Helps to humanize the president. And they also raise a lot of money. I would agree with both of them. I would also not want to overlook that in ways less obvious than that, they may actually wield more historical influence. Go back to influence and image we still dont know how the full story of how important nancy reagan was behindthe scenes in terms of personnel and policies. But she was clearly hugely influential. And i would argue, based on what we do know, most of the time for the better. I think the question was, did the voters vote for first ladies. And i dont think people in 1984 thought mrs. Montel mrs. Reagan. Historians get to vote in ways that voters dont. And i think historians may ascribe a different kind of significance to the many first lady than the average voter. Well, first ladies, influence image. Monday nights. Thank you for joining us. [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] season two of first ladies begins monday live at 9 00 p. M. Eastern with a look at the life of edith roosevelt. We are offering a special edition of the book. It presents a biography and a portrait of each first lady as well as comments from noted historians and thoughts from Michelle Obama on the role of first ladies throughout history. It is available for the discounted price of 12. 95 plus shipping. Our website has more about the first ladies including a special section, welcome to the white house. It is produced by our partner and chronicles life in the executive mansion during the tenure of each of the first ladies. You can find out more at www. C span. Org firstladies. Cspan, we bring Public Affairs advanced in washington directly to you putting you in the room at congressional hearings, white house events, briefings and conferences and offering complete gaveltogavel coverage of the u. S. House all as a Public Service of private industry. We are cspan, created by the cable tv industry 34 years ago and funded by your local cable or satellite provider. Now, you can watch us in hd. Next, a discussion about the 10 year search for Osama Bin Laden. Then, the future of president ial debate with the cochairs of the commission that organizes the debates. Later, a town hall meeting on Public Service with former senators trent lott and Olympia Snowe and others. Next, a look at the decade long search for Osama Bin Laden. This is from this summers aspen security for them. Ofer bergen is the author manhunt. It was made into an hbo documentary by producer director greg barker. They discuss their research and work with cbs news correspondent raviv. Hi, everybody. This time you do not have former government officials here. You will find we have two very well informed tests. The two men behind manhunt. He might see this tonight. Manhunt the search for Osama Bin Laden is the film title. Today it was nominated for two primetime emmys for best documentary and for best cinematography. [applause] congratulations to the two gentlemen with me who are here today. You probably know peter bergen. You have seen him a lot. A bestselling author. He set up the First Television interview with Osama Bin Laden back in 1997. His books include holy war inc. Mr. Barker lived in england for 18 years. He lives in los angeles now. Making films for the pbs series front line. The New York Times loved your contest in egypt here it you learned a lot about the culture. His new film does debut on hbo. That is what we are discussing. This film is just over 1. 5 hours. I think it is terrific in large part because their ability to get people to talk. Lets start with an example of that. We have four excerpts. The first section is titled sisterhood echo sisterhood. Lets watch excerpt number one. We have patience and and we are not always looking for the payoff immediately. Trying to keep track of all the threats and which ones are real and which ones are not real, you know, people say why did you connect the dots . Because the whole page is black. To pull a story out of all this information but there is no single intelligence looking at all this information, it is a lot of different brains looking. The more you can bring people together and share what is important, the better it works. At the time the people who had deep expertise in al qaeda they were women. They did a job. At first it did not make them very popular with their managers. I was counseled once in a Performance Review that i was spending too much time working on bin laden. They said we were obsessed crusaders, it using all the women stereotypes. Men throw chairs, women cry. Which one is better . That gives you a sense of the tone of the film. One of the women you saw recently said that women are better analysts in counterterrorism because they understand relationships and terrorism is about relationships. The way it operates and is formed. They are better she said, at perceiving patterns. Well. How did you get the women to speak to you . Even after they were identified, how did you persuade them to talk . It is great to be here. Largely it was a long process not just for the women but for everybody in the film. I try to make films that shine a light on how our government actually operates. Although a lot of subject matter might be classified, Human Emotions are not. I made a point of talking to some people in this room and people in the clip. Spending a lot of time with them and Building Trust saying i want to tell your story. In a full as way as possible. If we need to set certain for parameters, we can talk about it. That is fine. Peter was a terrific help in that. Peter made introductions. To go on camera they have to trust me. When i walk away with the footage, i can do whatever i want with it. Lets bring you in on this. When you develop a source for what we do, which is getting people to talk about delicate work, you have to get than the sense that you are on their side. Is that part of it . I think greg was able to correctly say that he was going to let people have that say. One of the interesting things is there is no narration. Theres no one telling you what to think. One of the messages of the film