Pentagons military Commission Defense organization. The show lectures at clumpy law school and a fellow here in the center of National Security and i must mention is a fordham law grad. Karen rosenberg will talk about his book, his awardwinning Senior Reporter for the New York Times working in collaboration with a pulitzer center. [inaudible] she started with the miami herald or before that she recorded from the middle east and moved recently to the New York Times. She has won many awards including the Robert F Kennedy journalism award, and was part of the miami herald team that won the Pulitzer Prize of breaking news in 2001. So, when we tell you the format. Michelle and carol we will talk and then i will come back on and i will pose questions that have come from the audience and if you have any questions at all please feel free to put them in the chat or if you prefer q a then i will get to as many as i can do. Without further ado michelle, carol, take it away. Thank you so much. Thank you. I think i will talk about the book real quickly. The story you tell starts this way. America gets this very cool upper punch of pearl harbor on december 7, 1941. The pearl harbor attacks galvanize and demoralize americans they were angry probably scared and wanted revenge. Four months later this scrappy bunch of pilots are the center of the story, the doolittle raiders, drive deep into territory drop bombs on extensive military targets and or strategic targets and most of them make it all the way to china our ally and then fdr is allowed to trump his victory. Thats exactly right. That is the doolittle raid in a nutshell. The story of an covering and what seems like forever goes like this. In 200119 hijackers in a very cruel sucker punch attack the world trade center, pentagon and crash a plane into pennsylvania field killing civilian targets. Four months later i watch a military cargo plane landed at guantanamo and dislodge 20 men in orange jumpsuits and when the photos emerge it seems to reassure, meant to reassure americans that we got them and that was the set up. In both cases there would be trials and trials about war crimes and questions about military tribunal justice and due process and reliability of evidence leading to torture. My first question is, how in heavens names did you discover the story and what compelled you to tell it . So, the second part first and what will help me tell it is what you just said. And why and how is because i was working in the department of defense in the military commission in 2007 and this was when Michael Mccabe had just been nominated to the attorney general and the debate over is waterboarding torture was rekindled. We had heard a rumor of a case in which the United States had prosecuted the japanese for waterboarding and that seemed obvious lee relevant to the questions we confronted in 2007 and we sent the young marine captain to dig out the record which i dont think had been seen in 60 years at that point. She came back on one rainy day i wanted to crack it open and read it and it was the story you just subscribed, the doolittle raid which is the most celebrated operation of world war ii and the people who live through world war ii and the story about torture and justice and revenge and i felt sitting there in 2007 i was reading this episode from 1945 in 1946 where the United States is prosecuting the japanese for doing all the things we were doing in the war on terrorism and you mean, i dont mean to be naive but it hit me in the chest that i had this sense of looking through 60 years of time and all of a sudden right where i was sitting in that moment and it came to me but it was the same in the back my mind they gave me context during those quintana no cases after that and then i decided in 2014 to try and make a book about it and that is how we got the book today. So, for the people watching ive been talking to michelle now for years about one, no. In 2007, i dont doubt. When i would talk to him about other things related he would talk about a really weird obscured episode like world war ii Japanese Airways far away and i thought it was kind of peculiar and then i read it and i got it and is divided into three portions and it is pearl harbor and they did not strike civilians, most made it across japan to china are allied but the japanese captured some, part two is brutal interrogation of the captured pilots including the trial in the summary execution of some, i hope im not saying too much. This is all in the first three chapters. They said, the japanese said they were working in part three after the u. S. Wins the war we have what victors justice, the americans recover their surviving pows who were held in conditions, it takes you there in the United States puts the people who prosecuted the pilo pilots. The reason we are having this conversation now, i remember calling up michelle and saying what struck me about the book is written in the language of the military commission to describe what happened 80 years ago. 75 80 years, lets talk about that language. You call people highvalue detainees in this book, who are they . I think i called them the highest value of detainees, that was a deliberate language choice, im not being coy and those were the doolittle raiders, you describe the doolittle raid accurately in the terms, the american perception which was a lot like the opening, i never made that connection until you just did, your four months go by in america shows that it can fight back. To make america feel better right . That was by design, they had virtually no strategic significance, they ended up having far more significant for the japanese and is precisely because one of the things i tried to do in this book for reasons we can get into but i became fascinated by the perspective of the japanese and as much, you can look at the doolittle raid as our celebration of her opportunity to show were in the war to win it, the japanese, it was 9 11, the first time in the