Lawfare Daily: Sept. 11, 2001, 25 Years Later

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[MUSIC PLAYING] Thanks indeed, Anfer. Yet, of indeed, point A/recruiting. [MUSIC PLAYING] I was on the mall fetching the copies

for my internship at the State Department. When I heard a rumble in the distance at about 9.30 or so in the morning. I graduated college right around the time that we learned that the United States had a systematic program of torture and rendition

as I was graduating with a new interest in human rights that became the real area of focus for me. It's the law fair podcast. I'm Katherine Pompeo, Associate Editor of Law Fair. With Julia Curley, Michael Feinberg, Natalie Orpet,

Lauren Voss, and Benjamin Wittes. And just the lasting impact of this conflict and in Afghanistan under a towel done control today, those personal stories are really to me. What I really hope doesn't get lost.

Protecting the country from things like this ever happening. Again, it literally becomes this sounds like an action movie cliche. It's the reason you wake up in the morning. We have to protect ourselves.

We have to protect our democracy. But also, we have to protect it from the people who we have anointed to protect it. Today, we're talking about how the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 shaped each of their careers

and the U.S. National Security apparatus 25 years on. I was two years old on 9/11, every version of the national security state that I've ever known. So TSA at airports, surveillance authorities,

the detention regime, wars, the creation of the DNI and the entire department of Homeland Security was built in response to that day. And so I want to spend this hour understanding what came before through the people who lived the before

and then built their careers in the after. So for the rest of you, who were adults on 9/11,

“what's the version of the U.S. Security state you remember”

from before that morning that I never got to see.

We can start with Ben. - So the post 9/11 national security state was not as is commonly imagined. A trigger that got pulled on 9/11. - It was a little bit more of a continuum

that started before 9/11. And if you read the 9/11 commission report, you know, one of the things that is striking about it is that the problems that led to 9/11, you know, people were responding to already the question

of how much you should use the military, for example, to respond to Al Qaeda, the questions of airport security were not, you know, wholly revealed on 9/11. They had antecedents. The sense that, you know, counterterrorism was an increasing part

of U.S. foreign policy and domestic law was something that built over the course of the 1990s and some of the architecture that we associate with the post 9/11 world, actually, kind of pre-existed 9/11 in some form.

“So I think the best way to understand it”

is that 9/11 radically accelerated a set of trends that were already underway. And they are the following.

The first is the idea that international terrorism is something

that we principally deal with as a matter

with, you know, through domestic law enforcement means

“we've tacked back in significant ways since then.”

But that sense that, you know, you use Tomahawk cruise missiles to deal with Al Qaeda is a creature of the late Clinton administration, right? And that radically accelerates with the passage of the AUMF seven days after eight days after 9/11.

The second is the sense that covert actions

have a very significant part in this. And that is covert actions both in the form of kinetic actions. But also, you know, what came to be called extraordinary renditions, right, running a transportation service in the form of kidnappings and airplanes

to get people to countries in which they had criminal process handing against them. The third big element is a hardening of American infrastructure. And this was most visible in the case

of the airport security stuff. But it was underway with respect to some a lot of other critical infrastructure.

And the phrase critical infrastructure was, you know,

kind of like already something, you know, a cliche in the late 90s, right? And that sense that, you know, boy, they could blow something up and it could really disable something, you know, was not a, you know,

that's a creature of 1990 or a 1995 when Tim McVey takes down the federal building. And as was, you know, questions like bioterrorism. And then the, the last of them is, you know, this sense that the whole world is becoming less governable, right?

“And that we have, and that you need to bulk up”

surveillance capacities and the legal architectures that underlies surveillance capacities, there are some significant reforms of the Pfizer that predate 9/11. So, and the government was already pushing the use

of those in ways that were raising questions as well as technology was developing in ways. So what I would say is very little new was revealed on 9/11. But all of a sudden, everything that we had thought about

as long-term questions that we really need to think about and things that really gonna require a lot of reform of the way we do business. All of them went from that kind of level of priority to this needs to be dealt with right now today.

But the nature of those questions,

“I think didn't change as much as people often think they did.”

