 So I'm Peter Bergen and I'll be moderating this discussion in addition to Rosa who until is a professor at Georgetown and worked in the Defense Department in the policy shop until relatively recently we have on the far right Phil mud who had his Distinguished career at the CIA. He was the deputy director of the counterterrorism Center for much of the period after 9-11 He then joined the FBI basically setting up the really the intelligence capability the FBI Which is not really had in the pre 9-11 era. He's now a banker strangely But we know we know he'll be very good at that and then and then there's also Doug Oliver Doug had a distinguished career in the US military. He He wrote the battle plan for a Baghdad in 2007 which became known as the surge He then was NSC director in the White House for Iraq. He became senior counterinsurgency advisor in eastern Afghanistan And so we have a very good group here. I'll start with you Rosa Obviously in December of 2014 We're gonna remove combat troops from Afghanistan The reason you were testifying is everybody's aware of that and that would be the sort of inflection point where you say Hey, this authorization for the use of military force that we voted on 13 years ago is either now defunct Over we're not in a cup. We're not in a war like situation Or you know, let's revise it and liberals want to I think liberals want to revise it They want to kind of constrain it and say there shouldn't be this expansive thing that you just described But I think the mood in Congress as far as I can tell is a lot of people saying actually we should make this bigger We should because the way it was written initially as you know was it's about the people who attacked us on 9-11 Well, there's some people that we would like to now go after who aren't really involved in that And so we should actually name more groups and make this a much bigger thing So how what you know based on your you know recent testimony and the mood there? Where do you think this thing is going? I don't know where it's going Peter. Am I still yeah, I think I'm now sitting on my microphones apparatus I Don't know where it's going because I think that I think that you have two distinct groups on the hill one In both in terms of substance and in terms of what you might call the separation of powers issues In terms of substance. Yes, there's definitely a group that would like to see this expanded to enable the US to continue to regard itself domestically as legally an armed conflict with you know any Still unimagined future group of bad guys who might have nothing to do with al-qaeda or mine 11 who might pop up to threaten us Equally there however there is a group that's saying whoa not a good idea Not a good idea first but potentially at least three reasons, you know one would be a sort of strategic reason of Is it actually ultimately this is the Brahmsfeld question are we creating terrorists faster than we can kill them? Is this a good idea is it going to get us to wherever it is? We want to go second issue being a separation of powers the more You know Congress you hand a sort of open-ended authorization to have an armed conflict To the executive branch that's a power. You're not very likely to get back Why not say if you have a very specific threat? Mr. President you come back to us and you ask for a very specific tailored authorization to use force against that threat that does have a sunset clause And then and then I think that the the third point which has got some traction and how this is going to play out I have no idea. I don't understand Laurel. I understand Congress and I sure don't but but the you know the third way that some are approaching this and interestingly the administration seems to be approaching it this way too is that Under both domestic constitutional law principles and international law President already has the inherent power to use military force to protect the United States against any imminent threat So nobody disputes that there may be still unimagined new threats out there or that will emerge But that's you know That's why we have that we give the president the latitude to use force and self-defense in emergencies But that that that legal framework has kind of a higher threshold You have to show the threat is actually imminent and has some gravity before you can use force So so how that's all gonna play out. I I don't know I in his public comments President Obama has basically used that argument You know and and it seems that the actual victims of the drone strikes are not people who are posing an imminent Threat by any kind of reasonable standard. They are like lower lower level members of the Taliban So I think there's been a kind of when President Obama's talked about it I think he's talked about it in a way that seems you know easy to understand but isn't really what's happening. Is that Does he get that your assessment? My sense is that they are mixing and matching the self-defense type of argument with the Law of armed conflict type of argument and to the you know You don't they don't need to be imminent threats for you to go after them if it's an armed conflict So they pick and choose Depending which is which is more convenient, but that certainly factually that's my sense Although my colleagues may have a better sense than I do I think the most interesting thing what Rosa brought up is how this is created perverse incentives inside the entire security structure There's a joke going around the interagency now that I think captures this that DIA wants to be CIA, you know, they've made a big push now to develop more human intelligence sources CIA wants to be JSOC, you know that the CIA has a very robust Capability is is a very poorly kept secret JSOC wants to be DOD, you know, Admiral McRaven has made