my future and success but i will not tell you what to do. it is just me. this may tick off some people but i am just in the camp that says you do what you want with your body. it is fairly libertarian, too. libertarian i thought was an interesting concept. i wish it would grow. i think it would bring in more young people where it is not as cut is dry as the far right conservative ideas. i like it a little but i like the core values and those are the core values i stick to here. one more? right behind her. >> thank you. i am a huge fox news fan and i watch it all of the time. but i never here and there could be a legal reason for this but never hear anyone talk about the possibility of president obama being impeached? >> the ship has sailed. he is just biting his time. >> in eight years? >> you might get hillary clinton getting impeached before she gets sworn in. show of hands, you all fox people? hands up? how about all the five? there we go. o'reilly stuff? can we give tony a hand for cashing in? [applause] >> okay. we good. where are we? everyone is good. where do you want me now? i guess i go over there. nice to meet everybody. thank you so much. [inaudible conversation] c-span, created by america's cable television companies and brought to you as a public service by your cable or satellite provider. after wards is next on booktv. national security center director karen greenberg discusses her book "rogue justi justi justi justice "she is interviewed by ali soufan. >> host: what do you mean by the term rogue justice? >> guest: rogue justice is the term i gave to the way in which had mechanisms that are supposed -- the -- to keep us safe from interference from the state, supposed to protect the constitution went off off the rails after 9/11 and have failed to really come back. so i call it rogue justice because it is out of control, it is outside the bounds of the law, and it seems like a rogue element compared to what we expected and were used to. >> host: you have a lot of very emotional and vivid scenes throughout the book. i know you love going to court and watching all of these proceedings especially when it comes to terrorism and prosecution. why did you include them in the book and why do you focus on national security courts versus other courts? >> guest: the book is about in the realm of national security. there have been people that proposed national security courts but i wanted to see what goes on inside the courtroom because that is where the issues of guilt and innocence, that is where the issues of the power of the law are most clearly shown and demonstrated. it is actually fascinating to watch the difficulties that courts have in national security cases. that is where i wanted to go. there is all this talk about can the courts try terrorists? we cannot try the 9/11 terrorists. we never have in 15 years. years ago i started going to court to see what terrorism prosecution looked like and i have been to many states and districts to see what the narrative of the defense is, what the narrative of the prosecution is and how it changed over time. i think it is important for the american people to understand that there are nuances to these cases, not all terrorism cases are the same. there is an entire specimen of cases for those accused and wanted to plot and found with evidence bike the subway bombers to those who are aspirational. and i wanted to see how the cases played out differently and if there was a way in which justice could be described as not rogue. one of the big takeaways from the book is the courts were like a deer in the headlights in national security cases. there are surveillance cases, there are some secret course cases for the classified courts, there are terrorism prosecutions, there are hearings over foya requests. there is a whole realm of cases we needed to look at at to see how the courts deal with national security and time after time after time many of the judges, the important judges in the country and important jurisdiction have said it is national security, we don't want a part of it, we are not equipped to think about it, the president has told us this person is enemy combatant and they need the surveillance powers, the president told us we need to have this find of request denied whatever it is. and i wanted to see what the substance of this was and how the judges interacted with the lawyers and for the most part many of them took a back seat and by the time they got engaged and interested it was too late. >> host: so it interesting. you said courts and the judges, i think the term that you just used were like a deer in the headlights. but federal court was always used to prosecute national security cases from big spies to big terrorists. the east african indian bombers, many cia spies and different big national security cases were also prosecuted in federal courts. so the court has a lot of experience and presence in dealing with this. why after 9/11 was it different? >> guest: that is a good question and what i wanted to figure out. why was there shyness in the face of these prosecutions. i think one of the easy reasons is there were not a lot of courts that did spy and national security cases and were comfortable with classified evidence. as you expand and had 400 prosecutions in states across the nation where could you get the judges that feel like they have the compitance -- confidence to weigh in and the national security division was established