- Does anybody else have anything they'd like to add about that before? - Go ahead, Mike. - So it's interesting, I don't disagree with a single thing Benja said, but if you asked me what the difference

between the pre-imposed 9/11 areas were, I would have a completely different answer. And that's because for me, the division of that day was primarily a cultural one. And I mean that in a couple of sentences,

first, the culture of national security,

the culture of the intelligence community, the military, fundamentally change. Not just because of the subsequent intelligence reform acts and various new authorities that were loosened in terms of approvals, but a lot of the stove piping

that even would have been touched by administrative bureaucratic reform, vanished because operators and analysts realized that the atomized way of doing things agency by agency was no longer really going to work if you were going to shift from a posture

where you're dealing with the contingency of a big war or you were dealing with figuring out something after the fact and shifting to essentially being a preventative enterprise. In other words, it's one thing if something terrible has happened and the FBI and CIA

and NSA are sharing what they know after the fact. It's a very different thing if what happens

So I really think there was a shift in employees,

worldviews and willingness to speak with other counterparts and different buildings that wasn't there before.

“And I think that has actually been almost an absolute good.”

I'm a hard pressed to think of a downside to that. The other major cultural shift is that we are now at this moment, hosting a podcast, talking about national security topics in the pre-9/11 era outside of a very specific sort

of group of professionals and practitioners, surveillance authorities weren't really something that took up a lot of ink in most newspapers. The average citizen had no idea what Jason was. Or, you know, what special activity center,

or special activities group was, or the hostage rescue team, like there's all these organizations now or subunits of larger organizations that are part of the national conversation that just nobody knew about beforehand.

And it's not just because of 9/11, it's because of how the popular imagination and media reacted to 9/11. I mean, it brought forth like we could do an entire show on like how weird a TV show 24 is,

but it wouldn't exist but for 9/11.

And then that, that leads to the third cultural change,

which I almost am reluctant to get into,

“but I think it was very pronounced among my generation”

by which I mean, people who were involved in higher education at just more elite schools to be blunt. And that shift was when I was growing up, Patriotism in its traditional trappings was viewed as something that was sort of almost unsophisticated

in for robes. Like if you grew up in the left, you didn't have a ton of friends who fly the American flag out of their house. You didn't have a lot of talk about like

John Ford films and springy steam albums. I'm just using those as examples of like sort of pieces of art that contain classic American tropes that have traditionally been leveraged by conservatives. Now, you know, 25 years on.

I mean, Ben and I were at a spring steam show where the imagery was no different at times than it would have been into country show during the Reagan era. And that was really interesting to me is that once the Iraq war sort of spun down

we withdrew from, we withdrew most of our forces from Afghanistan. I'm not talking about the most recent drawdown. But there was a willingness, like all right, the acute post 9/11 phase is over.

We can have a conversation about what sort of country we are going to be. And it was held in a much more honest and bipartisan patriotic matter that I ever would have expected.

And that was just, you know, that was very interesting for me. Yeah, I could do a whole podcast on that. But I want to get to why we're here. So you're all here on this panel

because you had careers that were shaped by 9/11 or in response to 9/11. So I want to go one by one. I'll start with Lauren. Talk about where you were that morning.

What's a moment that you can picture? And what was a moment in the following weeks, months, years

“where you thought this is going to be my life's work now?”

Yeah, so I actually didn't tie the whole narrative together until we started talking about this podcast, right? Because this is how my life turned out. And then I actually started looking at those threads and going, wow, look how contingent this all is

on this one moment. So I was in high school at the time. I was applying to getting ready to apply to colleges, trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. And I was in math class at the time.

We didn't know what happened at first, right?

You hear there's an attack, but you think it's something similar to a car bomb type thing. And the narrative came out over the day. And it was one of those moments that you remember those conversations throughout the day.

But I wasn't somebody who then on September 12th woke up and said, OK, I'm going to join the military now. I'm ready to join the fight. At that point, I thought I was going to go study at normal psychology.

I wanted to be a psychologist.

And then I went off to college. And I studied psychology.

“But with all of the world events going on,”

this was like the mid-2000s now. I was really drawn into the very difficult conversations that were happening around Iraq and Afghanistan and the challenges we were facing. That tactical success wasn't enough, right?

There were major failures happening there. And so I started studying international relations and political science and focusing on those things. I should say, as a side note, I went to public school in Missouri for high school.