a big point about getting his tentacles Oh that that's putting it about putting command and control centers out around the world that do that respond to him and not to the through the normal chain of command And as Rosa pointed out DOD wants to be state, you know, they are doing all these You know traditionally non-military activities and state is just hoping not to become USAID So it really has created these perverse incentives that are pushing people outside their traditional lanes because as you point out This this puts us in a really unusual sort of affairs where everything becomes a warfare activity And therefore all the institutions have to readjust how they behave Well Phil as somebody who sat at the CIA where a lot of this as this unfolded Critique of the CIA today is that As a for instance, you know, it was it was not possible to predict the data the Egyptian revolution When it happened, but it might have been predictable that the Salafis would get 25% of the vote and I don't think the agency saw that coming as far as I can tell So that the CIA's main sort of traditional role of providing strategic warning to policy makers of really important Political developments in the world has been lost in this They've got into the business of just killing people and that has sort of deformed the central Role of the agency. Is that an accurate kind of critique? I think there are some valid critiques, but I think they're miscast a bit They're too in particular. I'd be thinking about the first is on strategic intelligence and strategic analysis, which is what I grew up on My sense and I feel as strong. I shouldn't use the word sense I believe the intelligence community in the CIA do not recognize that the world has transitioned From a world of secrets to a world of knowledge We're from Google Earth if you're looking in North Korean facility or if you're looking at a running revolution Or the Green Revolution if you're looking at what happened in Egypt The analysts are still struggled to live in a world where that knowledge is freely available and where your capability to learn isn't constrained by secrets The second to get to your point is this this talk about the balance or lack of balance between strategic analysis and Tactical information. I think in the 21st century with the digital trail that all of us leave in this room The same digital trail there a cartel guy might leave the human trafficker or sex trafficker might leave that the thirst for Tactical intelligence that allows you to find fix and finish a target that as a human being and to draw a picture around that target That is so good that you can pick them up or kill them that people who talk about that as a terrorism capability aren't understanding I think that is a revolutionary capability that should be applied in concert with strategic analysis to things like Mexican cartels and sex traffickers Just to change subject a little bit The most successful al-Qaeda affiliate in the world right now is in Syria And they've seemed to have learned from the mistakes of al-Qaeda in Iraq In fact, they are al-Qaeda in Iraq. They're not imposing taliban style rule on the population They're the most effective fighting force against Assad You had to deal with that a lot Doug when you were in Iraq and obviously fell so Tell us how you see this playing out Are they going to make the same set of mistakes that will eventually cause the population to turn against them? Have they are they going to develop into a hezbollah like entity that actually is behaving in a political manner? Or is it impossible to tell? Go ahead, please. I think it's very very difficult to tell what the relationship is between al-Nusra and a QI Are they are they essentially the same organization? Are they two organizations side-by-side that are linked is one subordinate to the other that's not entirely clear that The AQI Amir Ababakar al-Baghdadi is reported yesterday to have moved to North Syria to direct the fight from there But whether he's just directing al-Qaeda in Iraq inside Syria or whether he's responsible for that entire the entire jihadist wing of the Syrian fighting force and then what what percentage of the fighting force is a QI al-Nusra and what of the what of the Arab moderates? That's just remarkably unclear. I think you know and it gets I thought roses comments really brilliant I want to tie that into this for a second But I hate to let the past dictate the future But I have not seen since Algerian Egypt in the 90s Looking at Zarkawi in Iraq that violent Salafis despite what they say have the capability To reform that is to say unless we figure out a way to accommodate people who don't think like we are We're just going to shoot ourselves in the foot. It happens every single time So as an analyst you have to say when is that going to change? I'm not sure it will because obviously embedded in the ideology is not only are we right, but we're right because You have to be people of the book. How can you be something else? But to Rose the point and you know if I were still in the business I would be very uncomfortable with this The oppressive nature of threat in the unknown in 2002 at the threat table, which I sat at every night Oppressive daily the sense of the unknown was pervasive When will anthrax hit New York? When will the next plane come down? And so to contrast in terms of how we define our society to suggest today That we should view the takedown or two cargo aircraft for example in Yemen as at that same level of threat to me Is an immature culture to be blunt that cannot accommodate risk. We say we're tough. We're not But as a political matter, I mean we can all agree that that's true But as a political matter whether it's President Hillary Clinton or President Jet Bush or choose your present