Vital Interests: Karen, thanks very much for joining us today on the Vital Interests forum. It is going to be a pleasure to discuss the themes you develop in your new book Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump. This book is a sequel to your well-received book Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State published in 2016. In that work you provide insights on what happened after 9/11 in terms of how the Bush administration reacted to this unprecedented terrorist attack on the nation, particularly the role the Justice Department played in expanding legal authorities to include activities previously considered unthinkable.

Before we begin talking about that particular moment in time, the transformative moment of 9/11, let's try to consider the mentality in the Bush White House and key government departments on September 10th, 2001. Bush had been in office just eight months after winning an historically close and contentious election. What was the agenda the Bush administration was intent on implementing before 9/11 upended all their plans?

Karen Greenberg: First of all, thank you so much for having me on this forum. That's a really good question, and it seems to me like an entire book, but I will try. There's an underlying question there, which is, was whatever happened after 9/11, built upon an attitude, a view of the world, already in place? Let me focus on what that meant in my realm, as a student of national security and the rule of law. Over the course of the pre 9/11 part of the Bush administration, there were a number of efforts within the Bush team to rethink laws regarding intelligence, regarding law enforcement, and regarding national security, that hadn't really yet come to fruition.

In fact, they had encountered some setbacks. When 9/11 happened, it's not a stretch to say that it propelled forward many of the things that were already on the drawing board, among them reducing the protections against sharing information between the intelligence agencies and law enforcement. This was a major change being worked on internally inside the administration prior to 9/11.

There were other things as well. You could feel there was a chomping at the bit on the part of a number of individuals and agencies to change things in a dramatic way from what had come before. It wasn't just true in places like the Justice Department, and the intelligence community, but it was also true inside the Pentagon. One of the things that Donald Rumsfeld wanted to do was to make it clear that he was in charge and he was going to do a different thing, by which he meant applying a business model to how you thought about expenditures in the Pentagon.

In other words, it was about balancing the expediency of the economy of defense with what needed to be accomplished. It came in the middle of that conversation, as well, but still a sense of individuals all around wanting to really exert the power of the executive and of the officials in charge of the different agencies of the executive branch. While that's true in every administration, there was a real sense in this administration that change was needed on a variety of fronts, and on a variety of fronts that eventually came to the fore in the wake of 9/11.

VI: Was the Bush administration trying to reorient the country due to the “peace bonus'' brought about by the devolution of the Soviet Union, the emergence of the United States as the unchallenged power in the world? China was just emerging on the scene as a potential economic rival. Were these the global realities they were coming to grips with?

Karen Greenberg: I think it was part of it. It's interesting that you bring up China because we forget how much China was very much on the minds of the American national security and economic establishment prior to 9/11. There was a sense that this was a century in which the contest between the United States and China would take an essential position and we got deterred from that by 9/11.

VI: For the United States the 9/11 attacks constitute a pivotal moment that demands answers and action. Although as we know now there was actionable intelligence about an impending attack but the administration is caught completely off guard, everyone's asking questions, and there is an urgent need to retaliate. You begin your narrative with descriptions of three significant acts the Bush administration quickly presented to Congress that were almost immediately passed. These were the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the Patriot Act, and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. 

Before we get into your description of the subtle tools and the role they played in the years after 9/11, can you talk about the impact of these key administration actions? 

Karen Greenberg: This is the thing. If you wanted to have a prescription for what not to do in terms of creating responsible legislation as a response to an attack like 9/11 on our nation, these three acts really resemble what not to do. The reason is not because of the authorities they claimed, although that's also pertinent in a number of places, but it's also because of the way they did it. There is such vagueness, imprecision, cloudiness, fuzziness in the formulation of these acts that they leave open opportunities for misuse and abuse in a way that is extremely predictable.