In the early 2000s, everyone had to take the AzVab. If you don't know what that is, that is the military enlisted placement exam. They tell you it is a job aptitude exam. And then you get the results, and you see that they're

all military jobs. You go interesting. So it had been in the back of my head for a while then. But I was really trying to grapple with these concepts in college.

And I wrote my thesis on the failure

“of disarmament de-mobilization and reintegration in Afghanistan.”

And I was getting pulled into this. And that was at the point where we were still struggling and both Afghanistan and Iraq at that point with what to do and at tactical success wasn't enough. There was no real good path forward at that point.

And that is when I joined the military. And that is really shaped much of my career. And that wouldn't have been probably an option on my radar if not for 9/11. And I joined the military and got to do these things,

being to the fray of it of what was happening. I was a part of very difficult targeting identification decisions and war planning in such a way that it made me want to go to law school,

which I had never wanted to do before.

I did not want to be a lawyer. And so I ended up in law school studying the law of armed conflict because I'd had all of these lawyers before. And the military told me no where I couldn't do things. We had to wait for something to happen.

And they would never explain why. And so I went to law school to have that experience. I also have to say though, the military, I've got to give it credit. I used the GI Bill.

I come from a working class, fat ground and Missouri. My father was a cab driver. My mom was a state home mom. There is no way that I would have gone to law school

and gotten a master's. If not for the GI Bill, which covered it all. So I'm grateful for that military experience for that. But you can see how all of these different pieces build up to turning me into an attorney.

And then making me want to focus on things that come up in conflict, whether that be targeting to the Pentagon or a DOD senior advisor on civilian harm, trying to tackle those concepts. And now today, what makes it super interesting to me

is that some of the issues we're dealing with now, we talk about domestic counterterrorism type issues, are things we're dealing with legal opinions and things that occurred right after 9/11 that could have impact on what we're seeing today.

And so that makes it kind of come full circle for me.

“The one thing that I think makes it the most personal to me”

is the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And I know that's still sensitive to a lot of people for a lot of reasons. I had just joined the board of the nonprofit, no one left behind.

They told me two to three hours a week. We want you to help with governance. We ended up doing 24/7 operations, trying to get people out.

I was pregnant with my first child,

eight and a half months pregnant. His name is Noah, and military people do dark humor. They, you know, said we were, this was Noah's arc. And we were trying to get people out. But you had people telling you,

I'm got to leave, my kids don't have visas because it's a baby, right? Do we leave our child behind? Or do we all stay, right? Or if anyone knows a special immigrant visa program,

which is what Noah left behind, works with, it's for immediate family. So we had people with unmarried sisters, who we're gonna, you know, we have to be them behind knowing what the Taliban might do,

but we're, you know, fearful of their own children. So, I mean, all of that to say that work and the like thousands of people that we helped get out were still doing the work today, right?

And that's what's most important to me

is we talk about this now and it's becoming, 9/11's becoming academic. Afghanistan's becoming academic. And to me, it is always so personal to think about the service members,

killed the wounded, you know, who will forever be changed by this. The SIVs, the people in Afghanistan that helped us, that got left behind. And just the lasting impact of this conflict

and in Afghanistan under a Taliban control today,

what I really hope doesn't get lost.

Julia, what was your experience? Well, when I think about 9/11, I think about my entire adult life. I was a college student in DC,

“I was a sophomore at American University.”

I was on the mall fetching the copies for my internship at the State Department when I heard a rumble in the distance at about 9/30 or so in the morning. And by the time I got back to my office, everyone was in a panic and the boss was screaming

that everybody should flee. And I found my way back to my dorm. There was already beginning to be a line of golf embassies sending their limos to evacuate their students.

Me and a couple of friends organized an NIH blood drive where we all got up to Bethesda, gay blood,

which turned out never was needed

because there weren't enough survivors. And pretty much after that, after that day, it happened early enough in the semester. I changed my major. I focused like a laser on military studies

and the Middle East and applied and got into the Defense Intelligence Agency and prepared to go to war as quickly as possible. Having grown up in Hawaii, I immediately felt like it was my December seventh moment.

