Transcripts For CSPAN Aspen Security Forum--bin Laden 201309

Transcripts For CSPAN Aspen Security Forum--bin Laden 20130902

Internationally. Well be joined by John Hoff Meister and at 9 15, the American Made movie, a documentary looking done by nathaniel mcgill. You can find that on tuesday washington journal which will start at 7 00. See you then. How you believe your members should vote. Looking at some of your facebook responses, it Cheryl Maddux says they should vote no and going in there. This has been mishandled from the beginning. Innocent lives will be lost. A says they will vote for limited strike if there are no consequences. What about charging syria with International War crime atrocities . The murder of men, women, and children should be addressed but i do not know what the response should be. We would like to know what you think. Share your comments at facebook,. Com cspan. Kids they win by the data did not play with stuff. Parents said they want to keep their kids safe. No parents have used the safety features on the programs they buy for their kids. If you just act on the data you were going to be in big trouble. People live. Do note jobs say, people know what they want until they see it. You can as in a million questions and then you can give them and ive had. An ipad. There were no focus groups in the building of the ipad. This discussion on the digital revolution is one of our future programs today on c span. Will discuss the future president ial debates. Then at 1 30, and look ahead at the next digital revolution. A look at race in america in 2050. The media is clearly an increasingly dominant criteria for every first lady. Human stories. They are not limited to the 19th century. Endurehow these people and o in the very rough world of politics. Richard gordon smith preview season two of first ladies, influence and image. Looking at their private lives and public role. Tonight at 9 00 eastern on c span, cspan radio and c span. Org. Up next, a look at the pursuit and capture of Osama Bin Laden with peter bergen. He turned the book into a. Ocumentary for hbo this is just under one hour. Hi, everybody. This time you do not have former government officials here. You will find we have two very well informed tests. The two men behind manhunt. He might see this tonight. Manhunt the search for osama is the film title. Today it was nominated for two primetime emmys for best documentary and for best cinematography. Congratulations to the two gentlemen with me who are here today. You probably know peter bergen. You have seen him a lot. Bestselling author he set up the First Television interview with Osama Bin Laden back in 1997. The holyinclude war. Mr. Barker lived in england for 18 years. He lives in los angeles now. Making films for the pbs series front line. The New York Times loved your contest in egypt here it you learned a lot about the culture. Debut on hbo. S that is what we are discussing. This is just over 1. 5 hours. I think it is terrific in large tot because their ability get people to talk. Lets start with an example of that. Four excerpts. One. Watch excerpt number patience and and we are not always looking for the payoff immediately. Trying to keep track of all the threads and which ones are real and which ones are not real, you know, people say why did you connect the dots . Ecause the whole page is black to pull a story out of all this information but there is no single intelligence looking at all this information, it is a lot of different brains looking. The more you can bring people together and share what is important, the better it works. At the time the people who had deep expertise and al qaeda they were women. At first it not make them very popular with their managers. In awas counseled once Performance Review that i was spending too much time working on bin laden. They said we were obsessed crusaders, it using all the women stereotypes. Cry. Hrow chairs, women which one is better . You a sense of the tone of the film. One of the women use all recently said that women are better analysts in counterterrorism because they understand relationships and terrorism is about relationships. The way it operates and is formed. If they better at perceiving patterns. Well. How did you get the women to speak to you . ,ven after they were identified how did you persuade them to talk . It is great to be here. Was a long process notches for the women but for everybody in the film. That shine a films light on how our government actually operates. Of subjectlot matter might be classified, Human Emotions are not. I made a point of talking to some people in this room and people in the clip. Spending a lot of time with them and Building Trust saying i want to tell your story. In a full as way as possible. If we need to set certain for amateurs we can talk about it. That is fine. , we can talk about it. That is fine. Peter was a traffic help in that. Youd are made introductions. Twoo on camera they have trust me. When she walk away with the footage i can do whatever i want with it. Lets bring you in on this. When you develop a source for what we do, which is getting people to talk about delicate work, you have to get than the sense that you are on their side. Is that part of it . Was able toreg correctly say that he was going to let people have that say. One of the interesting things is there is no narration. Theres no one telling you what to think. One of the messages of the film shows youre not thrown to think it is 9 11 was not an intelligence failure. It was a policy failure. Providedould not have more strong warnings. It is almost a case of perfect strategic warning. Think of the august 6 daily brief. Graphicnot get anymore than that. Illustrated in the film by John Mclachlan who is probably in the room, putting up the pieces of papers and you could see where they were. As providingil strategic warnings. They are not able to save time and place. The women in the film and other people at the cia felt very strongly that this story had not really been told very well. That is one of the reasons they spoke. A lot of people in this room to get asked by folks like us will you give an interview, whether it is for print or a book. My advice is