Let me start with the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which as you'll read in the book, was a less broad authorization than that which the White House had asked for in the days following 9/11. What it did was it provided the ability to go after those who had brought about 9/11 or who helped them in a variety of ways. It did not name an enemy, it did not have geographical limitations, it did not mention any temporal limitations as in referring to the end of hostilities which prior authorizations and war declarations in the past had done.  The AUMF left open so many things about where, how, on what terms and against whom, and for how long it could be used that it was basically just a blanket authorization for the president, not Congress which was constitutionally authorized to do this, but for the president to have the power to make these decisions about who, when, where, how, and for how long to use force.

I refer to the AUMF in the book as the “ur” document in the war on terror, because it immediately says, "We are not going to abide by what defines us as a country, abiding by the rule of law," which is to look at articulated powers, expressed powers, look at definitions, look at legally defined limits. Instead, we're going to have the broadest possible authority for what we can do as possible. That tone was set within the first days after 9/11 and it was a tone that persisted in other pieces of legislation that you mentioned, and over a number of activities that happened. In fact, it characterizes and supports the 9/11 age which has lasted until today very, very well.

It was this indulgence in the use of vague terms rather than specify authorities, responsibilities, and limits that really set the course for what will become the era of the war on terror.

VI:The implication would be that in this concerted effort to insert vague and imprecise language that would allow for more latitude of action, the Bush team asked for “authorization” to “use of force” not a declaration of war? 

Karen Greenberg: In debating the AUMF in Congress immediately following 9/11, the word war is constantly used. There is reference to Pearl Harbor, to the Day of Infamy. It's seen as a war by those who vote on this resolution, and yet when they passed the resolution, they didn't use the word war. It's not just imprecise language, it's an intention to avoid language that would inculcate legal triggers, legal parameters. It's just a way of escaping that. That's what you actually see.

VI: Was the underlying argument also that the United States had to take off the gloves, that the United States had to be able to act anywhere in the world against this enemy that attacked the homeland. The administration was seeking permission to retaliate, to seek revenge?

Karen J. Greenberg: Yes, that's right. Now, the word take the gloves off doesn't come till later in the war on terror. It's usually associated with the decision to use torture against detained individuals in CIA black sites. But there was a sense articulated in the beginning that we were going to do what we needed to do to defeat this enemy. The problem was the enemy wasn't precisely named, and so it became, we're going to do what we have to do to keep going until we think we feel secure. That's a different story, different narrative.

VI: Were lawyers involved in the conversations within the Bush administration about how to define the new non-state terrorist entities that carried out the 9/11 attacks and what kind of appropriate actions could be taken? 

Karen Greenberg: 100%, yes. The reason for their being able to switch paradigms like they've done to go from the precise to the imprecise, from using terms like war and defining the enemy and having geographical limits on warfare, was very much behind the scenes. This and many apparent policies that followed. This I've written about in the past and also in this book. It is mostly the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel, a little known office by people outside of the expertise in national security and law. An office that during the war on terror provided legal opinions for the executive, the president, and his administration to do what they thought they needed to do in, as you said, taking the gloves off. For example, they separated out Afghanistan and the Taliban and Al-Qaeda from belonging to the international covenants that define warfare and the laws of war.

They translated that to the detention of individuals from the battlefield, and the rest was history. This is how they justified the indefinite detention, how they, in their minds, legalized torture, and basically created a separate legal code for the United States than the one it had followed in the past and had agreed to with other international bodies when it came to war.

VI: The AUMF allowed the Bush administration to reach across the world to find and punish the perpetrators of the attack on the homeland. The Patriot Act was their next step to acquire domestic authority to seek out any other terrorist cells and create surveillance and intelligence to thwart another attack. What were the mechanics of getting this accomplished?

Karen Greenberg: First, I just want to just comment on one thing you said. One of the things that George Bush did, and that President Obama continued with, was to provide a sense that, to the extent that this was an act of war, it would be kept off American shores. It would be kept away, something that cannot be said about domestic terrorism. At the same time that they did that, the hijackers had been here in the country. They used this as a way of saying, look, whoever else is in this country, whoever else has been deployed by Al Qaeda to this country, we're going to find them, and we're going to root them out one way or another using our criminal justice system.