recorded history that japan is ever successfully attacked from abroad at least on the mainland, it is immediately a moment of fear, uncertainty, terror, the basic assumption of japanese life offended all at once. For mobility. Its a profound sense of for mobility but its outrage, we can talk about how the japanese characterize the attack but they called it a terror raid and what they focused on was not the bombing of the mitsubishi plant for the oil tankers they focus on the civilians in the context of the doolittle raid, to them it was a great atrocity, they would utterly called an act of terrorism. So when they capture them, they had their own almost four months later there seems to be a symmetry to all of this because when they captured them and they tortured them and theres a debate about what to do with them it exposes all of the challenges that we face in the immediate aftermath of 9 11 and that continues to this day over to what extent do we act on revenge, do we act on the ability to show our power over prisoners versus our ideals and one thing that surprised me, this is probably because there was not japan before working on this book, japan conceived as itself as a progressive liberal society, the first country to sign the convention of 1929 so they had prohibited torture at the end of the 19th century and they almost prohibited the Death Penalty as a massive liberal revolution in their own thinking so when the doolittle raid happened, they revert to the same forms of brutality for almost the same reasons in the same excuses that we did throwing out values that they claimed ahead just as dear as we did in that to me was incredibly compelling parallel between the two and i think its just as important to understand the doolittle raid of japan in 9 11 and understanding how and why they did what they did. In the detainees because they are the first . Theyre not the first prisoners of the japanese by any stretch of the imagination, japan has been raging war for five months. But they are the first marquis prisoners, the first people that the japanese themselves, the japanese population cares about who these people are, they are not just a combatant in the philippines or in singapore, these are the people who perpetrated the attack against us that has created a turning point in our own sense of national identity, vulnerability so they became to the very tippy highest levels of the japanese government, the doolittle raiders were a political issue and thats because they had such highvalue to japan. On page 22 you call the interrogation enhanced and at lunchtime, a can you describe happened to the doolittle raiders . I do describe it and these are somewhat coy words, this is not about a book on the war on terrorism, i dont draw these parallels out directly, youre the first person to unpack all of them im sure. But i did choose language in certain parts of the book precisely to cause the reader to reflect upon the parallels that i was seen as i wrote it so the torture enhanced interrogation that the japanese objected the doolittle raiders to waterboarding but also sleep deprivation, what we would call stress positions today protracted solitary confinement and other forms of really incredible brutality that looked incredibly familiar to what the United States was responsible for doing in the immediate aftermath of september 11 and i think one of the things that was poignant to me, when i first read this in 2007, i grew up in a very traditional pennsylvania overview of American American history, my grandmother never drove a japanese car so to see the United States behaving as the Imperial Japanese was such a jarring moment in thinking about what the country, what road the country had gone down and when you get down to the precise methods of torture for an reflected back in modernday it was really just stunning, it was really stunning. I dont think its overt, i am not suggesting this is overt but it is the language of today and thats how we talk about it so when i read it and people who force on this issue read it i think thats how they see it, other people i imagine read and dont recognize the language. I think that is probably true, most of my readers who have written to me really do see it as a traditional world war ii story legal thriller, that was my intent i did not i wanted to russia with the ambiguity that i have wrestled with in my career dealing with these issues in a way that was honest, there are two kinds of history that are very popular and get very wide audience, one is the fairytale history which were all quite familiar with lookout of michael bay movie and you will see a fairytale history but theres also history of everything in the United States does is expose printer history that exposes the worst about the United States or any country that is being written about. And i find both of those naive and i think its naive in our own times to look at these issues with the blackandwhite understanding, i think people good people do bad things and they do it for good or understandable reasons but i think that people do good things for bad and understandable reasons and this book in a way was an opportunity with me too wrestle with that, with the distance of not having to think about the contemporary issues that were dealing with but thinking about it as history. You do work at wonton among on cases involving torture and so without risking anybody security clearance, some of it sounds like its ripped from the pages of the Senate Report of the rdi book . It is not ripped from that, one thing i will highlight for readers, this book has about 1700 footnotes, a little more than that so this is a history. Again the language. Again of course because these are, for example choose a point of the language choice that i made quite consciously and i did this across the book and not just questions of torture, use modern language to reframe the beijing because i find readers are going to get confused if i use this other