To say look, you know, we we've made the assessment that this problem is not a particularly big one And we're going to kind of dismantle much of this national security apparatus whether it's legal or physical Because we're moving on the political cost of then having an attack that could be any in any way Construed to be linked to these groups would be enormous I mean look at the political cost of a near miss on Christmas Day 2009 So I think you're I think I think the analysis is right, but as a political matter. It's very hard to Make the argument and and sort of succeed as a politician. I think that's right I think the real forward-looking conversation might be we have now proven a tremendous capability To intervene in places where we don't even have a footprint And so you could look at Yemen you could look at the destruction of the al-Shabaab foreign focus leadership in Somalia I think the forward-looking conversation is as a country if we have that capability between having no presence in big green When we're looking at threat, do we want to move against leadership before they moved against us? If we think they're plotting or do we want to wait till they hit us? What is intervention if we have this new tool to say intervention might be Going against the leadership of a group and you don't have to commit us forces. That's an interesting question I wonder why I wouldn't ask that more about cartels. They're a bigger threat than terrorism Well, what is your assessment of the al-Qaeda man-related threat? I mean on a scale of let's say if 9-11 was a 10, what would you give it now? You're talking about the core or the entire revolutionary both the core and the sort of the whores one or two The movement I'd give a three But that the volatile the volatility of the first that is the al-Qaeda architects I think is limited. They don't have much of a future the volatility of the revolutionary Elements in northern Nigeria or Mali etc to me is that could go to a six tomorrow It depends on the vision of leadership and their ability to access safe haven that gives them time and space to plot You were you know one of your big jobs was being a military planner what are the Pitfalls and and possibilities of a no-fly zone in Syria Extending from a complete no-fly zone to just a smaller no-fly zone in the north Any no-fly zone requires you to take down the air defense network any Capable Totalitarian authoritarian dictator puts his air defense networks in the middle of places that will cause huge civilian casualties When and if it's attacked so to set up a a no-fly zone is a could be done relatively quickly with US air power the lack of a legal mandate for that of course is very complicated It could be done very quickly very violently, but at great civilian cost on the on the legal matter I mean doing and then the question is does that then what does that buy you? Okay, and then if that doesn't work, what do we do now maintaining a no-fly zone is a very expensive proposition Requires a lot of a lot of fuel a lot of man-hours putting planes up in the air 24-7 is very very expensive and we take away Assad's air power and the condition on the ground changes not particularly very much because Because he's not particularly using air power is not his qualitative advantage. What is his quality? I think right now. It's has both Rosa in terms of the legal framework Can you we do a no-fly zone as Syria without a UN authorization? My understanding is that you there was one in Kosovo, which was a NATO Only but obviously this is not that illegal question or is that a question of a bit of can we sure? should we I Don't know. I'm really conflicted about this. Yes in Kosovo NATO use military force without a UN Security Council authorization I think that if we if we came to the conclusion that a military Intervention of some sort whether it's a no-fly zone or troops on the ground or special operations forces on the ground or who knows Including maybe even arming the rebels may present the same legal issue What I think we would probably Have to argue Of course that we didn't argue anything We just kind of looked away and you know home to whenever anybody mentioned the question But what we would argue probably a something related to Hezbollah's increasing role in the threat to Israel and threats to US persons linked to Hezbollah and other groups maybe even al-Nusrah and be we would argue that the Use of forces unlawful without a Security Council act only if the sovereign state doesn't consent and we would argue that Assad is no Longer the legitimate representative the Syrian people the Arab League has given its seat has given Syria's seat already to the Syrian National Council Council of Coalition I get the mixed up so somebody else who knows more about Syria can correct me We the more than a hundred nations including the US have recognized that as the legitimate representative the Syrian people So we would essentially say You know we have consent from the those who now matter and that would be our legal argument Little shaky maybe but not crazy But can I actually just go back to an earlier point about the the risk from global terrorism to the United States and The politics of talking about it now easy for me to say because I'm not president And my election doesn't depend on whether I irritate people God bless Tanger going back to our previous discussion But but I think it's it's just lack of political leadership And I think I think that our leaders have consistently under ends underestimated the intelligence and the grit of the American public that that I think Americans were smart enough to ask themselves the question when Boston was shut down because of one teenager for a day to say wait a second This is nuts, you know to say that the the with the exception of 