were the purpose of being able to manage, oversee, make consistent the argument that were used in the legal framework to prosecute these cases. it took a long time. in taking a long time there was a lot of political backlash to let's not use our courts. that is one of the saddest things that happened. the court was up to the task and by the way compared to the 9/11 trial who could have taken this long to try any trial within a federal court cysystem. i agree they are up to the task and many other jurisdictions are up to the task. the brooklyn federal courthouse has done numerous terrorist trials and is now one of the leading courts in the regard. the eastern district of virginia as well. the d.c. court same thing. look, you have the boston case and the scariness factor of someone getting acquitted sets people off. >> host: let's talk about the beginning of the book with attorney general eric holder giving the case for the 9/11 defendents to the military. interesting you start the book with that and throughout the book you go back to the scene again and again and again. what is the importance of the specific decision? and what was eric holder's i im% -- impact and the effect did it have on the united states when he sent the cases to guantanamo bay? >> guest: it was an unfortunate decision. he said when they were going back to guantanamo bay instead of being tried in manhattan federal court what he said was i believe our courts are up to this task. i don't believe for a minute this is how it should be. but congress has taken the decision out of my hands by making it impossible to bring guantanamo bay detainees to this country for any reason including prosecution. and one of the original impetus for writing this book was a memo to eric holder which was listen, it wasn't congress that did this to you. it was ten years of the deference by the courts to this idea of the national security state. and after ten years it is not just congress that is able to do this it is the fact that the courts are not saying here we are, how many prosecutors came down on the side of congress, how many prosecutors said these are not cases we should handle, it is too dangerous, too much classified information, we don't want to run the risk of acquittal or run the risk of being responsible for war deaths in america. it is not our job. it wasn't just about the congressional ban on transfers from guantanamo bay. it was a very long narrative that started right after 9/11. the original military commission document came out as a presidential order in the fall of 2011. this was taken out of the federal courts right away and there should have been an outcry, an outpouring of no, we know how do this and are protecting our system of balance and powers. it didn't happen. after all of these years that is how i see the story and that is why it comes back and back to to me the 9/11 trial is an important misstep that we have not had it for americans. trials are guilt and innocent, they lay out a narrative, trials are healing and bring closure. we have not have closure for 9/11 on some very deep psychological level that i cannot name and frame and put in a scientific category but i know it. i know that it is a lack of trust in ourselves that is fundamental. and a lack of trust in our courts. so i am glad you asked about the holder scene because it does matter to me. it is what inspired me to go back and say how could this have happened? what else went wrong with our trust in our judiciary? yeah. >> host: another thing that goes hand and hand and we see this with guantanamo bay, every time there is a hearing, most of the fighting and discussions and legal proceedings have to do with the secrecy and it seems the secrecy is very important to you and again that is a topic that you refer to throughout this wonderful book. can't we have secrecy at a time of national crisis? i am trying to be the devils advocate here. >> guest: we need secrecy absolutely. secrecy is essential to national security. there is no question about it. but how much secrecy is really the issue. secrecy that shuts down the courts in a way they can't function as they used to, secrecy that takes away from the american people as a right to know what is going on, let's remember when president obama took office and issued a series of decrees on the second day he talked about transparency saying you will know what is going on inside this government. it hasn't happened. when you go to court, there is a tremendous amount of classification already. these cases whether before 9/11 or after have always had classified issues and there is a procedures act that gives guidance to rules, judges, prosecutors about how to handled classified materials. for the most part it has worked. that doesn't mean it hasn't been contested but it has worked for a long time. the secrecy issue at guantanamo bay has decked these proceedings. they can not get to the beginning of the trial even. it is all about what is going to be presented, what isn't going to be presented, what is allowed to be seen, what exists. and one of the problems with secrecy after 9/11 that is there is some suspicion on many that the secrecies of the things the united states government did that they should not have done and that cannot be the reason things are classified rather than sources and methods and information that would help our enemies. so for example, torture, the fact that we know these individuals were tortured. that