which i think shows youre not thrown to think it is 9 11 was not an intelligence failure. It was a policy failure. The cia could not have provided more strong warnings. It is almost a case of perfect strategic warning. Think of the august 6 daily brief. It does not get anymore graphic than that. Illustrated in the film by John Mclachlan who is probably in the room, putting up the pieces of papers and you could see where they were. The cia was providing strategic warnings. They are not able to save time and place. The women in the film and other people at the cia felt very strongly that this story had not really been told very well. That is one of the reasons they spoke. A lot of people in this room to get asked by folks like us will you give an interview, whether it is for print or a book. My advice is dont do it. [laughter] you think what is in it for you. You illustrated one thing, the story had not been told well. Have either of you come across someone who wanted to talk because they were disgruntled . As an example of someone in the film who wanted to talk to is not prevented by the cia they were not disgruntled. She is the mother of five. She was the first person in the u. S. Government to write in 1993 a warning about a guy called Osama Bin Laden who is going to be a problem. She wanted to talk. She is a public figure. Shes not undercover. The agency would not let her speak. At the end of the day, the American Public has been trillions of dollars on this since 9 11. The hunt for Osama Bin Laden is a huge success story. Why not talk about it . Everybody in the film had left office. It was interesting. We began shortly after. I got the rights to peters book. It was a while before we started filming. At the time we are starting to film, all the controversy over the zero dark 30 was breaking. The door started closing quite rapidly at the white house, at the cia in particular. The irony is we can talk what we want but the documentary is where we really wanted to just let people tell their story. That is where he faced a lot of roadblocks because of the cooperation with the movie. In both intelligent work and in intelligence related journalism, we are in a post snowden era. What do you predict will be the effect of snowdens leaks when we ask for interviews and information . I do not think it will be a problem. In some cases it might be. People ultimately always want to tell their story. I have a much longer lead time with a documentary. 1. 5 years or sometimes longer. It is a golden age for documentary filmmaking right now because of the decline in covers of some of the more mainstream media. It is not done as much as it used to be. It is a great time to be making these films. There is a desire to get the story out in a way that we can tell it through firsthand accounts. In the short term, with some people it will have a chilling effect. I think snowden is just one example. If you look at what the four years in the zero dark 30 reveals, it was an investigation of the pentagon, mike vickers conversation, they are all out there publicly. If i was sitting in this position or anywhere else and i felt like if i am going to talk to a journalist or a book writer or a filmmaker and there is a chance it will become public, do the math. I think snowden is just one element. The leak investigations, all these things have a chilling effect. Lets have another excerpt from the film. It takes you into the information after you found someone who was detained. Where do you take them . Were there enhanced interrogation techniques. Lets watch excerpt number two. [video clip] we were empowered more. We did things more aggressive. My job is to kill al qaeda. Get with us or get out of our way. We had been focusing on capturing. We had been focusing on capturing. He knew who the leadership was. He new method of attack that targets. He was the highest we have ever captured. We captured him in march. He was severely wounded. We knew we had to get him out of pakistan. The way they had dealt with issues like this was to transfer the terrorist to a investigation. We needed to take responsibility for highlevel terrorists ourselves. We understood what we had to do. We did it. We took a lot of bad guys off the streets. They got put up and now it is Public Knowledge in a nice little boutique locations. [end video clip] that man was a cia field officer. He introduces the word downrange, the ones out there in the field. You took up the controversy. What do you think you were able to add in the film that was new in the debate about waterboarding . I try to place the audience in the mindset of the people who were making the decisions at the time. To hope that the general public would ask themselves what they would have done. When i have these long discussions with people in the film about being in the film, i never want talked about what i thought about this. I think that is one reason they decided to be a part of it. One man from the fbi has a substantial role in this section as well. Wellknown for believing water boarding does not work. Many point to this as an example of how it can work. I am never trying to just break new ground per se. Im trying to add contacts. Context. How decisions are actually made as told by the people who were there at the time. It is what gives a film like this its value. Your book and film are about searching for bin laden. The type of interrogation that took place, key to finding bin laden . There is a 6000 page answer to that that is still classified. Any public discussion of this matter is made difficult by the fact that we do not really have the facts. In the course of my book i found wiki leaks to be very useful. The summary of the key guantanamo detainees were in the wiki leaks dump. You can piece together what these people were saying and to some degree when they were saying it. What you cannot find in there is a very specific analysis of what this information was given up before or after interrogations. There is no doubt. There is no doubt that played a role. We will never know if they could have been solicited another way. It is