9-11 of the 2001 In a typical year terrorist worldwide kill fewer Americans that are killed by lightning strikes And that doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything about it, you know That's that's that's that's enough people to really care and to really worry and certainly given given the availability of More lethal forms of technology out there in the world We do need to absolutely be vigilant But but I actually think that no our political leaders have never sought to say to Americans Hey, let's keep this in perspective. We have survived You know, it's not the question should not be on a scale of one to ten with 9-11 being ten Where are we now the question should be on a scale of existential threat? You know with nuclear war being ten where are we now and that's a really different kind of question I actually think Americans are smart enough to give a pretty different answer Well, Boston I think did supply an answer But the only way you can have that answer supplied is if something happens I mean, you can't tell if a society is resilient unless an event happens And I think that I think the response to Boston was relatively resilient Phil, how would you score the FBI's handling of the Tamalain the elder brother who after all Was flagged by the Russians as a potential threat In in some of the previous events that I witnessed and testified on for example, Fort Hood I thought there were things to learn and there's there were some significant lessons learned in pain points in the Fort Hood event I Can't find significant lessons learned in Boston and in doing a lot of media about that the questions I got were immediately went toward What's the easy way to explain this sort of put in a box and put it in the closet so we can categorize it? Look where look where our security services are buffoons fix it and move on But if you have a couple of kids who aren't on the grid very much and vulnerable to people like me in my old Life that is email phone travel talking to the wrong. I need a vulnerability and they want to create what is the word? Sophisticated used to to our Boston you couldn't get farther from a sophisticated event from start to finish every step Was unsophisticated if that if that's the level that you want to reach in the volume of threat I witnessed we need to have a conversation that says we just can't get to that level and I'm not sure there's in there's a fix Just a quick question on the AP Story the leak of the Yemen operation as somebody who was both at the agency and the bureau You know Rosa used this interesting idea of lawful, but awful I mean clearly the DOJ is within its legal rights to do what it did, but was this you know a sort of Unreasonable fishing expedition did they lose common sense? I was surprised by I confess because the leaks that we had at both the agency and bureau were legion happened all the time and you'd sit around like the the coffee machine and say You know there's a solution to this and that is and even the most secret programs I witnessed you're gonna have several hundred people at a Minimum you can't find that needle in a haystack So the solution would be find the journalist phone records and of course we'd all say I'm not whole here now There was no consideration that I recollected said okay. Let's go do that So my question is not whether the AP leak was that significant my question was and frankly I would be highly critical of the way the media has handled this My question is do we think that when someone breaks the law and breaks the oath that I took that that's an appropriate That protecting that person by not going after the journalist is appropriate now the answer may well be it is But all I see cover now is you know you're you're going after our sources and freedom of speech That source just broke the law But you're saying that when you were in the government that common sense would dictate that you wouldn't do a sort of Fishing expedition for a lot of journalists who well It's not a fishing expedition you know who the journalist is and presumably somebody's calling in to say I want to talk to you it you know well I mean just a bit you know they were they looked at the Hartford bureau the AP which is where one of the reporters had worked five Years ago it seemed like a pretty expansive definition of I mean and also you just from your just to clarify from your own experience That was not a road that you would have gone down. I can't imagine anybody proposing that okay I'm not saying it's wrong. I just saying it's I don't something has happened here And I'm not quite certain what it is but again the AP story is part of a bigger debate We need to have about whether leaking is acceptable as a way if we want to protect the right of journalists have sources It's not whether somebody picked up 200 phone records from the AP. That's too small Okay, Doug you just got back from Iraq. You've spent a good chunk of your Recent the last decade in Iraq. Give us a sense of the prognosis there There's still clearly a lot of political turmoil and a lot of violence Um, I think your your outlook on iraq depends on what you think is the root problem in iraq If you think that right now the root problem in iraq is The government's authoritarianism that I think you're very pessimistic about the future because that's clearly not changing If you think the root problem in iraq is that there's a very active a qi franchise that is routinely blowing up Large groups of shia civilians which then look to their political leaders and say do something The political leaders then you know lacking a precision capability go up and round up the usual suspects Not unlike we did our first, you know, three four five years in iraq um, this then creates A you know hostility in the sunni population because they're