is not a secret. what kind of torture? who did it? we may not know but that can't be the reason we cannot have these trials. >> host: you mention torture and you and i have been talking about torture for a long time. prom your experience, you have been looking into these issues for a long time. you looked into guantanamo bay and your book was about guantanamo bay and today it is about the federal courts basically. in your understanding, is there a lot of over classification in the federal system or in guantanamo bay? and how does the overclassification have an impact on the entire justice system? -- over-classification -- >> guest: i think i am not the only person to think over-classification is an issue. the government is rstruggling with this. you can see they decided on a level that is no longer classified. there are number of federal judges that say when i looked at the classified materials i was astonished. if you give breadth to classification and you are the officer that has to decide whether to classify it or not why wouldn't you? why take the risk you make a mistake about something that could be the needle in the hay stack down the road. so there has been tremendous over-classification and who knows what direction that is going to go in because all of this depends on external events. between the media and rumor mongers, they found out this and that, and the snowden case, and we are entering a world where classification is actually harder because secrecy is harder, because the way the internet works and the way sophisticated hackers work, there is a sense of having deeper and deeper needs of classification and not just the first level of let's classify something. i would say it needs to be rethought within the context of 21st technology and a lot of people in government are doing that but we have a long way to go and it will impact these trials. >> host: some basic things. in guantanamo bay, i understand the term waterboarding is still classified. there are a lot of issues the u.s. government admitted to publically. it is part of official investigations that have been released by these agencies, enities but are still considered classified in a guantanamo bay courtroom. how do you explain that? >> guest: it is beyond inappropriate. you have a number of individuals who have either testified in congress or have, you know, written or spoken about things that in one context they are classified and in another context they are not classified. there is a chill factor of not writing about this or that even though this is public knowledge and people can google it. this is dangerous because it diminishes the legitmacy of classification. it is not a good space to be in. it makes a mockery of what classification should be. classification should be reserved for those things which are truly dangerous, truly secret, truly important, and there is a category of those things and what happened and this happened in a lot of areas, not just classification, is the government is so over-reached people don't trust the decisions, don't trust the lines drawn between classified and unclassified and that is another thing i allude to in the book and that is the withering away of trust in the government to say what is real, what is right and what makes sense for us to go forward. >> host: and how do you see classification in federal courts? >> guest: classification in federal courts works well. listen, there has been so many issues with all of these terrorism cases involving classified information and the judges have figured out a way to handle it. the defense attorneys are not in up and arms about it. there are cases where they wish things went their way but they worked it out. that is the judge's role to say you can have this but you cannot have this. in the longest terrorism case we have ever had, look how they litigated what could be shown in court when you were dealing with individual torture and information that hasn't gotten torture notes which people may not know depending on when the case was and after trumend hazardous appeal to the circuit court, you know twice, they came up with a system. but they came up with a system that involved summaries of, you know, substitutes for the witnesses and the testimony verbatim. but they came up with something, and they had the trial, it was concluded. it took years but not 15 like the 9/111 trials. even when the reason for classification is complicated they worked it out. >> host: so, what is the biggest fiphilosophical contract after 9/11 was the balance between liberty and security. a lot of people have been advocating it is fine to do all of these kind of things if they keep us secure and can prevent another 9/11. from reading the book and knowing you personally i know you are big on that balance. how do you see the balance, not based on your opinion, but based on your countless hours sitting in court, listening to national security cases? >> guest: what i would say is that for the most part security has won in the balance. there hasn't been a balance since 9/11 and that security has overwhelmed courtrooms and juries and the media in terms of understanding, you know, what at stake andt tha that liberty has suffered tremendously. i will come back to how i think that is the case. what i think further is that we focus too much on liberty and what this book tries to show is while we were focused on liberty versus security we should have been focused on justice versus