For that, they asked for and got a larger array of powers than they had had in the past. Those involved things that were both codified in that Patriot Act, and things that were used unknowingly and secretly beyond what was actually codified in the Patriot Act, for example, as you referred to, surveillance powers.

The Patriot Act, in of itself, though, already was a call for an approval of an aggressive use of law enforcement for things that, as civil libertarian said at the time, violated First and Fourth Amendment protections in particular, and that undermined a sense of constitutional protections writ large, should the word terrorist or terrorist suspect be applied to an individual or a group.

VI: Just the name itself, the Patriot Act, it's an odd label to put on such an undertaking.

Karen Greenberg: Yes, but it makes sense in the context of the time, in the context of the war on terror. The shock and trauma that the center of the financial capital of the United States, and perhaps of the world, had been attacked. It was such a shock to the system, that the idea that any and all responses were the true manifestation of patriotism was understandable. What's more amazing are the individuals who saw the civil liberties problems coming way ahead of time as these pieces of legislation were laid out. I found that more surprising than the fact that there would be agreed upon term by Congress, if it should be called the Patriot Act

VI: One thing that was put into the initial Patriot Act were sunset clauses. Congress agreed that we really need this now, but we want to be able to review it a year or two down the line. Did the sunset clauses make a difference in the authority the Act permitted?

Karen Greenberg: Over the years, during the Obama administration, the Patriot Act sunsetted and was revived as the Freedom Act. It had better Fourth Amendment protections than it had before. Even during the early years of the Trump administration, there were calls for re-expanding surveillance powers. Those were shut down, and I think they were shut down in part because Trump himself was worried that they might apply to him or his colleagues.

 In addition to the Patriot Act sunsetting, when it comes to surveillance, there was the FISA Amendments Act and the revelations about warrantless surveillance against Americans. That was revived internally. By the way, the call for that kind of reform came from within the George Bush government. That's the famous scene of Comey at Ashcroft’s bed. Instead of just getting rid of it, what they did was codify it in the 2008 FISA Amendments Act that persists to this day. It was a way that the Patriot Act was a wedge for advancing these surveillance powers. Many of them, an uncomfortable number of them, still are used and persist to this day.

VI: Another thing that persists to this day is the third post 9/11 act the Bush White House passed, which was the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. This was the hasty lumping together of some 22 government agencies in an attempt to create an entity that then could be pointed to as the department responsible for protecting the nation from future attacks, a department that had broad powers, broad authorities, and as we have seen, undefined authorities that have greatly expanded. DHS is now by far the largest agency of the federal government with 240,000 employees, 80,000 of whom are law enforcement, and with a $70 billion a year budget and dwarfing the Department of Justice.  Why was that allowed to happen?

Karen Greenberg: It's a good question, why was it allowed to happen? Because those who saw trouble coming down the pike were overruled. There was a sense that there needed to be something set up that would particularly focus on national security, but as Russ Feingold has referred to it, there was at the very beginning the concern that creation of DHS would be a bait and switch, that if you put all these agendas together in the name of counterterrorism, then eventually you could use it for other things, for example for anti-drug enforcement activities.

The fact is that when you put this many authorities from this many agencies together in one place, their lines of command are confused, the lines of integrity in terms of who does what is confused. We saw this in Hurricane Katrina, which was a massive failure in terms of response, in large part due to people talking to different authorities in Washington, not knowing where or how they should fit in, among them, FEMA of course, which had been wholly subsumed by the Department of Homeland Security.