being picked on although that is you know You go find a qi in the sunni population. You don't find them in the turkham um So they go pick them up and then this creates this whole political turmoil if you think that a qi is the root cause here That is theoretically fixable And you can build capacity in the iraqi government that allows them to do Better explosives detection, you know, they finally put the guy who sold these Imaginary wands in jail and the iraqi's actually played a huge part in that Which was slightly encouraging If you get some real explosive detection If you help them to build a intelligence fusion like capability where they can be more precise in what they're doing Then there's some cause for optimism if if you think as some of our colleagues do that the root cause is maliki then then Then the outlook is bad Let's throw it open to questions. We have about 15 minutes left Um, recently there's been a lot of discussion about cyber wars, especially with china in the press Um As the have the policy makers really been thinking about this very in a serious manner How does it play into the bigger theme of everything's war and who's going to take charge of this anti cyber war effort? Well, us cyber command is going to take charge of this cyber war effort and even in a time of military austerity They are expounding Exponentially like tenfold over the next two to three years So that's where the focus is. Um, you know, now whether that's the right focus, whether that's the right agency Whether they have the right, you know, do we really want to use a military approach to what is largely an intellectual property rating problem These are these are all open questions But I think the answer to who's going to do it is it's us cyber command How much I mean when you were the policy planning shop in in defense department, how much of that was occupying Your time or not that much was occupying my time But but it was certainly occupying the time of many of my colleagues very extensively It's I I think it's it's obviously something people worry about enormously because as we grow as we more and more take advantage of the opportunities presented by Electronic forms of networking and interconnectedness We also grow far more vulnerable to just disruption that that that if you shut off And you know there's something Doug could speak to far more than I but if but if you if you shut off the ability of troops in the field to communicate or get information that comes from surveillance platforms or We've got a huge problem and and and our our systems as they become more sophisticated technologically They they become vulnerable in new ways as well. So so at every level both the the tactical level and the Thinking in terms of things like well, what if a terrorist group decided to you know hack Into us infrastructure systems and destroy a dam or something like that. I think people are very worried about it I I think that Doug is absolutely right. It's it's we are Nevertheless, we still have a choice. Do we see this? Solely or primarily through a military and war frame or should we instead see this through some different lens? Which will have implications for who responds what set of constraints there are in responding Whether we think when we shift from defense to offense What what do we think about collateral damage in the context of counter attacks in the cyber world? About attribution and so on it presents that same set of conundrums that I was talking about earlier And on that level, I think we are only we are only well while we are well advanced in establishing a sort of a Institutional infrastructure to focus on cyber security and cyber attack We are only at the very beginning of thinking about what is a sort of legal and conceptual framework for thinking about this another big conceptual Thing at the Pentagon right now Doug is is the question of what kind of war in general are we going to be fighting? Is it a is it a war against China that it's a sort of naval Battle is it Sort of a more like a Syria contingency operation? I was about to add. I think this is You know it plays into this larger issue of you know What what do we need to look at and the what I would call the defense industrial complexes villainization of china You know if china didn't invent they'd have to invent it Um if it didn't exist they'd have to invent it because you you need something to go after you need something to justify high-priced toys And you know if if you can't have a good old-fashioned shooting war in the south china sea where can you have one? You're kind of running you're kind of running out of battlefields to have very seriously You're running out of first tier opponents to have serious wars against You know you can you really justify you know Hundreds of billions of dollars of pentagon spending to you know to fight Somali pirates or you know to Defend against the rise of you know brazil um You know you need a large bogeyman that presents you know and and that has a You know its own certain militaristic class that is happy to provide harsh rhetoric in turn You know the you know the the very nationalist wing of the chinese political system is happy to play tip for tat With uh, you know considering the west to be some kind of villain even though as you know The ambassador was stating last night, you know china has zero history of moving outside its traditional territories You know it's never invaded china. You know they came into north korea, but then left They have no history of being an expansionist power and yet we insist on treating them that way and orienting you know Building a navy and an air force That can go fight that when I think that it's very clear the future is places like syria Like you know like africa like the the rest of north africa. There