language. But one place where i had to think about a little more carefully with the use of the great water board which was not the current phrase used in the 1940s the phrased used was water torture, trip torture, you name it, a couple of expressions but water boarding does not come back into american until september 11. So choosing to use the word waterboarding to water cured, but it is the same thing and we should not get lost in her own youth is and is him or of the past to draw extinctions where they do not exist. So i did do that deliberately and i did that because i think doing it, i did not want to mislead the reader, i want to make what is being talked about as clear as possible and i think when history tends to use the language of the. It is lost on the reader for the same reason i will point this out, the 1940s especially the. Im writing about had casual racism and so the word jack comes out of everybodys mouth without even thinking about it, the newspaper headlines, you name it, high and low and i made the conscious choice to restrain my use of quotations in which that was included because to a modern reader its extremely jarring you make judgments about people using it that are misleading. There is an uncomfortable use of it in the book. There are a few, those were deliberate choices as well, i did choose lingered very carefully because i wanted to convey the reality and i wanted people to enjoy what they were reading but in certain language choices for tickly things as you said there are one or two uses of the word jobs in the book but those are very specific choices because i thought at those moments using that word was necessary to convey things like the alienation, the dissent of alienist and the racial dynamic that were at play in front of mind but using the word job every instance, i think it wouldve an builder to those moments and also been distracting because it means Something Different today. Who were the war criminals in this book . Thats a great question, who are the war criminals. There are two war crime trials in this book, one is the work crimes trial that the japanese conduct which is by any measure, the whole thing last about an hour, is passed over the law and use evidence of torture, everybody get the Death Penalty as expected, the japanese accuse them of being war criminals and convicted them and executed them as such in the second part of the story is the United States final the japanese who conducted that and accusing them of the criminals for conducting an unfair trial so you end up having a 1946 a trial of a trial so who are the war criminals, i dont know im hesitant to answer that question because i want that question to hangover the book as people read it because it is one of the efforts i tried to do hopefully successfully is to not presented as a fairytale and obvious morality but to really give you the perspective of all the various people involved so you could wrestle with these questions in the same way that i have over the past 15 years doing these, these are hard questions and anyone who says they are not hard questions im not saying torture is our question but when it comes to the responsibility, victim status to be able to claim that you are victim, shes incredibly fraud questions and are difficult and they should be because they are real questions, theyre not fairytale. What are legitimate maybe legal targets in 1941 in 1942 . Along order to be candid was in flux at the time so its not like you had, there were efforts to create treaties about Aerial Combat in 1920 but they never got off the ground, no pun intended but there was a sense, the United Kingdom had taken aggressive you of the population and the more people you kill the better, the germans took that view as well and the japanese took that view certainly. The United States had resisted this quite aggressively so there was a very deliberate policy that was ingrained in the u. S. Army air force officers from the 1930s and 40s the only military targets, targets that are industrial or directly military in nature are legitimate that the deliberate targeting with illegitimate, Collateral Damage can be accepted but we dont delivery try to kill as many people as possible, we are trying to break what the war planners the strategic planners, the industrials, the memes by which the enemy wages were, that changes over the course of the work, never explicitly which is his own interesting story but certainly by 1945 with Curtis Campaign against the prior bombing and then the two atomic bombings at a minimum tolerance for civilian casualties goes extremely high and the pretext of targeting military targets become more and more pretextual, even in the bombing of nagasaki, you can read the debates about targeting a military school in hiroshima, i think theres about quality of course but it certainly 1941 in 1942 the United States took the targeting of military targets by civilian targets very seriously at least on paper, before i go on too long of a rant i will say the one piece of evidence that i directly have in the dual raids is doolittle made the target selections and they were all industrial targets and the pilots got together to draw cards to see who got to bomb the imperial palace in doolittle called a stop treaties were not bombing a is on military target and moreover we dont want to give the japanese cause to accuse us of wrongdoing or to give them an opportunity to rally around the leader. Doesnt Jimmy Doolittle if i remember from your book correctly recognize that in england people are rallying around royalty and that hes very strategic in that regard and hes like we dont you explain it. Thats exactly right, one of the major express rationales is the battle of britain had been effective as demoralizing the British Population until the germans hit Buckingham Palace and then that created a opportunity for people to rally around the flag into say if the king can take it so can we. So Jimmy Doolittle explicitl