About the introspectives on it, as somebody who has obviously participated in politics and policy for a long time and who has seen our party and the Democratic Party go through times of change. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on where the party is today and what we have got to do to take back the white house in 2016. After the obviously i was not happy about the outcome in 2008, but president bush and i had had our eight years, we had worn out our welcome in some quarters, although we are looking better and better every day. It was easy after not easy, but it happens to a lot of people, to be down after the 2008 election, and we lost, but then we went through i can remember that morning on january 20 of 2009, when we swore in the new president , there is a certain ritual that goes with that that i have always been fascinated by. There have been five republican president s since eisenhower. I have worked with four of them. I worked with a fifth as part of the congressional leadership. I have been intrigued by that transfer of power. I can remember when president ford lost in 1976. One of my jobs as chief of staff was to read his concession statement over the telephone to jimmy carter, because president ford had lost his voice. He had been working so hard in this closing weeks of the campaign, his voice was gone. All he could do was a bare whisper. He called me into the oval office. We drafted a telegram, and then he told me to get governor carter on the phone, which i did. He introduced me and then i had to read that statement. That was a real bummer. That was about as low as you could get when i think about my political career. As i look back over it now and think about it, those particular days, but a lot of my experience is that out of adversity rises opportunity. I think back to that time when we lost the 1976 election, on the heels of watergate, nixon had been forced to resign, and a lot of things you could be pretty grim about, but with the perspective of a little time and history, we had to go through that jimmy carter period to get to Ronald Reagan. That morning when i read that telegram, at was for me the beginning of what became the reagan revolution, when we were all reaganites, when we got behind governor reagan and i think did some tremendous work, took back the senate that day and put a man in the white house who believed in all of those things we all believe in, in the creed, if you will, of your institute. I tend now when i look at what is going on out there, and there is an awful lot that i do not like about what is going on i will say a word or two about it in a minute but i look forward to the next election and all the elections coming up as it is not going to be easy, nobody will hand it to us, we will have to earn it one vote at a time, we would have to raise money, recruit candidates, build the organization, and put forth a program that the American People will believe in and will support, and it is our right as americans to go do that and our right to go change the government. That is by golly what we are going to do. There is a lot of concern, i hear a lot of discussion and debate these days that is focused a lot on domestic affairs, for good and legitimate reasons. But i am perhaps even more concerned, or at least as concerned about what is going on internationally as i am about what barack obama and his administration are doing domestically. Why do i say that . One of the most memorable days of my life was 9 11 when after the planes struck the World Trade Center in new york, i was in my west wing office, working with my speech writer, and some of the staff gathered around when word came down that there had been an attack in new york and shortly after that the door to my office burst open, one of my secret Service Agents came in, he was sitting down in a chair, and he said, sir, we are leaving now. He did not ask. He did not ask if it was ok with me. He grabbed me with one hand and propelled me out the door and down the stairs, headed for the Emergency Operation bunker underneath the white house. He got part way down there, got into a tunnel, and he told me the reason they had effectuated evacuated me was because there was a hijacked aircraft that have been reported by dulles, headed towards crown. That was american flight 77 that went into the pentagon. What emerged out of that whole day obviously was not a terrorist act, it was not a Law Enforcement problem, it was not a matter of us sending out the fbi to go find the bad guy, bringing to trial, and lock him up, it was an act of war. It was worse than pearl harbor. Killed more americans than pearl harbor did, took place in the heart of new york city and washington. If it not been for those brave passengers, they wouldve taken out the white house or the Capitol Building on flight 93. It is as bad as it gets. One of the key decisions we made in the bush administration, and we made it basically that night and the next morning after the day was over with and the president was back and address the country. Lynn and i were evacuated off the south lawn of the white house and flown up to camp david, and we wanted to make sure that the president and i were not in the same location because we want to preserve the continuity of government. We were careful not to get into a situation where an attack would take us both out. I had the opportunity to watch the reruns on television on what had happened that day. People did all over the country, i am sure. We began to think about what did we have to do now, how do we make sure that never happens again and we get the guys at his that did this to us . The key decision was to say that was an act of war, because then we were justified in marshaling all of our resources, including our military