security. the liberty is interesting but we lost the strength and fiber and backbone of our judicial system in this context including our laws in this congress. when you think about the security versus liberty in the courtroom which is a really good question for this book and i say security, you see a lot of cases where the first amendment rights are really an issue. soon hard to tell in some of these cases when how many individuals and these are lower level cases, we are not talking about locations where people were caught in the middle of an activity or a plot or after a plot. we are not talking about the embassy bombings or the subway attempted bombing. we are talking about individuals between aspirational and aul rationale. talking about al-qaeda and isis comes across as being guilt. where is the overt act and how have we pushed back against the first amendment is an issue. another issue that is bigger is the fourth amendment. the fourth amendment has been beaten up since the beginning of the war on terror. that is what the edward snowden revelation showed. but we did want even need snowden because inside the government, lawyers and others, the current head of the fbi, jack goldsmith, now a professor at harvard and now justice department lawyer, recognized the surveillance authorities being used were not justified by the way they were laid out and did their best to rethink and recalibra recalibrate. >> host: he was heroic for standing up for this. >> guest: he was willing to put his reputation and career at stake to say we cannot do this. this is a guy who is pro-law enforcement -- >> host: the director of the fbi? >> guest: who understands the security state and understood and wanted to bring it back, rein it back in. and the fourth amendment is still not as protected as it used to be and we will see where that conversation is headed. the patriot sunseted a year ago, the surveillance part of it specific but there is talk to bring back those powers. what is necessary, what is not necessary, we have not figured out. that is what i mean by security has won, liberty, mostly through the work of the aclu and other organizations has sort of found its voice and it has been lingering and building steam here and there but it hasn't -- that recalibration and balance isn't there. i have been thinking about this and i am not sure balance -- balance is good. we want balance. but i think the tension between the two is great. i think it is great for the country. national security people are so inkeepingthecountrysafeandcivil liber liberty -- >> host: you mention about the aspirational, but if you look at an individual trying to reach al-qaeda or isis, and the only tool you have is to send an undercover agent, you know the fbi to something, or law enforcement in general or to have a source to deal with that, an informant to deal with them, and see if they are serious or gnaw. do you see that as entrapment or law enforcement doing their job and utilizing the only tool they have? do you prefer to individual to be arrested before they commit the act or after al-qaeda reaches out to them and after they commit the act? that is the balance we have to look at. what should experience, frauj from reviewing these cases can you tell us about that. >> guest: this is the hard part. there is a range of cases called entrapment cases. a range of cases. and some are just shameful and others are spectacular. so where you see individuals who, you know, you see what is going on and there are larger players at force that law enforcement is trying to get out. there is an intelligence component that is important and substantial and then other cases where you feel like they could never have done anything on their own like the river dale case. there are couple ways to think about this. one, the fbi, as you know, in the very beginning, and still somewhat today although it is better, does not have undercover agents who can go in and are either, you know, muslim, foreign-born, arabic speaking, whatever it is they need. they don't have and didn't have enough of those agents. so the reliance on informants was probably not the best way to go about things because informants have something to gain whether it is not being deported, or not paying a fine, or whatever it is. there is a trade off there. some of these have turned out to be rather desipidou. the more there is undercover agents the more it is professionalized in that way and it is better and you see that as these cases play. out that is the first thing. the second thing is yes, the use of informants, it is not just terrorism they use them for, but it is way of infiltrating and being inside. of human intelligence. something good law enforcement and human intelligence has to and should rely on but you have to be really smart about it. some people are and some people aren't. that is what you start to see in some of these cases. the reason is the fbi is not large. it is what the 13,000 agents to cover a domestic but global at this point portfolio. so you really want to make sure you are not wasting resources on individuals who are not the type to go toward al-qaeda. it is a judgment call but you have to make sure you make it the right way. >> host: one of the things here and allow me to just comment on -- >> guest: yeah, of course. >> host: on the statement you made about people who will never be able to do it by themselves. yes, and usually we have seen a lot of even people who are