The Prevent Program News Today

More complicated question. i think to some extent the administration has gotten out ahead of itself as we saw in the clip where president obama talked about wanting to do this. now they are trying to do it as they go down this path. theyre realizing for both institutional, bureaucratic, political and legal reasons, and to some extent, national security reasons, coming out and publicly about a covert program is hard. it doesnt mean it shouldnt be done but it has to be done carefully and i think t...

Inside the agency. it is sort of a paradox that the drone program has in some ways given the cia its highest profile in the war on terror, although it is a program that they maintain covert and dont want to talk about. so the question is, do they want to give up their toys. and you know, at the higher levels, my understanding is that the agency has signed off on this. most of the administration has signed off on this. the president has as well. so the question is, how do they do it? i do think t...

Of the situation and the perception of the reality of the situation. do you think that most people who are inconvenienced by this, waiting in longer security lines, do you think theyre standing there with their luggage thinking this is because of the sequester? if they are playinging that connection, who do you think theyre blaming for those delays? >> well, they might not use the word sequester but they definitely blame washington and they probably blame both the president and the congress with...

The best opportunities to pass meaningful legislation are not in the wake of these sort of crazy one off extraordinary events. what do you make of that? >> well, it is a real conundrum. on the one hand, holmes was right. you dont want extraordinary circumstances to create general law for average circumstances. but in another sense, this was not extraordinary. in fact, weve been living in something of a bubble. the fbi has done actually a fairly amazing job over the last decade of stopping many t...

Our drone program is what drone program, right? >> if you have a program that is operating in the shadows, eventually youre going to have problems with it. right now, we use drones primarily as weve been about by the cia to kill al qaeda members. and i use that term loosely. sometimes these are al qaeda affiliates, people inspired by the same goals as al qaeda. well, other countries eventually will have armed drones and they can be using them against human rights activists. and we wont have a lo...

Little bit. as you know, we have a new director of the cia, john brennan who in the past has advocated for that move from the cia to the d.o.d. do you think he still sees that as a valuable move now that he is the one in charge of the cia? >> well, it is an interesting question. he was in some ways the driving force behind this idea. i suspect this was something that president obama was comfortable with. wanted to do. but internally, within the intelligence community and in the white house, this...

A little erratic and unstable. >> what is stopping them -- what would be stopping them from doing that now, michael? >> well, there are questions of civil liberties. one of the things, you talk to fbi and even many people in the muslim community about is can the united states emulate a very aggressive program being done in britain called the prevent program. you have a lot of outreach from law enforcement, even the national health authorities. they set up liaisons with these communities. that ra...