manpower, capabilities, using all the powers of the president under article as commander in chief. That is what we did. During the course of that, we put in place at the terrorist Surveillance Program that is now referred to as the nsa program, basically, what it did was it allowed us, and i am confident of the program we put in place and we have not been involved in the classified stuff but the program we put in place saved as general alexander has said at nsa must stop over 50 attacks on the United States and our friends overseas over the course of the last 10 or 12 years. We put in place the and enhanced Interrogation Program, waterboarding. Some people so that was torture. I do not believe it was torture. Ksm may have felt it was torture. The fact was that the enhanced Interrogation Program was signed off by the Justice Department using techniques we used on our and people in training, it was not torture, it was a good program that allowed us to develop the intelligence we needed to keep america safe for 7 1 2 years. [applause] and it worked. The record speaks for itself. The cia put out a classified report in 2004. Ksm was subjected to enhanced interrogation. A report was published, classified by the cia, and it has been declassified, although it still has parts redacted. The headline is khalid sheik mohammed preeminent source on al qaeda. That is the place where we learned most of the intelligence we had, at least in the mid part of our time there, about what al qaeda was about, about where they were based, how they were funded, where the Training Camps were. On 9 11 we did not know that. We knew Osama Bin Laden was in pakistan, but that was the extent of our knowledge. The way we kept the country safe was get that intelligence and according to the agency itself, the way we did that was by subjecting him because he was subjected more than anybody else to enhanced interrogation techniques. This administration does not get it. They do not. Obama made a speech here not too long ago to the National Defense university in may and basically said ok, now we are returning back to the pre9 11 days. We are not at war anymore. We are going back to pre9 11. We will go try to round up the guys when they blow up. We are no longer on a war footing, if you will, in terms of thinking about the state were in. I think that is dead wrong. It is an absolute total misreading of where we find ourselves today. As i look at that part of the world, north africa, a good part of the middle east, not just afghanistan, where they launched 9 11 from, but also yemen and the major struggle underway in egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood taken power there, the group having spawned all those other radical groups, egyptian jihad, and out of that has come most of the major islamist terrorist organizations. They are out there. Look at benghazi in libya, and all across the middle east, clearly in other areas such as pakistan, iran we see obviously significant elements of radical islamist belief and action and activity. They have a much larger geographic base from which to operate now that they can use as safe harbors than they ever had on 9 11. We have got major problems with respect to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Nobody likes to hear that. That is a dirty word after we went into iraq because of our concern of weapons of mass distruction. That was a legitimate concern. Saddam hussein twice had Nuclear Programs underway. In 1991 we took it out in desert storm. He preserved the technology to get started up all over again. When we took down sadaam, we shut down the Iraqi Nuclear threat. When we shut down the Iraqi Nuclear threat, Muammar Gaddafi surrender all of his stuff. He had centrifuges, he had a weapons design, a Chinese Nuclear weapons design, all that stuff now resides in the United States. Gaddafi did not want to have happen to him what happened to Saddam Hussein. When we went after gaddafi, we went after khan. He went into the black market operation himself and was selling Nuclear Weapons technology to the libyans. They were his best customer. To the iraqis, North Koreans, and we shut down khans black market operation. We took out three major sources of proliferation. That in and of itself is reason enough for what we did to Saddam Hussein in iraq. The threat has not gone away. You may remember it was discovered in the spring of 2007 that a few months after north korea set off their First Nuclear test that the North Koreans had built a Nuclear Reactor a couple of producing plutonium in the eastern syrian desert. Syrias a mess today. Imagine what would have happened if the israelis had not taken out that Nuclear Reactor. We also found from khan that pakistani officials were bribed for the latest technology for enriching uranium. We know from a scientist who has seen it that the North Koreans now have 2000 centrifuges operating to produce enhanced uranium. The Nuclear Program is better now than it has ever been. They have already proven to be first class proliferators. This administration in the midst of all that that is going on claims there is no problem. We got bin laden. There is no terrorist threat in benghazi. That turned out to be frankly a blatant lie. They are still covering it up. You look at their recognition of the threat out there. It is basically nonexistent. In the midst of the week that obama went to israel and met with netanyahu and they talked about the uranium, the Nuclear Threat from iran, thereafter they announced they were cutting our naval Aircraft Battle groups in the persian gulf down to one. Do not cross that red line, and at the same time pulled a carrier out, the truman was scheduled to deploy to replace it, and it is still tied up at the dock in norfork. Theyre cutting the Defense Budget by huge