idiots. al-qaeda reaches out for them and they blow themselves up. the prerequisite is to be an idiot. when the fbi discovers an individual on that path trying to reach out for al-qaeda, yes, they might be mentally unstable, not that smart in any way, shape or form, but if you are a supervisor in the fbi or in charge of the fbi office, and somebody comes, one of your agents, said this guy is trying to reach out for them. do you wait for the real al-qaeda or the real isis to come to that mentally unstable individual and convince them to do a terror attack or do you interfere? this is part of the balance law enforcement has to take into account. >> guest: this is particularly important today. you cannot say watch the al-qaeda guys. it becomes more complicated. that is why there is such a push inside the fbi, inside the department of homeland security, inside the white house, and in society at larch for thinking about -- large -- about these individuals who are vulnerable to a message of violence. right? to think about these individuals in a way that feeds a diversion program rather than a law enforcement activity. it is something now, even more than the al-qaeda day, because is younger individuals. these individuals are coming on the radar either through their parents, associates, something the fbi picks up on social media wise at a very young age. what is really needed and what this country does not have yet is a program that can help these individuals realize that this is not a path to go down and th that -- the other part is the average age of these individuals is 26 but the age of most of them is 20. it is a huge spike in the chart. it is just a matter of getting through this period of late adolescence development with people who can deter individuals. it might not be isis. it might be some other kind of violence. i see isis as a definable slice of a larger, you know, sort of violent-prone movement that is happening in the united states in a way that is visible and palpable. that is why there is a call for diversion programs because do you want to be the person to take the camp but no it would be better not to waste resources when there are individuals who wish us harm and isis is not being deterred in its call for violence in the united states. >> host: how do you see the programs working? you probably have a better idea about it than many of us because you aend -- attended so many court proceedings. i think you can know if it would work in this case or not work in that case. what is your general opinion about them? >> guest: in the cases that have been the most high profile cases where individuals have gotten weapons, often by themselves and wanted it commit acts, the off ramp, it often involves foreign direction or involvement, the off ramp was not available to us. so as i say is there a case where there might have been an off ramp, i think maybe the case where the young man who was arrested for material support, alleged material support, who eventually pled but i think there are some cases where i think that could have happened. but how i see it is i see we haven't done it. we don't have the program yet. we have not figured it out yet and don't know how because it feels like targeting. you are in the midst of this uncomfortable situation. we don't want to target individuals and ask people to report on individuals so we need a space safe and need to create a space safe for these individuals to be able to come on their own. that would be the best way. where they are helped one way or another. that may sound naive and idealistic but we don't have a choice. >> host: "rogue justice" appears to be a pessimistic view. do you see any progress from the bush administration to the obama administration? a lot of people say the obama war on terror has been executed very similar manner to the george bush war on terror. what is your opinion about that? >> guest: there is less difference than obama's supporters, at least from my view of things, would like to see. i think obama acdhatually wanteo change things. >> host: in what way? >> guest: guantanamo bay, i think holder wanted to return and have them in federal court. >> host: but holder gave them back to the military commission. >> guest: i think politically they were not up to the tasked. i think they failed time and time again politically. i want to come back to guantanamo bay. i want to say on surveillance it is murky in terms of what they wanted and didn't want. this administration has used surveillance powers and in the drone program, the targeted killing programs with weaponized drones, the obama administration has stepped this up exponentially. it is their way of conducting the war on terror. without judicial review. that is a dicy area. you really want the executive of getting into the business of deciding who should be killed and who is guilty or not? if you think about how this country was founded it was founded on many principles against a general warrant. you had to have specific suspicion for a warrant. against executive killing. against executive detention. obama has not really cleaned this legacy up from the bush administration. having said that, i think he has tried on a number of levels. in his mind, he has curtailed and contradistricted the weapon drone killing which i still think is just executive decree. on surveillance, it is actually very interesting because while this administration has embraced a lot of these encouragement of the