are all kinds of these places As a friend of mine put it do you really think the problem is An order that you don't like as in china or do you think the problem is just disorder Whether it's from a state that's collapsed or just a place that never had a state in the first place With iraq being a clear example the first afghanistan a clear example of the second amary Thank you. Uh, so just a Another response on the legal question and rosa, and I could debate this as international lawyers But one possibility is the responsibility to protect original commission Recommended that Responsibility to protect these decisions not be subject to the veto Because by definition if if you meet the threshold where a government is murder massacring its own people crimes against humanity genocide systematic war crimes Nobody should be able to veto action for political interests and kosovo is arguably the first step I would argue that if we were to act Subject to multilateral approval by a regional organization. I don't think we should act unilaterally But if you get the arab league to vote with us and as you got nato to vote for kosovo You can if you keep doing it establish a customary international law exception To the the current un charter and that's one of you, you know international law is made by breaking it And so that's that's it is so that's that's how you ultimately make new law So that's just one other legal argument. I I agree with you Amory absolutely subject to a caution Which again, it's not a legal caution. It's a it's a What precedents do we set that kick in in other ways? I actually think it's it's Uh, I believe sovereignty should not be a cloak that governments use to abuse their own people and and and that the set of arbitrary constraints related to security council voting rules should should not be what stands in the way of of morality and good policy I also however have been very interested in watching the ways in which the discussion of the responsibility to protect Which is premised on the idea if you will that sovereignty is a is a privilege not a right that you you earn sovereignty By protecting your people Has sort of dovetailed in in interesting and often in our unarticulated ways with the sort of u.s counterterrorism legal logic That sovereignty is also a privilege that you lose if you harbor terrorists Inside of if you become unwilling or unable. So I I worry that every time we say As sometimes perhaps we should Security council can go to hell Because the right thing to do to protect human beings is to intervene On a responsibility to protect basis if their own sovereign government is unwilling or unable to do so that we also add fuel To arguments that say The security council can go to hell if we the united states and some group of other states assembled by us Decides that a government is unwilling or unable to deal with a threat that we define as severe and and maybe nobody else does So my concern is not is is I I I absolutely agree with you and I'm not But I don't know what set of constraints we have That replaces that old idea of sovereignty. So so I worry a little about the unintended consequences Even at the same time that I'm very much in sympathy with your with your logic I actually had a question for dugs, but I just so Doug I I'm really interested in your Answer on the Terrorists the anti air defenses because I haven't heard anybody's administration say the reason we're not doing it is we're going to kill more civilians Then then we might save no one said that what the administration just says is oh, we're going to lose planes It's a far more convincing argument. I think the way you made it But I want to ask you what your solution in Syria is I mean, what would you do? Would you just let it burn itself? I'm not this isn't a confrontational I actually I really want to want to know if I had an answer I should have all your old jobs It's you know, it's it's as I tell people you know, I spent two years in the ground in in iraq I've been a year in afghanistan. I worked, you know, national security and this is what syria is what we professionals call a mess it's I I see no good way out and each of the steps that you talk about taking I think has a such an insignificant chance of working even if we make We set up a no fly zone. I'm very dubious that really changes the balance of power on the ground um, you know doing nothing is bad Doing something that costs a lot of money and is ineffective that costs money burns political capital and is ineffective is even worse Um, and so I think the administration rightly sees that taking any step Then puts you on a very slippery slope to the next steps You can't have once you have planes circling over syria You've kind of just assumed some responsibility for what's now going on on the ground because you could theoretically now with your planes up there Stop it Um, so then we then that this carries us then into airstrikes or could very very quickly Um, and then what happens if that doesn't work? I mean, what if the the reinforcements from the irgc From hezbollah from, you know, shia militias in iraq from from wherever Really are strong enough to stand up to to everything that we could do from the air now What do you do we're running out of a little bit running out of time? I've got tim and lisa You can combine these Thank you Rosa you spoke a lot about the legal frameworks I have a question with regard to how To organize the state in the new environment that we have threats coming from abroad And the response as you outlined was that we more or less said that war is now the legal continuum rather than peace And we have declarations of war And this response from the government bureaucracy is that the new york city police unit, for example, has gone international You have