And whatever my misgivings were concerns with the Bush administration at the time, it just felt like this was the moment and my generation was being called to serve. And I got swept up in it all.

And when the all of her homes, quotes of we shared the in-communical experience of war, it was just like a tide that pulled us all away and I found myself sooner than later in Iraq

for the first of five tours.

And then in Afghanistan and all the places that a person like me would serve, whether it's Baghdad or Kerkuk, or Ramadi or Kabul or coast, I was there. I won't point her another over the next 15 years.

And it defined all of my adult life. CIA became my family and my home, the place I transitioned genders, gave me my identity and then the day I walked out of CIA and May, the last thing I did was walk by the 9/11 exhibit.

So in other words, it's the defining moment of my life and gave myself my purpose,

“which I followed to now, and I think like a lot of people”

in my generation now without that organizing principle, the world feels a little bit alien. - Natalie, what about you, tell us your story? - Yeah, as everyone is talking, I think maybe a minus best characterized

as a response to the response to 9/11. So I was a senior in high school, I live in Chicago. So the news of the Twin Towers being hit came out before the school day started. It was all anyone was talking about.

I remember very vividly that we didn't know what had happened. Maybe it was an accident. There were planes, then there were more planes, then there were more planes in Pennsylvania. And it took a while to piece it all together.

But I remember by the end of the day, I was becoming really scared that my friends who had just registered for the Selective Service, were gonna be called up in a draft to go to war against whoever it was, I done this.

I was not a particularly national security or even federal government, whole of country-oriented person. So I didn't ever really feel the poll to like Julia or Lauren were describing

to join the military or join the government and some other capacity. I was deeply worried about it. And I was scared. I just saw a different sort of role for myself.

But I think pretty quickly, perhaps my role here on this call that my role in all of this also is as a bit of a foil.

“I remember very early on feeling like part of what had happened here”

to speak a little bit to another component of the cultural shift that Mike was talking about is that for those of us who were not in DC or New York or already part of institutions or bodies that were observing what government was doing

and thinking about it, it was a total shock. And maybe this is a feature in part of the age I was at. I was not as fluent with what else was going on in the world and certainly not as aware of what other sorts of threats there were

to think about in this context as well because that was the case for a lot of Americans. This was completely shocking. And it was a brand new world. And I fully believe Ben, when he says that a lot of these debates

and discussions were happening before 9/11, but it wasn't until 9/11 that the rest of us became aware of them. Or I felt like we had anything to say about them because it had been sort of academic and relegated to the back rooms of government buildings

“where important people did important things.”

But I remember in college sitting in my dorm room watching the news about the US going to war in Iraq

and saying, wait a second, what did Saddam

who's saying have to do with 9/11? I thought we were going to war because of 9/11. And from then, I guess, I have taken to the response to the response as the area where I have felt the need to engage. And it is in part because I'm sure in the first instance

inspired by the shock that I experienced at the fact that it had happened. And then watching and observing and for better or worse feeling like I didn't know what my place was going to be in the immediate response.

But knowing as I was watching others' response, others' responses unfolds that I had some serious questions about some of them. And so to fast forward a little bit, I was not focusing on national security for in policy.

I was focusing on international development

and undergrad. I decided pretty quickly that I was interested in a human rights-based framework rather than an economic-spaced framework. And as things continued to play out, and I graduated college right around the time

that we learned that the United States had a systematic program of torture and rendition. As I was graduating with a new interest in human rights, that became the real area of focus for me. And that is how I eventually got into,

“I think, the only thing that's particular to my career”

that has to do with 9/11 is having been involved with representing a detainee at Guantanamo Bay. There are other things that are a little more tangential, but this was only a piece of my career. It was not sort of trajectory changing in the same way

that it was for others here. Mike, let's hear from you next. - So 9/11 definitely impacted my career, but it was a very long fuse before I felt the effect. I was in law school on 9/11.

I was a 1/11 at Northwestern. And there is one morning I was running late to my save pro class. And as I was driving down late short drive towards our cannabis, I couldn't figure out why it ain't in the morning,

all the traffic was coming out of the city. It just was the exact opposite pattern that you would normally see during brush hour. I was not smart enough to turn on NPR

“and try and figure out why I instead just shrub my shoulders”

and kept going. And I got to camp this, got to my save pro class and found out what happened. And it really was, it was a different time in so many ways that even have nothing to do

with national security. I didn't have a cell phone. The woman I was dating in law school at the time was furious with me because she hadn't been able to get in touch with me as she discovered what was going on.