fourth amendment and expressed anger at snowden and the fallout from snowden, obama was the person who unleashed the report, who commissioned the report, after the snowden revelations that said of five individuals he trusted in the national security state, including lawyers and cia guys and said look, tell me about this. make an assessment. and they made an assessment and their assessment was this program that is codified by the patriot act doesn't work and it is illegal. that was obama that created the grounds for that argument that led to the sunsetting of the patriot act. in my heart of hearts, i take him at his words he wanted to close guantanamo bay. he never, though, at least very early in his presidency, he decided he didn't want to end indefinite detention. he gave a national archive speech and said among our possibilities are indefinite detention and we still have a category of those who can not be released but can't be tried. those are the most well known names. individuals we have known about for a long time. but i honestly believe that in terms of closing guantanamo bay in ways that are not perfect, i think he wants to do it. it is clear in the case at which he is clearing for this administration -- his administration is clearing for release through the periodically review board the individuals from guantanamo bay taking them off the list of limbo, of not charged or cleared for release, that they are working at a hell bent pace to make this close. i think it is going to close before the end of his presidency. >> you think so? how come? >> guest: it cost over $4 million right now per detainee at guantanamo bay per year to maintain guantanamo bay. >> host: that is an amazing number. >> guest: it is an amazing number and it is going to go up because for everyone released it goes up and up. when you have less than 20 individuals who are in the category of haven't been cleared for released and haven't been released. do you know how much it is going to cost per detainee? we are talking $11 million a detainee. we will have -- half the population again and again and it will go up. and i don't think congress will have the support, and this has to be the calculation inside the government, and then all you have left are the indefinite detainees which is a small number and they will divide them up and put them in prison around the united states. that will be dicy because what rights do they have. they may be able to be tried or they may plead to federal court charges. there is talk about them pleading if they waive their rights. i think that small number could be widdled witled down. and then you the military commissions that were not part of guantanamo bay, took a long time to get going, were revived under president obama who initially put them on hold. you have the 9/11 trial and a couple other important trials that resulted in death all over the world that have still nothing tried. if this country cannot figure out a way to have a federal court procedure for these cases i will be highly surprised. >> host: i notice there are a lot of people confusing the military commission with military court. can you please kind of clarify the difference? military courts, same as federal court in my understanding. >> guest: yeah, court marshal is a separate piece of law codified in the ucmj that can try everything from a petty offense to a serious offense. in the same way they would be tried in federal court essentially although there are some differences. when you get to the military commissions that is a whole other structure. it has gone through tremendous evolution since the beginning of the war on terror. the first military commission act was in 2006 in response to the supreme court saying you cannot have made up military commissions. congress has to create these. >> host: this was a made up ad hoc by the way. >> guest: yeah, and so then obama when he revived them in 2009 and what the heads of the military commission now say is look, these are as close to article iii courts as we can possibly make them. the only differences are we have certain procedures based on classification as we were talking and hear say is a little broader than it would be elsewhere. so you have these things, you know, built in that it turns out these military commissions, however much they are like article iii courts are not like article iii courts. have you seen an article iii court where it took this long to get going? where the judge doesn't have control of the courtroom? where other forces are at play? it is a mess and it is a mess because the nature of the evidence in these trials is extremely hard to present in court. and so you say, well, why would it be different in federal court? you know how many cases we have tried in federal court where there is not a tremendous amount of evidence? i think there is a way to do this. i think there are issues about the death penalty and whether or not these individuals would plea. this isn't the way to go about it. it as a mockery of the system and a mockery after 9/11 which isn't fair. >> what is the shocking thing you realize about our justice system when you were writing the book? >> guest: perhaps the biggest things i learned were the things i thought shouldn't be allowed were actually law. >> host: like? >> guest: like the fact that you can have -- there are things that you really can't say or do that are considered overt acts or can be interpreted as overt acts. watching this