VI: Let's move on to the organizing theme of your book, which are the subtle tools - the methods being used in the dismantling of American democracy. Tools that are the legacy from the war on terror that are in play to this day. Understanding what the subtle tools are and how they have evolved is of acute importance. You write that they are the less visible means of conducting the war on terror which bestowed enormous amounts of power on individuals, mostly within the executive branch. The first one you identify is the subtle tool which promotes “the degradation of language, the starting point for political dishonesty and power mongering, and the platform upon which undemocratic and unlawful policies have been fashioned.” This fuzziness, the imprecision with intent to confound becomes an essential tool. Is the culmination of this subtle tool what we experienced at the start of the Trump administration when Kellyanne Conway informed us that they had the right to state and believe in alternative facts? 

Karen Greenberg: It's the entire disregard for the use of language in a way that betrays the responsibility to facts or truths. The imprecision of language that we started with morphed over time to what Donald Trump did with it. I just want to note  what happened with President Obama, which was, for all of the good that he did or trying to do, the use of the word “imminence” to describe something that was anything but imminent, to conduct, to authorize and conduct targeted killings of terrorists around the world.

The idea that imminence could then be used to mean somebody who was thought could someday harm the United States, is different from the actual meaning of the term imminent. It didn't start with Obama. This was the long slow bleed of what started with the imprecision of those early days after 9/11. Then you saw it again when Trump took that playbook and used it, when he used the word imminence for rationale to assassinate Qasem Soleimani who, by imminent what they meant was, he wanted to conduct attacks against Americans, and was using proxy forces around the world to attack Americans and others. It wasn't imminent in the way it would have been defined in the dictionary, at least not prior to Obama.

VI: The linguistic imprecision enabled a second subtle tool, which is to introduce confusion and imprecision regarding the roles and responsibilities of the institutions of government - the term you use is bureaucratic porousness. This is important because if you do not have defined roles, if you do not have some organization of governance within departments then there is an erosion of effective decision-making at the bureaucratic level. Doesn’t this default in decision-making lead to more power accruing to the executive branch?

Karen Greenberg: And avenues to the abuse of power as well. Of course, the Department of Homeland Security is the perfect example of this, but we saw it before that, especially in the porousness between the White House and the Department of Justice, something that we saw get out of hand with William Barr, but it definitely started in the days of John Ashcroft right after 9/11. Then Alberto Gonzales who went from having been George W. Bush’s lawyer as governor in Texas, to the White House, and then became attorney general. This erosion of the barrier between the White House and the Department of Justice had been immediate.

You mentioned that the Department of Homeland Security is now the biggest law enforcement agency. The way I see it, looking at the Trump years in particular, is the way in which the Department of Justice controlled the Department of Homeland Security, and in particular, in matters regarding immigration. There are all these mechanisms by which the attorney general is empowered to be able to intervene in immigration cases, even when these are immigration cases that take place within the context of Homeland Security.

There's a porousness in terms of who does what. That was a confusion at the very beginning of the Department of Homeland Security by splitting the border patrol and those who look at internal migrant affairs. There was confusion with where the line was. What I saw was the erosion that was found also between Justice and the Department of Homeland Security.

VI: In considering the antecedents of bureaucratic erosion and porousness, don’t we also have to think about what happened during the Reagan administration when there was a concerted Republican effort to shrink government by reducing the size of the bureaucracy with the notion of privatization. Outsourcing government functions to contractors supposedly reduced the cost of government but this also led to important departments losing long-standing expertise and competence. By the time Trump came to Washington, weren't many key bureaucracies already gutted and many politicized as contracts were often handed out by the executive branch?

Karen Greenberg: Yes, the privatization of government functions is absolutely pertinent to this conversation. Many have written about the death of professional expertise, for example Michael Lewis’ The Fifth Risk, what's happening to the administrative state, what's happening to expertise. Trump took encouraging dysfunctional governance one step further by playing musical chairs all the time, rotating people from position to position, keeping loyal people in acting positions, so that the president had the most authority. It's defusing the power of others to make decisions so that the president can make decisions across the executive branch.