And I was unreachable because I wasn't at home with my landlord. It was just a different era. And probably the greatest shame in my life is that I did not enlist right after it happened.

And that's something that always sort of stuck with me

for a few years. And then some time around 2007 or 2008, we threw a birthday party for my grandfather. I forget whether it was his 90th or 95th, but his relatively spray late 80s younger brother was there as well.

And they started reminiscing about how they joined the military after Pearl Harbor. And it just sort of got me thinking that I had had way more privilege than them growing up. I mean, they were children of the Depression in every sense of the word.

My grandfather's father had died when he was a kid. Like the older sons were taking care of this large family while putting themselves through school. And they still felt the need to serve their country when the unthinkable happened.

And I had every advantage they didn't. And the next September, 12th, I had nothing to change my life. So talking to my grandfather and my great uncle a few years later, I realized that I still could do something

So like within a week of that party,

I looked at jobs both at CIA and at FBI

“for a variety of reasons which aren't super important here.”

I withdrew from the CIA one and only focused on the FBI one. And much like Julia, it became... It's more than a job. I mean, that sounds like a tagline in a commercial but protecting the country from things like this

ever happening. Again, it literally becomes... This sounds like an action movie cliché. It's the reason you wake up in the morning.

It's the reason you go to work.

It's the reason you don't allow yourself to have bad days where you're not on your best footing. Like, you just can't. I mean, there were days where I had horrible things going on in my personal life

but you get to work and like,

“you can part mentalize and shut up about it”

because there are still spies and terrorists out there and that's what matters. And that is, I know I'm describing it a weird way. I hope Julia would agree with it. That ends up being a really goddamn beautiful thing.

Having that ability to focus on protecting other people, to dedicate your life to the safety of strangers is a calling that is more rewarding than I can ever articulate. And it's just, that was my life's purpose.

Was to stop things like that from ever happening again. And the great thing was I was surrounded by other people who had made that exact same choice. And, you know, 9/11 is not about my personal self-actualization, obviously, but I hope people realize there are tens,

if not hundreds of thousands who went through that similar experience and viewed the responsibility the exact same way.

“And I think all of us, I mean, Lauren, Julia,”

jumping if you disagree. Like, I don't think myself or anyone I worked with would have hesitated in the slightest to lay down our own lives to protect people in an office building. Like, you just did it.

And it was a really noble way to spend a couple of decades. (speaks in foreign language) - (speaks in foreign language) - No, I'm not even going to let it go. (speaks in foreign language)

- (speaks in foreign language) - (speaks in foreign language) - (speaks in foreign language) - (speaks in foreign language) - (speaks in foreign language)

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- And finally, Ben, not here's story.

- Yes, so, I guess, you know, two of the three major components of my professional life were already in place on the morning of 9/11. I was already a journalist who did opinion writing about law.

And I had a bit of a background in national security law, which made me unvery unusual among journalists, but that was kind of just a creature of the way that I'd spent my time and some things that I'd become interested in.

So, on the morning of 9/11, I was sitting in the Washington Post editorial page, conference hall in my office,

walked by and stuck his head in and said,

“did you see that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center?”

And so, I wandered into the conference room, and I saw a whisper of smoke coming from the World Trade Center and a plane, you know, that was clearly a terrible accident. And I wandered back into my office and didn't think much more of it

because I was aware that at one point during World War II, a fighter plane had slammed into the Empire State Building and it had been an accident in the dark of night in a storm.

And it never occurred to me that it was a jetliner

and it never occurred to me that it was done on purpose, which gives you an idea of what a counterterrorism investigator I would be. And I sat in my office for another 40 minutes doing normal work things until a second plane hit the second building, whereupon I sort of woke up.

So this was the third component of what has been my career ever since, which was, you know, what do I do in life? I write about law in contexts that involve democracy and national purity. And that's where that third element came from. And I think everything about my career

has been defined by those three things colliding, writing about law involving national security. And, you know, as I say, I did have a background in it before,

but I'd never thought of it as foundational to who I was.