play out in the courtroom and whether you see that in the law you see how it plays out. that is the first thing. the second thing is judges try hard to talk to juries about how to think about the law. let's talk about entrapment. understanding entrapment is so difficult. and juries come back with questions all of the time. would this be predisposition? that is another thing i found out. the intricacy of the relationship between a judge and the jury is fascinating. and i think a real shining gem and can be a shining gem in the american system. i also have seen the opposite which is judges who don't want a terrorist in their courtroom and get away with it. one takeaway from the book which everybody knows how powerful judges are. when you see guantanamo bay you realize you do want somebody to have that kind of control in the courtroom. another very interesting thing is the degree to which when i talk about the weakening of the court the one exception of courts that stood up with the security state was the supreme court. four separate occasions they stand up and make these military commissions being one make rulings saying you cannot detain a person this way. but the supreme court rules in 2008 that guantanamo bay detainees have the right to challenge their ruling in court. in a habeas proceeding. that is a clear fine about rights and liberties. goes to the district court in d.c., which is the court appr e approved and authorized to do this. then the circuit court overturns them in scolding ways like whose evidence were you looking at? why would you trust this evidence? you need to defer to the government on the evidence. that was a surprise the degree the supreme court said what they had but it was like you said it but we are the circuit court. i found that conversation disheartening and surprising. it is still surprising to this day because it continues to go on. >> host: you talk about weakening the court system but how powerful the judges are. how do you marry the two together? >> guest: because they are powerful but stepped away wherever they could from the issues at hand. if it was a surveillance case, no we will not discuss that. if it was a detention case, look what happened in the -- >> host: the so-called dirty bomb case? >> guest: who was never charged with the dirty bomb, right? even before the case gets going, right, he is in enemy combatant status, he is detained, the government wants it that way. it is litigated through fourth circuit in the d.c. and the judge takes it on and says they agree with the government knowing it will go to the supreme court. the white house realizes the supreme court might say, and this is the power of the supreme court, no, you can't hold him there. and they go to the fourth circuit and say you have to revoke the decision. what? what? and the reason they were willing to do that is because they had several years of being able to say to judges we are telling you don't do this. if you knew what we knew, we will not share everything, but we know and we are holding the reins of security and don't go there. the judge, who was up at the time, one of the people they were thinking about for the supreme court position, says no, i am not revoking it. i am not doing it. and the supreme court said fines finesses it is says we will allow him to be released to federal court. think about the overtness of the president going to the judge saying you need to revoke a decision we made. >> host: you talk about government overreach using the threat of security, trying to control courts, you talk about torture being committed by the u.s. government. and you talk about legal surveillance, you talk about a lot of sad and disheartening issues in this book. do you see any accountability and do you think we need accountability to move forward? >> guest: yes. >> host: in what way? >> guest: i think the lack of accou accountability is one and it is isn't like we don't like that guy. >> host: no, we are talking about is he accountable for mistakes and who should be held accountable. >> guest: i do believe the lawyers who justified torture should be held accountable because it should not happen again. it weakens our confidence in r ourselves that we can do things without torture. it compromises who we are. as donald trump said we can go back to waterboarding when we need it. we don't know how bad the torture policy was because we have not seen diane feinstein's report. i believe the lawyers should be tried. i believe the agencies, as you know, the fbi walked away from this, the agencies that did this need to be held accountable in some way. i don't know if that is -- you know, proactively which is if this happens again or whatever it is but that should be held accountab accountable. government officials should be held accountable. the fact that there were some who close their eyes and others embraced it and ran with the policy. torture has infected much more than we know. it has infected case after case whether it is just abuse, just abuse in american circumstances or something that happened at black sites, at cia black sites abroad, it infected the john walker case, and these are individuals who are tried and you know charged in federal court. and it has infected so much of our court system. it is the poison that was let out that has diminished. and that is why the military commissioners can't function. why do we have military commissions because there is too much about torture. >> host: