, you know, attitudes toward the United States in the Muslim world are worse now than they were during the Bush administration. I mean, I don't know if I should give that credence, but I've seen those polls. It's an enormous challenge for Obama and I am sure that in the National Security Council when they're debating what to do in Libya right now and whether they should be going after the perpetrators of the Benghazi attack, you know, they are thinking about the, you know, backlash in a country that right now where the people feel pretty good about America because of our role in liberating them. And I do think that the President is mindful of that kind of blowback and he has to balance, it's another thing that he has to balance, balance it against protecting the security of American interests whether it's, you know, over there or here. And I don't, I think if you go back and look at the Cairo speech, you go back and look at a lot of the things that he said during the campaign, he's clearly fallen short. He created, I think, high expectations and he has not met those expectations. I don't underestimate the challenge of really, you know, fundamentally changing attitudes toward the United States. He could give up the drone program. I don't know if that would make a difference. This gentleman over here. Yeah, two-part question. There's been two studies that have come out over the past two weeks, the Stanford NYU and the Columbia Law School on drone strikes, which are pretty hair-raising both in terms of the lack of surgical precision for all the talk about it and the impact on civilians and also the legal implications in terms of violations of the law of armed conflict and international humanitarian law. So the question is, have you looked at those and what are your thoughts on that? And secondly, why are you so sure you know what's going on with these drone strikes? I mean, one of the takeaways, especially from the Columbia study and JSOC is hardly anybody knows except them, what they're doing. It's done an absolute secrecy and a lot of people who talk about them don't really know what's going on with these things. It's a really great, really important question. Actually, Peter is probably more qualified in some ways to answer this question than I am because of all the work he's done studying drones here. I have not yet because I gave myself a break from some of these national security issues and I've been writing about politics in the Supreme Court lately. So I have not had, I have the, I don't have the Columbia, so I have the other one and I haven't, but I haven't read it yet. I plan to read both of them because they looked serious to me and they looked like they were very worthy of serious attention. The, how do I know, you know, you can't know for sure. And I think that when, I think Brennan made a huge mistake, I think when he was announcing the counter-terrorism strategy a couple of years ago at CICE, I think it was, and he made that statement that in the past year there had been no civilian fatalities. I mean, I think that was not true and I think it was imprudent for him to say what he said. You know, I've seen studies on both sides. You know, I've seen studies that, none of the studies I've seen suggest that civilian casualties are as low as the administration has said, but I've seen a wide range, you know, in terms of the number of casualties. And, you know, I hate to do it, but I sometimes sort of split the difference because I can't know for sure and I suspect they're not as high as some of the studies have suggested and not as low as many of the others have. And it just, it remains a really important question and we need to continue trying to figure out what the numbers really are. So it's not a very satisfactory answer, but in terms of the precision of the weapons, I think there's a lot of studies that suggest that the weapons are precise. The question is, is the intelligence, the question is, is the intelligence precise? And that's what's much harder to know. And I think Obama's found this weapon appealing because they're technologically precise. I'm sure he's being told the intelligence is very good. My name is Ralph Krause, retired. Perhaps your book gives some historical background on assassinations or targeted killings and a new term for the... But looking over the index, I didn't see any reference to Senator Frank Church in the CIA hearings, but perhaps you discussed it nevertheless. And it comes to mind that in the early 30s, Adolf Hitler was applauded for getting rid of a number of suspected persons, I mean, persons suspected of being treasonous. You remember that episode? So in regards to Osama bin Laden, they claim that he was not to be targeted to be killed, but there are rules of engagement when the soldiers are involved. And, you know, there's some question there, really. So it's all rather cloudy, it seems to me. And where we're coming from is that a separation of powers. We allow the police to arrest somebody that's suspected to violate the law, but it's up to the court system to administer whether he's guilty or not. And are we ignoring these ideas on the international scene? Yeah, there's a lot in that question. You know, the interesting thing is you mentioned assassinations, Frank Church. I spent a lot of time debating whether to use the word assassination in my book interchangeably with targeted killing. Targeted killing does have that feeling of being a euphemism. And I remember when I first heard it was when I was correspondent in the Middle East in Jerusalem for Newsweek in the late 90s, and the Israelis had begun to do these targeted killings. And we, by the way, the ambassador at the time was Martin Indyk and he, expressing American policy, was criticizing that tactic, calling them extrajudicial killings. And I remember the Israelis at the time saying, just you wait until you face the same threat, which is what the Israelis will often say. But I ended up not using the term assassination because it has a legal connotation. And the argument, and you know, you can debate this, but the argument was that these were lawful acts of war and that they were legal under international law, under a theory of self-defense. They were legal under the authorization for use of military force. That all can be debated. And I just thought assassination, I would be making a statement. It would be a little too loaded. I'm a reporter. I wasn't making a case against or for. I was trying to tell a story. So I ended up not using the term assassination. But it's a legitimate debate. It's something that clearly people care about. We should continue talking about. And I don't remember the rest of your question. Can I follow up? The gentleman raised an interesting point. Was the bin Laden operation a kill or capture? You know, there's a, I just read a new book by a guy who had Black Hawk down, Mark Bowden, which he had an interview with Obama in which Obama said that his preference would have been a capture. I think that's what the headline said. And Obama was making the case that, you know, if there was any, if there were ever an opportunity to make the case that our values are strong or are strong, it would be to take Osama bin Laden and put him on trial somewhere. I mean, maybe that's what he believed. I imagine that. You have a quote in the book here, I think, from somebody who addresses this issue head on, right, about, I think, a lawyer who. Well, I have a, I'm not so much one here. A senior defense official, basically that if bin Laden came out, you know, he was, you know, basically naked. Yes, right. That's