dont do it. [laughter] you think what is in it for you. You illustrated one thing, the ld well. D not been towe have either of you come across someone who wanted to talk . . Because they were disgruntled as an example of someone in the film who wanted to talk to they cia, were not disgruntled. Five. The mother of she was the first person in the u. S. Government to write in 1993 a warning about a guy called Osama Bin Laden who is going to be a problem. She wanted to talk. She is a public figure. Shes not undercover. The agency would not let her speak. Thehe end of the day, American Public has been trillions of dollars on this since 9 11. Osama bin laden is a huge success story. Why not talk about it . It was interesting. E began shortly after i got the rights to peters book. It was a wall before we started filming. I the time we are starting to film, all the controversy over the zero dark 30 was breaking. The door started closing quite white house, at the cia in particular. Can talk whate we want but the documentary is where we really wanted to just let people tell their story. That is where he faced a lot of roadblocks because of the cooperation with the movie. Andn both intelligent work in intelligence related journalism, we are in a post snowden era. What do you predict will be the effect of snowdens lee when we ask for interviews and information . I do not think it will be a problem. In some cases it might be. People ultimately always want to tell their story. I have a much longer lead time with a documentary. 1. 5 years or sometimes longer. A golden age for documentary filmmaking right now the decline in covers of some of the more mainstream media. Done as much as it used to be. It is a great time to be making these films. There is a desire to get the story out in a way that we can tell it through firsthand accounts. In the short term, with some people it will have a chilling effect. I think snowden is just one example. If you look at what the four years in the zero dark 30 , it was an investigation of the pentagon, it might vickers mike conversation, they are all out there publicly. In this sitting position or anywhere else and i felt like if i am going to talk to a journalist or a book writer is afilmmaker and there chance it will become public, do the math. I think snowden is just one element. Leak investigations, all these things have a chilling effect. Lets have another expert from the film. It takes of how do you get information after you found someone who was detained. Where do you take them . Enhanced interrogation techniques. Lets watch excerpt number two. [video clip] we were empowered more. We did things more aggressive. My job is to kill al qaeda. Get with us or get out of our way. We had been focusing on capturing. He knew who the leadership was. Thatw method of attack targets. He was the highest we have ever captured. We captured him in march. He was severely wounded. We knew we had to get him out of pakistan. The way they had dealt with issues like this was to transfer the terrorist to a investigation. We needed to take responsibility for highlevel terrorists ourselves. We understood what we had to do. We did it. We took a lot of bad guys off the streets. They got put up and now it is Public Knowledge in a nice locations. Ique [end video clip] was a cia field officer. He introduces the word , the ones out there in the field. You took up the controversy. What do you think you were able to add in the film that was new in the debate about waterboarding . I try to place the audience in the mindset of the people who were making the decisions at the time. To hope that the general public would ask themselves what they would have done. When i have these long discussions with people in the film about being in the film, i never want talked about what i thought about this. I think that is one reason they decided to be a part of it. One man from the fbi has a substantial role in this section as well. For believing that water boarding does not work. Many point to this as an example of how it can work. Just breaktrying to new ground per se. Im trying to add contacts. How decisions are actually made as told by the people who were there at the time. It is what gives a film like this its value. Your book and film are about searching for bin laden. The type of interrogation that took place, a to finding bin laden . There is a 6000 page answer to that that is still classified. Any public discussion of this matter is made difficult by the fact that we do not really have the factws. In the course of my book i found wiki leaks to be very useful. Keysummary of the guantanamo detainees were in the wiki leaks dump. You can piece together what these people were saying and to some degree when they were saying it. What you cannot find in there is a very specific analysis of what this information was given up to four or after interrogations. There is no doubt. There is no doubt that played a role. We will never know if they could have been solicited another way. It is part of our history. On the question of did it lead to bin laden . For a somewhat skeptical couple of reasons. A lot of things led to bin laden. There was no detainee who said he is living here. That was one of the reasons of their. There were fragments of information that came from a lot of people. One person was interrogated. He was the real 20th hijacker. Hijacker. He went to bora bora. He fled to pakistan and then he went to guantanamo. And guantanamo he said he was in fact to stand because of his interest in falconry. After a few month they realize he was the same guy. Then he was subjected to a pretty severe regime that Susan Crawford said amounted to torture. He was kept up for 43 days. He was subjected to hot and cold of white noise and lots Christina Aguilera music at loud volumes and he was discomforted. [laughter] it seems he is the first person who identified the current year as being someone who was important and al qaeda from what we can gather. I think there is a Public Interest in having a 6000 page report that the Intelligence Committee has done. There is a 300 page summary that is out there. The cia is trying to compose a response to it. I think it is in the Public Interest for us