the horrible torture is beyond the efficacy of the technique. we know from personal experience it doesn't work but now you are talking about the larger harm it did to legal cases and relationship with allies. >> guest: it is the original sin and doesn't stop. think about the individuals who were tortured and have family and clan and country who know what happened to them. it has harmed our relationship. look at all of the videos that are sent out by terrorist groups that include pictures of abu grave which is not even a website. it has harmed us. the harm of the torture program and some accountability would restore our standing in the world in terms of our leadership on human rights and free our court from the taint -- as good citizens they tried to maneuver around and step around and it will cleanse them i think. i see accountability for the torture program being crucial and very sad that we were too scared to go down that road. and president obama is the person who led that. we will go forward not back. what he didn't understand is you cannot go forward. you have to confront what was again, think about it, and think about why want to be as a people. we cannot be a people that we tortu tortured. it doesn't work like that. >> we hear from officials saying that if that regime were -- it was considered torture but if the cia does it is not. what is your comment on something like former director hayden saying that? >> guest: he knows it it is not true. torturing another human being is torturing another human being no matter who does it. here is the part that really bothers me about it. as you know, as you have so well written and spoken, the -- you cannot have torture in your back pocket if that is what you are relying on to get information. that is why we have an integration service and report trillions in the intelligence capabilities and why we have law enforcement agencies that are trained and professional. ... one terrorist attack away from what you are talking about in your book and would probably be 10 times worse. gest it's a worry. >> guest: that's a given, you are right in the book made the point that we don't have to go the other way. there has to be safeguards and those safeguards began with the commander-in-chief in power. the surveillance torture etc. these programs are based on a vision of what the president could be and that's why we ended up with executive detention and executive killing etc. so it's complicated. we have yet to see lawyers involved in government who can really make as much headway as they want. they never quite got to the end of turning back what they were focused on the surveillance program and also the torture program which they did a lot to try to stop at least in one form or another. so tau it's a little problem. >> host: how do you look at our successes and our failures in the last what, 15 years of our war against terrorism? we saw officially the war against al qaeda and we have been combating al qaeda. officially the war was declared against 9/11 and now we have ice is and a lot of other affiliates so many places around the world. some under al qaeda and some under isis. with everything you mentioned are or breathe more secure or less secure as a nation? are the things that we need to do in order to make ourselves more secure and more confident in facing the task ahead? >> we are much more in my opinion then we were 9/11. all that tax dollars that up and pushed into our law enforcement intelligence, military etc. i think we are more secure and i think there were tremendous glitches in the system prior to 9/11. we are safer. we are going to stay vigilant and trust our law enforcement officers. we are going to trust their intelligence agencies. we are not going to overreach in that way. we are going to have rules and regulations and we are never going to just do things secretly behind the scenes because we think it's important that we are safer and the reasons we are safer at the because of the things we did legally in the things we thought about and the things that we took a step back. >> host: but the nature of our own society and america as a melting pot. just from my perspective you look at the number of foreign fighters for example. we have 150 in the conflict zone in iraq and syria and a look at a place like elton, they have 500. they have a way smaller country and we have the muslim community which is way bigger so there something we are doing right that goes beyond just the system. >> guest: right, this is a really important point. rose-colored glasses version version which i like which is that hey our job is to make sure that they don't become brussels, that we don't don't become friends and that we are inclusive in a way that we have not been willing to be inclusive. that's the next step and it's a challenge but we can do it. we have done it before. we can totally do it. we have to want to do it. the good news is a lot of the structures of government are looking at. yet federal judges that are basically saying look there needs to be a reintegration program or you have other saying look we are going to figure out, law enforcement saying look let's have civil society take care of some of these kids who are 13, 14, 15, let's function as a nation and let's understand that there has to be a sense that you can belong essentially to a country. you have to want to vote. you have to be part of the civic framework. you have to be able to say what you think a y