And yet within five years of there, then I had left the Washington Post to come to workings and work on nothing else. And by the way, one part of that was founding law fair. And so, you know, law fair absolutely certainly would not exist,

but for 9/11. And I find myself very much in the mode that Julia and Mike and Lauren, are describing of just having this kind of all-consuming passion that has been what I've woken up every morning thinking about ever since.

And the wrinkle is that I also have a bit of what Natalie described,

which is a, although I came to it later than Natalie described it, which is a kind of horror about some of the response. And that is a really personal horror that, you know,

“I think is a little different from hers because, you know,”

I feel very used by the, you know, some of the arguments that I made and believed and still believe have been twisted into things that are very ugly. And, you know, I believe in drone strikes. I don't believe in drone strikes against fishermen.

I believe in surveillance authorities that are relatively robust. I don't believe in using them to go after political enemies. And so, I find myself both sharing this kind of all-consuming sense of we have to protect ourselves, we have to protect our democracy. But also we have to protect it from the people who we have

anointed to protect it. And I think that is the, if I think about what the last 25 years of my professional life has been, it's been kind of a bit of both. And sometimes a lot of both at the same time. I want to dive into that last point that you made.

All of you come from different backgrounds and perspectives on this.

“But I think share sort of that sentiment.”

I feel like it's why we're all here now. To pose a question for all of you, is there a single post 9/11 institution or authority that you think is fundamentally outlived its original purpose? And how so? DHS 100%.

DHS was a reorganization based on increasing administrative efficiencies between disparate organizations that were not necessarily tied together thematically, but didn't fit anywhere else. Like federal emergency management with immigration, like there's no reason that those two organizations should be together,

it turns out good having the people respond to disasters, having some small

“law enforcement component and some national security component, like it's a good idea.”

But what we've seen, and I'm going to get a bit controversial here, what we've seen is the organizations tend to solidify their power as much as they can. I mean, it's just like an obvious statement of how political institutions work. And it's no longer a coordinating agency, so much as it is a catch-all agency

that has the capabilities to do things similar to many other law enforcement agencies, but without the requisite history of mistakes and subsequent learning, that might stop them from doing some of those things. I don't think it's a coincidence that the overwhelming majority of what I will call indefensible law enforcement or national security actions over the past 18 months or so

“have been largely done by DHS and not by some of the older, more state organizations.”

And I really question what we're getting on of it in this point. But you know that that's also tied up into another argument that no one's really reckoning with except, I suspect more people from Natalie's world are reckoning at that people from my former world are Lauren and Julia's former world. And that is like, I do a lot of me a culpa's every day,

because I spent a very long time dismissing arguments that increased surveillance authorities, you know, additional administrative warrant powers. Like, I sort of poo-pooed the civil libertarian argument. No, these are inevitably going to be used against American citizens. Like, no, they're drafted pretty carefully.

There are a number of restrictions that hamper them in from being misused. Like, these aren't necessary tools.

And yes, there's always a possibility they get misused.

But on balance, we need them. And what I see now is that when people take power, who have no respect for normal balance, like, the civil libertarians I brushed off were 100% correct. I just, like, that's heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking on a personal level to realize you were so wrong about something so

important. But it's also heartbreaking to see all these institutions that you worked with and loved and accomplished great things. Undone for really petty bullshit reasons. You know, I'm sure Lauren feels about the military,

the way Julia feels about the CIA, which is the way I feel about the FBI, which was like, I, you know, I, I bled bureau blue as the cliché states. And we were really wrong about the institutional backbone to those organizations and that they would hold the line when pressed to use powers intended to combat terrorism to do something else instead.