part of our history. On the question of did it lead to bin laden, i am somewhat skeptical for a couple of reasons. A lot of things led to bin laden. There was no detainee who said he is living here. That was one of the reasons of realize asians of the cia. Tions of the cia. There were fragments of information that came from a lot of people. One person was interrogated. He was the real 20th hijacker. He went to bora bora. He fled to pakistan and then he went to guantanamo. In guantanamo, he said he was in afghanistan which wasnt true. After a few month they realize he was the same guy. Then he was subjected to a pretty severe regime that Susan Crawford said amounted to torture. He was kept up for 43 days. He was subjected to hot and cold and white noise and lots of Christina Aguilera music at loud volumes and he was discomforted. [laughter] it seems he is the first person who identified the current year as someone who was important in al qaeda from what we can gather. I think there is a Public Interest in having a 6000 page report that the Intelligence Committee has done. There is a 300 page summary that is out there. The cia is trying to compose a response to it. I think it is in the Public Interest for us to know to what extent is whether these methods are ethical, were they efficacious. It also takes is in great detail into the successful search for the leader of al qaeda in iraq. The woman we met early we see her there. A jordanian doctor pulled the americans. Fooled the americans. Lets see excerpt number three. [video clip] he finds his way to pakistan and disappears. Somebody expected him of being an informant most likely. Nobody knew anything for three months. Suddenly he is back on the radar screen. He is now beginning to trade the treat the number two leader of al qaeda. The place goes crazy. Even the white house gets briefed. He is going to take his right to number two or number one. The meeting has to take place in a place where the cia can completely control the environment and becomes the cia basic khost. They come up with a plan to get inside here without being detected. The problem is that nobody in the cia had ever met with him. They made arrangements for him to come into the base without being checked because they were afraid someone might recognize him and his identity compromised. [indiscernible] that story was told by the triple agents about that. He is a wellknown newspaper men. Was this just a case where you could not get an official to tell the story . Yes. Later in the sequence others will speak about it. What we talked about for, i couldnt get access to some of the people who were around right the final years or so. Nobody in our film was directly involved with the khost operation. Those i wanted to talk to. Access to write up. Dried up. Some of the people, including the women, had spoke about jennifer matthews. We just saw a still of her. She was killed in that blast. She played a very integral role in the fight against al qaeda. The reason we focus on khost is when i started this so may people told me you cannot underestimate the impact of khost psychologically on the cia. The setback. It became personal. They lost some of their own. There is an indication to seek a determination to seek justice. Story needs a story arc and the cia is closing in on met modern. Bin laden. Then, this major setback. It is a major part of the story. Absolutely. One of the female cia analysts says the great irony is shes been 15 years of her life trying to find bin laden and bin laden killed her. This is a woman with three kids and with a very rising career at the agency. The portrait of her in zero dark 30 is extremely misleading. Shes made to be an idiot who is stuck in the cold war. It was an unfair betrayl. Portrayal. In this film, shes given her due. It is a more accurate treatment. Were about to turn to you for questions. Another man who is here, general michael hayden, is in the film as well about khost. He portrays it in a war you are going to have casualties and losses. It is the sad truth that some on our side would die not only on 9 11 or on the obvious battlefields. I will call on anyone he raises their hand. We you will probably get a microphone brought to you. If you do not have questions i will continue. I want to ask you then, in the 16 months from khost to abbottabad, you have about 60 seconds. What is the key there . What really moves ahead that takes us to that one place in pakistan . There are a lot of keys along the way. Let me try to lay it out briefly. They have an alias. Abu kuwaiti is the father. There were several million. He was the career working for courier working for bin laden. Sometime in 2007 we get the real name. Sayed is a john smith name. Even he is not a kuwaiti. He is a pakistani. That is twice the size of california. It is something that it is not great. In 2010, this guy makes a phone call to someone in the gulf. The content lead the agency to believe that this guy is still in al qaeda. He is in a city in western pakistan. The city is about several million people. He is practicing careful security. He takes the battery out of his phone. Theres no way to track him. They have to put people into the city and eventually track and back 2. 5 hours away to the city of abbottabad. What surprised them was the mysterious third family he was living in the compound. They began to think it might be Osama Bin Laden. In august of 2010, they go to president obama and say we seem to have a good potential lead on Osama Bin Laden. Khost has just happened. Khost was december 30, late december 2009. There was no great excitement in the oval office. The last really good lead took to several cia officers dying. Clearly this was a good lead. Then there is the whole Agatha Christie story about how that lead, how they tried to get a sense of how to make the lead better. There was a debate. At the end of the day when you make the decision under percent there are 100 not there. The analysts were saying 40 or 80 . It is an interesting case of president ial decisionmaking. The stakes were lower. If you think about presid