dhs creating international corporation You have either jaysoc or cia involved in drone strikes You have cyber command with the dual-headedness with the nsa where an intel agency is transforming it into a security agency So we have all of these different Trans institutional transformations in the government bureaucracy which was set up along the lines of domestic and foreign And that distinction no longer applies So apart from the legal framework, how do you see and this is a question for all the panelists How do you see that mirrored in the institutional framework? Apart from the from the legal side and actual the the bureaucracy side. Okay. Good question on lisa Yeah, hi lisa magerl from open society foundations I wanted to go back also to the legal framework and the choice that the united states made Different than some other countries that faced similar attacks But also to what phil mud said about how this is that cartels are bigger threat than terrorism, so what does that mean about the frame that you apply to big crime and how The united states interprets and gets out of this frame if that's what we want to see the military frame So it it would the juxtaposition of those two ideas is interesting to me Does that mean that you start to apply a military frame to The cartel problem in a way that hasn't been done before or how do you Backtrack from the decision and the choice that the u.s. Made in those opening moments I think the choice is I mean we're in a different time So I don't see this as a I mean we live through a continuum in my analytic mind. This is not a continuum We do not face a strategic threat from terrorism today I'm not suggesting we use the same tools against Cartels that we use against terrorists. I'm suggesting there should be a discussion in terms of political context to say if you want to Take terrorism seriously understand that if you have high school students or nieces and nephews as I do That what they face in a high school hall in terms of drugs and gangs Pay is far more significant than any terror threat. So let's have a serious conversation about where we spend our money One final point. I don't buy that that we view. I mean in the age of globalization You're going to have security services like the fbi and ci work together But what I witnessed in terms of the difference between How we conducted intelligence operations on us soil against us persons versus overseas continued In the 21st century to be night and day. I did not view what we did at the fbi as intelligence as I knew it It was that profoundly different. So I would dispute that this too are sort of converging I suppose in some ways they are but in terms of the fundamental value of an american citizen deserves to live free or die I saw that every day Except if they're anwar are lucky Well, I I he forfeited is right. I actually would take a slightly different tack I mean the phenomenon I was talking about earlier is all people say Oh, it's the militarization of us foreign policy and then we see the militarization of all these domestic institutions That's terrible. We need to put the military back in its box and we need to get more money in the state department and you know, and I and my reaction to that is is actually Often, you know, you could just as much see this as a civilianization of the military If you will, you know that and these are again, I don't be too abstract here We made up these categories god did not say, you know And there shall be a military and this is what it shall look like and it shall wear uniforms And so, you know, we said let's develop this category that we're going to call the military We're going to develop a set of, you know, descriptive of its functions and role and uniforms and all this stuff And let's set up this set of dividing lines between what you can do to this others You know, what is a u.s citizen or here in the territorial borders of the united states We we made that stuff up and we made it up for some functional reasons, right? Which is that we and this is what I was referring to earlier when I said, uh, you know As we see this kind of greater blurriness in our concepts of what's war It has some real implications for our our notion of civilian control of the military Which I would put it to you as a is a construct that has been rendered almost meaningless Um, simply because it's now completely arbitrary. What does it mean to say that people don't wear uniforms have authority over the people who do if the control of The ability to use lethal force is no longer either solely in the possession of the military or no longer constrained in the ways Well, it seems to me that are the more interesting and more and more difficult question Is in an era in a globalized era in an era in which there are all kinds of convergences and there must be Because borders don't matter as much and so forth. There have to be How do we come up with some new set of institutions and rules that prevent what we really care about Which is which is not military getting out from under civilian control But which is the abuse of power by those who have it to harm those who don't You know, that's what we should care about. That's what I care about and that's a completely different question I don't care if the military does everything right the military can you know make breakfast tomorrow morning for it doesn't matter You know the the issue, you know the issue is how do we make sure we have some set of institutional institutionalized legalized constraints that protect against the abuse of power When there are concentrations of power and that's a really different question from What institution with what label on it is doing what activities? I have very little to add to that. Okay. Well, great. That's good, but we're out of time Thank you