exactly, it's interesting. So a very senior official who was involved in the planning said, I was asking this precise question, you know, was it a kill operation or a capture operation? And he said, he said if, look, he said if bin Laden, if they found bin Laden, he was naked, he was waving a white flag, he was unarmed, and he was unambiguously saying in English, I surrender, they would have captured him. And the implication of that quote was that it was a kill operation in some way, so although he didn't say that. I mean, you could also argue that it was a, you know, that the, and by the way, the book by Mark Owen, yeah, the Navy SEAL who pulled the trigger, or at least took the final shot and who wrote this book about the operation, used very similar language. So I think that was probably going around at the time. You know, it is also true that General Cartwright, for example, his job that evening or when that operation was transpiring was to be available, was to deal with all the contingencies if he was captured and not killed. They had a capture plan. They knew that it was a possibility that, you know, that if he did surrender, put his hands up and was unarmed, there was the possibility that he would be captured, because it would be a, you know, a clear violation of the laws of war if in those circumstances he was killed. And so they had plans to, you know, they would try to take him to some third party country, possibly, I think they were going to try to possibly take him to Saudi Arabia. They were going to put him on this ship for a while. They had contingency plans. I don't think that you can say for sure, you know, that, you know, Adam McRaven and the president and everybody said this is a kill operation, you know, don't capture him under any circumstances. I think it was wade toward killing over capturing, but I wouldn't be comfortable saying that it was a kill operation. In the back, Jennifer? Miranda with Hispan TV. At what level these targeted killings or selective assassinations, which is the term they use overseas, are designed in order to avoid situations like Guantanamo? Instead of capturing the supposedly alleged terrorist being taken as a prisoners to Guantanamo or some other places. And in what level also, there is a pressure of the companies that profit with the war, like those companies that built those drones. That's my question. Well, on the first point, which is a really important question, and people have commented on the title of my book, Killer Capture, that perhaps there really wasn't a choice. You know, we weren't capturing anybody. We were killing people, and there were incentives to kill over capturing. The reason being, as you kind of point out, is that the legal and the policy and the political issues surrounding capture is just so complicated that it just became easier to kill. If you capture them, policy of this administration was not to bring anybody back to Guantanamo. Although that was debated, by the way. There were some people who were saying, maybe we should start bringing people to Guantanamo again. The president said, no, absolutely not. You know, a lot of obviously controversy, putting people on trial. Where do you bring them? You know, if you capture someone and you can't try them, then are you going to have to sign on to indefinite detention, which the president didn't want to do. So all of those things were extremely complicated and which has led a lot of people to believe that we were killing instead of capturing because of that. I think it's more complicated than that. For one thing, there were not a lot of opportunities to capture. Remember, we were not on the ground in Pakistan. We're not really allowed to operate on the ground except for in training capacities in Yemen. We're not on the ground in Somalia. Now we've made choices. I mean, conceivably, we could have been more assertive and been on the ground in Yemen and had opportunities to capture people, but for diplomatic reasons and political reasons, we didn't do that. So there weren't a lot of opportunities to capture. And yet, I talked to a lot of people who, and one person, very senior person who advised the president on these issues on a regular basis who said that this was always in the back of our minds. And we were always thinking about this conundrum and that the idea that it didn't, in some ways, create incentives to kill is just not true. It did, maybe more subtle and not explicitly talked about in meetings, but it was a factor. I think that story will sometime be told in full. I wasn't able to get all of it, but I think it's complicated. You know, there really has only been one capture since Obama has been president, as far as I know, away from the conventional battlefields, Iraq, Afghanistan, you know, in places like Yemen and Somalia, which really presents the biggest challenges. And that was, interestingly, at the same time that the bin Laden operation was being planned, there was a fairly senior member of the Shabaab who was a liaison between the Shabaab and AQAP and was traveling back and forth between Somalia and Yemen and had meetings with Anwar al-Aulaki and there was an opportunity to capture him on the water. He was traveling back to Yemen, back to Somalia and SEAL Team 6 seized him in the middle of the night and took him off to a ship in the Indian Ocean and kept him there for, I think, 70 days trying to figure out what to do with him. Do we, you know, do we try to find some third party country to take him to? Do we try him in a military commission? Do we try him in a civilian court? Do we hold him indefinitely? Do we send him to the Guantanamo? And they had more than a dozen principles meetings, national security meetings with the principles, trying to figure out what to do with this one individual. And they had more meetings over, this guy's name was Wasami, they had planning the bin Laden operation and it was all happening at the same time. What did they decide? In the end they decided to, the Justice Department at first didn't know whether they would be able to make a criminal case against him, but ultimately they did, they indicted him and on the 4th of July they brought him to Manhattan and they're going to put him on trial in the Southern District of New York. I have a little anecdote in my book where it's the 4th of July White House Party and Eric Holder is at the White House, they're having their barbecue on the White House lawn and he's munching on a hamburger and Obama walks up to him and Obama says we got him, brought him to New York and I guess Holder said that to Obama and Obama looks at him and he goes, he says textbook, textbook. And what he meant by that was it was a textbook kind of balancing of all of the interests, the law enforcement interests, the intelligence interests because during those 70 days they were able to interrogate him and he considered that to be a textbook example of his approach to the war on terror. The only problem is it's only happened once. And it could happen because he was taken to a ship that was sailing into international waters. And it also happened because, yes, and it also happened because they could capture him on the sea which was much easier than to do an operation in Somalia or in Yemen. So that in some ways made it unique. Well, great. Well, thank you very much. I don't remember what it was. The sort of national security counterterrorism industrial complex. I don't know. It's not something that I really looked into. It's an interesting question but I don't know the answer. Sorry. Great. Well, thank you very much, Daniel, for a great presentation.