I don't know how to describe Obama, as somebody who's now in office for two years. Just when we needed an angry black man, we didn't get one. He has a nice dog.

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Let's just do a checklist of what... We know a lot about Bush-Cheney. I've been doing a book for the last couple years about Cheney, basically based on people I knew that were inside... I've learned the truth that if people... You know, it's inevitable in a bureaucracy: You're a one-star general and you get assigned to the vice president's office... [cross talk] ... and maybe you knew him when he was secretary of defense under George Bush I in the first Gulf War when he was rational, so it seems, didn't want to, easily abandoned... and defended George Bush's decision not to go into Baghdad, if you remember, when we had that slaughter that we had that we called Gulf War I. But he was a different person after 9/11, as I think most of you have some sense of.

And so, I did know people in that process, and I couldn't write much about it. How to describe the Bush-Cheney years would be... I was telling a group of faculty people earlier -- and the book I'm doing isn't published, I don't want to talk too much about it -- but just to give you an idea of how differently they thought... As many dark thoughts as you may have about what America did after 9/11, whatever the justification was... I would argue that, what I'm really writing about is, about how eight or nine neoconservative whackos, if you will, overthrew the American government. Took it over. And it's not only that. It's not only that the neocons took it over, it's how easily they did it -- how Congress disappeared, how the press became part of it, how the public acquiesced. And all of us, I guess, in the sense of payback and rage and fear, tremendous amount of fear in America, and we all sort of signed on to what we call now the global GWOT, the global war on terror which, for this government, [inaudible] still exists.

I talked to somebody the other day in the... [inaudible] ... I'm ruminating here, but I talked to somebody Saturday before I came about Ben Ali -- a man in the intelligence community, a very decent... Believe me, as you can under... it makes total sense. Many people, the overwhelming percentage of people, want to do their job right, whether in the CIA, or the Joint Special Operations Command etc., etc. Around the world, that's just the natural instinct. Everybody wants to do their job right. But I'll just tell you, the thinking that goes on... I mentioned what happened in Tunisia, the implications of which I think will be felt, my guess is, we're talking about, there are a lot of countries in North Africa where there's economic distress as there was in Tunisia -- Morocco, Algeria, etc. -- where we could see a lot of trouble. But, my American friend -- this is somebody in the joint special operations business -- his first remark was, "Oh my God, he was such a good ally."

You know, he was. He was an ally in the Global War on Terror. That's the way we do look at things. Never mind that... maybe he did chase down terrorists, al Qaeda if you will, for us. But you have to wonder (which I did not say to my friend, being reasonably polite at that moment, I did not say that), but for every terrorist we capture, how many more do we make? I mean, how many more... We complain bitterly when Iran captures three American students, they released the woman but the other two men are kept there, we complain bitterly in America about the lack of their jurisprudence and the lack of a good legal system. And how many people are still in GITMO, Guantánamo, suffering away? Over 200 still. We claim we can't get rid of them, nobody wants them, but the truth that if they weren't al Qaeda when we captured them -- and most of them were not, as many of you probably understand -- they are now after 7, 8, 9 years of being incarcerated without any hearings or any rights. So we don't always look at ourselves in ways we should.

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