“And that's like, you know, I think there are certain circumstances where the older you are,”

the more it hurts when the scales finally fall from your eye and seeing how the national

security and law enforcement community is now being used is really one of those moments. Yet to your point about, you know, maybe a legal interpretation is kind of outlived its purpose. I think we're seeing a lot of really hard conversations that need to happen around the law of armed conflict that were a lot of modification, the new interpretations that were made for the CT environment. And, you know, for example, so that you didn't have a revolving door

problem, we talk about, you know, being a member of an organized armed group means that you're targetable and how we define that membership according to law of war manual is this long list, we don't tell you how to weigh the things. So you may not even think you're a member of the group, but we think you are, right? And so there's that kind of piece, there's also this argument around the war sustaining that made sense in a counterterrorism context of, you know, if this economic

thing, like drum is, for example, is sustaining the terrorist group that can indeed be targeted. But we're talking about these small war interpretations and now we're putting it, whether it be,

At the point, you start talking about membership in the same orifice ways. There's point, you start talking about economics as being something you can target when it's, it's nation versus

“nation. You've completely, like, destroyed the foundation of the law of war. And so I think, you know,”

there's a lot of nervousness of the interpretations and lessons learned from the counterterrorism

world of what that might mean for future conflicts. So to me, that's just like an incredibly crucial

point that, you know, there is not, there's not a good proposal or a good solution out there now, but I mean, I think people are very nervous about how the law of war might continue to be interpreted, going forward. The one other thing that I would just say is, you know, I, Natalie kind of, you know, posed herself as the opposite of those of us that had been in government. And I think that it's been, for me, at least, personally, really interesting to be in government

and almost feel like I was, I was part of the reform effort within government. When it, whether it be, you know, standing up the civilian harm mitigation efforts, or when I was on NSC staff having the,

the Gitmo portfolio and trying to reduce the number of people there. So I had the UCMJ reform efforts.

“I think, you know, right now, though, even those of us that were in government are on the outside,”

because we see the importance about talking about those issues, not just how, how do you effectively build power, but then what is the oversight of that power? And I think that is where we are all, you know, critically worried today. And even though we came from all of these different different district backgrounds, we're all focused on the same core issues today. I think it's very possible that if you, you know, change a few of the variables in my life,

my life would resemble Natalie's a lot more than it resembled mine. And it's probably most to do with what tribe I found myself in on 9/11 or the time to afterwards. So the efforts that I got involved in in the war zones, the first thing I did was get assigned to a hostage rescue task force. And in the name of rescuing Iraqi and American hostages, which was a righteous mission

that I've never had a more satisfying effort in my entire career, I participated in

efforts that resulted in the death of other people. And in using surveillance technologies that we have now developed at scale, I participated in organizations that were involved in the obligory abuses, in renditions, in torture, in Gitmo, in black sites. I wasn't involved in any of those efforts. But I was down the hall and I justified most of it because my mission was righteous. And I've never been more satisfied in my life than getting to live and breathe in that

kind of of an effort. And I will say now with with all of the benefit of hindsight, I am trapped because I wouldn't give back a minute of that time or the good things that I was involved in. But I admit that now that I find myself in a category of people that has been added to a CT strategy list, potentially put on the nipip for intelligence collection priority against radical protransgender Americans and being a part of an apparatus that's now

won't only making criminal groups into terrorists so that it opens up a CT toolkit to do lethal operations against people engaged in non-capital activities.

“It makes you feel like you have to question all of those choices what's I lied to all the”

long and it's been gut-wrenching. The only thing I've got going for me now is I no longer am inside. I actually can work through these things and write about it from the outside. I'm not ready to say that we were all wrong at the time because I think that many of the things that we did, the authorities we used, the actions we took were justified given the circumstances. But it is now undeniable that they've long since outlived the real requirements and they're being

abused. I wish there was a more regular process for revisiting these things. But it is gut-wrenching and I have much more sympathy for people like me now that we're out of that period of my life. Natalie, I'm curious for your perspective. I feel the need to say that although a lot of my concerns have proved justified, I am not taking a victory lap and I think that those acting in good faith who were in the sort of dissenting crowd of the libertarians and the other communities that were

really challenging people in government and the choices that were being made, the powers that

went wrong. There were things that went wrong that doesn't mean that everything went wrong.

“And I think there's a little bit of a tension here that's worth naming that is a virtuous tension.”