to know to what is whether these methods are ethical, were they efficacious. It also takes is in great detail into the successful search for owls are carly the leader of al qaeda in iraq. The woman we met early we see her there. A jordanian doctor pulled the americans. Let the expert number three. [video clip] pakistands his way to and disappears. Somebody expected him of being an informant most likely. Nobody knew anything for three months. Sediment his back on the radar screen. He is saying suddenly he is back on the radar screen. Beginning to trade the number two member of al qaeda. The place goes crazy. Even the white house gets briefed. He is going to take his right one. Mber two or number the meeting has to take place in a place where the cia can completely control the environment and becomes the cia basic coast. They come up with a plan to get inside here without being detected. The problem is that nobody in the cia had ever met with him. They made arrangements for him to come into the base without being checked because they were afraid someone might recognize him and his identity compromise. [indiscernible] [end video clip] that story was told by the triple agents about that. He is a wellknown newspaper men. Was this just a case where you could not get an official told the story . Yes. Othersn the sequence will speak about it. , it we talked about for cannot get access to some of the people who were around right the final years or so. Nobody in our film was directly khosted with the operation. Those i wanted to talk to. Some of the people including the women had speak about jennifer matthews. We just saw a still of her. She was killed in that blast. She played a very integral ale in the fight against qaeda. The reason we focus on coaskt is when i started this so may people told me you cannot underestimate the impact of khost psychologically on the cia. The setback tummy tuck. It became personal. They lost some of their own. There is an indication to seek justice. Does that work in your narrative too . Every story needs a good story arc in the cia is closing in on bin laden and they got beheaded out qaeda and then this major setback. It is a strong part of the real story. Absolutely. Sne of the female cia analyst sheshe great irony is i been 15 years of her life trying to find bin laden and bin laden killed her. This is a woman with three kids and with a very rising career at the agency. The portrait of her in zero dark 30 is extremely misleading. Shes me to be an idiot he is stuck in the cold war. It was an unfair but trail. In this sump shes given her due. The stakes were certainly made. This is a more accurate treatment. Were about to turn to you for questions. Another man who is here, general michael hayden, is in the film as well about khost. He portrays it in a war youre are going to have casualties and losses. It is the sad truth that some on our side would die not only on 9 11 or on the obvious battlefields. He raisesl on anyone their hand. We you will probably get a microphone brought to you. If you do not have questions i will continue. I want to ask you then, in the 16 months from khost to abbottabad, you have about 60 seconds. What is the key there . What really moves ahead that takes us to that one place in pakistan . There are a lot of keys along the way. Let me try to lay it out briefly. They have an alias. The father. Is there were several million. He was the career working for bin laden. Sometime in 2007 we get the real name. Sayed is a john smith name. Not a kuwaiti. He is a pakistani. That is twice the size of california. It is something that it is not great. , this guy makes a phone call to someone in the gulf tummy tuck. The content lead the agency to believe that this guy is still in al qaeda. Several is about million people. He is back to sing careful practicing careful security. He takes the battery out. Theres no way to track him. They have to put people into the city and eventually track and back 2. 5 hours away to the city of abbottabad. What surprised them was the mysterious third family he was living in the compound. They began to think it might be Osama Bin Laden. In august of 2010, they go to president obama and say we seem to have a good potential lead on Osama Bin Laden. Khost has just happened. December 30, late december 2009. There was no great excitement in the oval office. Leadast really good lead to some cia officers dying. Clearly this was a good lead. Whole agatha the christie story about how that lead, how they try to get a sense of how to make the lead rather. Here was a debate at the end of the day when you under percention there are 100 not there. S were saying 40 or 80 . It is an interesting case of president ial decisionmaking. The stakes were lower. If you think about president kennedys decision in the cuban missile crisis, he made an extremely mature decision in a difficult circumstance. You can say the same thing about president obama. It is easy in retrospect to say this is the decision because you know the outcome. There were civilian casualties. Hey plan for every eventuality there the reasons why were an precise in the immediate aftermath. They have not told ripper paired for themselves there for success. They have not really repair themselves for success. It is a classic case of president ial decisionmaking. Securityrget that his advisers were on either side of the issue. In your book, do you dwell on that and take of the Decision Making issue . We all know the outcome. I was hoping to do that. It was my intention initially to do that. At is hard to put drama in the because we all know what happens. It did not work. It is funny. You you make these films, have to follow your access and course of the movie. The film is exhausteive. We do not have all the information on this. There are a lot of big gaps. Anymore questions otherwise we will go on. Abbottabad, how is it handled in the film question mark with what excerpt number four. [video clip] the hunt from the carrier to bin laden makes complete sense to me. It was based on all of the years of experience in a tightknit group of people who really cared about this and supported each other. The

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