amounts. One of the great things we had with Ronald Reagan was a man who understood what was needed in terms of our National Security capabilities, build it, and the first call i made after desert storm was over with was to Ronald Reagan in california, and thanked him, and what i said was mr. President , i want to thank you for all the 600 toilet seats you bought. He said, darn it, it did not cost 600. Then he got the joke. Our capacity to win in desert storm was in no small part due to the decisions he made 10 years before about our military capabilities. Think for a minute now, the massive cuts underway, sequester of the budget, we have trouble keeping pilot in the air force because they do not get to fly anymore. Oftentimes squadrons have just been grounded. We have a lot of them now who are not maintaining proficiency and they are leaving. What we are doing by the actions of the administration, in some cases, the in action, we are crippling the capabilities that a future president will have 10, 15, 20 years from now to deal with the next crisis. That is how long it can take to build up all of the military forces. It is not like letting a highway contract and somebody is pouring concrete. It takes years to get a first rate topnotch nco in the marine corps and the other services. To develop the technologies we need, to build tanks and provide for the training and proficiency that our troops demonstrated so tremendously in desert storm. That capability is not going to be there after barack obama gets through his eight years in the white house. One of our major priorities has to be to recognize the threats that still exist that does not matter that what he says, they are still covering up benghazi, they do not want to admit there is a major threat out there and he could care less about the quality and the state of our military capabilities. I think not only are there a lot of very good reasons to be concerned about where he wants to take the country domestically, with obamacare and so forth, and abuses like the irs, but i am deeply, deeply worried about what kind of National Security posture we will have, how good our word l be around the word, our world,the our capacity to do with threats, and if you cannot even mount a rescue operation from an hour away from benghazi, and four of our people are being killed by al qaeda terrorists in libya, what does that say for the next time we have a big problem to deal with and hundreds of thousands of lives at stake . I think the biggest threat we face is the threat of terrorists armed with something deadlier than Airline Tickets and box cutters, and we have to be able to defeat that threat. I am sure i have gone on longer than i was supposed to. I have a question. I want to go back to the nsa program. You said something important, which is you could vouch for the program that was underway when you were in office. But obviously not being read into the into the program now, it is a different situation. I think everybody in this room would agree barack obama is no dick cheney. [applause] when you have a president who has shown himself to have such a complete disreguard for the rule of law, who has shown himself willing to use the irs to go after political enemies, who has shown himself willing to completely disregard the constitution, to decide i am not going to implement the employer mandate because it is inconvenient for me even though it is the law, who has shown himself frankly completely irresponsible when it comes to protecting americans privacy, you have a lot of americans out there now, and in light of a lot of news stories we are seeing, that say the nsa made a mistake and they listened to phone calls from washington, d. C. , because it has a 202 area code which is similar to the country code for egypt. There is a lot of concern out there, and when you think about the threats that still exists and the fact that we have got to be able to defend ourselves both from the threat that the president is posing to our freedoms domestically, also from terrorists internationally, what do you do in a situation were you a have a commander in chief who has put an Important Program at risk, in my view, who may well be undertaking a real abuse of power. If he is willing to do it in areas we can see, what makes you confident he is not doing it in areas that we do not see . You get yourself a new 2 ander in chief. [applause] i have some ideas about that. No question this is a difficult subject matter, and i know there are a lot of americans, some good friends of mine, who are concerned about the nsa. Part of the difficulty is and i plead with people, do not conflate the nsa with the irs those are totally different problems, totally different issues i believe there is ample evidence for the irs that it has abused its power, that the power and authority of the irs has been used, misused to go and in my mind it ought to be we ought to investigate it, subpoena whoever we have to subpoena, bring them to trial, and make certain that we build the safeguards that can be used again. But it would be a terrible mistake because the irs has been abused by barack obama and his people we would therefore turn and say we are going to get rid of the nsa program because it might be abused by this president. But there are not really good examples out there of how the nsa program has been abused. You do not have the kind of evidence there that you got with respect to the irs, or you have old who had been interrogated by the irs about their political beliefs, and Keith Alexander, the commander of the National Security agency, four star now, he is one of the finest officers i have ever known, as is also true for people like now i forgot his name. Allen . Before him. I am thinking of mike mcconnell. Mike mcconnell was a nav