And that is that, you know, I will take on the role, though, I think it's, I probably don't deserve to take it on as a full mental nearly as much as others. But for the purposes of this conversation, I think the, the communities of those pushing back responding to the responses, et cetera, the role is to remind that not everyone who is in positions of power and ability to do really dramatic things in the name of the American people are actors and who will act

in good faith. They are not all people who are motivated by the right things or they are not all

people who whose judgment you contrast. There are always going to be people in every

institution at every layer of everything that think that the end is justified the means. But the, the people in the pushback communities were also not the ones who were charged with keeping American safe and had access to what information did exist about the, the likelihood of

“threats in the future. And so there are different roles and both of them are necessary. And I think”

Lauren makes a very good and a very important point that also government institutions are not monoliths. And there is a lot happening internally, also between agencies. I mean, there's, I think relatively specific to the Guantanamo context. But there definitely is, there's a history of a lot of tension between the FBI and the CIA, which is, you know, in contrast to a lot of what both Mike and Julia have described. And that's because all of this is very, very complicated.

So I think it's just worth saying that expressly because although I do think that it is an important lesson that communities expressing concerns about the possibility of future abuses of great amounts of authority that are either given to or taken by government actors need to

“not be dismissed as historianic. I also think it's important to remember that they are not also”

coming along with solutions to all of the problems. It's just part of a conversation. If I could just want to just put one more little thing on top of that, I agree with the having Natalie just said. But there are people alive because of the CT authorities because of the 702 authorities, people alive, including, I think, myself because of the authorities and capabilities that we were able to use in a warfighting context. And I now am in favor of effectively rescinding

those very things. And times change, wars, wrap-up, and we should be able to revisit even justified authorities and capabilities when they're no longer needed as much. Yeah, I just want to put Stomp that point a little bit. I don't repent a lot of the authorities ever put some of them are worthy of repentance in a whole. But most of them had a real purpose and were used according to that purpose and there were a lot of people who were alive today because

of that and there were a lot of people to use Lauren's example from earlier who are not alive today because we stopped using them or whose lives have been really disrupted in profound ways. And so you can air in both directions here and we have air in both directions. I want to nominate two authorities, post 9/11 authorities for repeal, not because they want good ideas at the time, but because they are no longer, you know, to go back to Kathman's original question because they're

no longer good ideas. The first of them is the authorization for the use of military force of

2001. There is no good reason why this should still be law and there's no good reason why it should still be authorizing anything. The second and this bridge is post 9/11 authorities and some a lot of pre-9/11 authorities. All presidential emergency authorities should be the subject of significant review and amendment and in some cases outright repeal. We are living in an environment right now in which the authorities themselves are more dangerous than the things that they allow the

some people are going to die if we take them away, but some people are dying because we have them.

“And so I think, you know, a systematic review of some of these emergency authorities is really”

well, well overdue. Michael, had you had one final point? Yeah, I mean, if we're going to close, I would like to make a bit of a point and I know this is going to sound a bit school-emarmature sculpting. I really don't mean it to. It's a genuine plea. After I left the FBI, the hardest day I had

by far was the first anniversary of 9/11. And it is because it was the first time since I started to

really care about the national security of the United States that I didn't have a community with him to alert. There was going to be like, I was in my townhouse in Virginia Beach. There was going to be no moment of silence. There is not going to be a group of people talking about it afterwards. There is not going to be a remembrance of the people from our office who died that day or later from ingesting harmful chemicals while clearing the scenes collecting evidence and rescuing

people. And we're recording this podcast on September 10th. And the conversations we're having

“are very important conversations. And their conversations we should have every day of the year”

is long as the United States is facing hostile foreign actors, war zones, national security emergencies, what a have you. But I would just implore all of our listeners and ourselves on 9/11 itself at least take a moment to pause and think not about the reactions and consequences, but just on the facts of what happened and what was lost. There were people who made the choice I can't even fathom that their best option that morning was to jump out of the 90th floor of a skyscraper.

There are people who spent months trying to find bodies so families can get some degree of closure who inexorably will succumb to cancer from the concrete dust that they ingested during the entire time period. There are thousands upon thousands of soldiers who have left the widows and orphans in the conflict that resulted. However strongly you feel about any of this stuff like maybe just on 9/11 itself put a pause on the arguments and at least spare a few

moments of reflection for the people who don't get to take part in these debates anymore. I think we'll leave it at that. Thank you all so much for your perspectives, especially for someone like me who's grown up only in a post 9/11 world and for people younger than me too

“I think it's very important to be a part of these conversations. So yeah, thank you all so much again.”

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