As William Barr said, “The President is the executive.” One of the things that goes out the window with this is the separation of powers and checks and balances, because there's no way to control what's happening when none of the initial rules of professional government, what I call the culture of governance, are being followed. We still need those rules, by the way.

What's becoming really clear is there have to be rules. Remember that Chad Wolf, who was the Acting Secretary of Homeland Security for something like 18 months, as well as Ken Cuccinelli, who was acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Services, were finally declared by court to hold their position illegally, unlawfully. They were just going to push this as far as they could, ignoring established norms and assuming that whatever the president wanted was to be considered the new rule.

VI: Wasn’t another characteristic of the Trump administration that as soon as they took over they were intent on politicizing government departments. Political operatives were brought in to identify people considered not sufficiently loyal to Trump and were either dismissed or assigned to dead end jobs? The State Department, for example, saw many experienced diplomats and area specialists leave and not be replaced.

Karen Greenberg: Absolutely. It was an intentional corruption of the bureaucratic structure.

VI: It logically follows that the third subtle tool deployed is calculated secrecy - the intentional withholding of facts by the executive branch. The Bush administration in their handling of the war on terror were certainly less than transparent and manipulative of the information they did provide. Obama promised more openness but still did so selectively. How would you describe the Trump administration’s attitude to the use of secrecy in governing?

Karen Greenberg: Trump takes secrecy to a whole new level. We have the Department of Justice writing memos that are authorizing a variety of things from not having to abide by the Geneva Conventions to the use of targeted killings, even to kill an American citizen, under Obama.

With Trump comes there are insidious examples of secrecy, for example, with the targeted assassination of General Soleimani, there are two Soleimani OLC opinions, one issued before and one after the killing, the latter of which has now been released albeit with redactions. I'd love to see what else came up during the Trump administration. What's interesting about this is that Trump's tactic for ensuring secrecy was a step beyond because as a matter of executive policy he impeded the routine creation of documents. If you are in the White House or on executive-branch related calls, you can't take notes, as John Bolton and others have revealed. The Trump administration didn't keep records on children at the border when they were separated from their families. As a result, many of them suffered the unacceptable cruelty of not being able to be reunited. The White House repeatedly missed a number of deadlines for reports required by Congress, for example delaying the first report on targeted killing, just to give one of many. Trump was very aware of the fact that real secrecy meant never creating the documents to start with. 

VI: The fourth and ultimate subtle tool is the abandonment of legal and procedural norms for lawmaking, oversight, judicial review, transparency - what we would consider the basic elements of democratic governance. What are the consequences when norms that we all think are accepted as how things should function, are cast aside?

Karen Greenberg: In a way, the first three subtle tools empower the last tool. Secrecy allows for breaking norms and laws, for example, in authorizing torture without anybody knowing about it. Secrecy is involved in so much of what went on in the war on terrorism, some of it legitimate and much of it not legitimate. So, too, for imprecise language, which basically allowed them to avoid the laws and  norms of fighting wars, of observing limits on the use of force, of adhering to the treatment of prisoners of war required by the Geneva Conventions, using the nebulous category that didn't exist of “detainees” and “enemy combatants” for which there were no legal parameters in place.

Bureaucratic porousness contributed to the abrogation of norms as well as institutions and agencies could readily trade authorities and confuse the integrity of what were once separated entities..

VI: Isn’t the most disturbing ramification of this particular tool that disregards norms the logical consequence that in fact we don't really have any norms? What we thought were long-established procedures, processes, accepted behaviors, and modes of governance are, in fact, all capable of being circumvented, willfully ignored, or just rewritten.

Karen Greenberg: That goes to a very central point, which encapsulates my take on what happened in the war on terror; namely, that because of the perpetuation of these four subtle tools, accountability and oversight no longer exist in any powerful way. You see that in terms of secrecy persisting. Trump understood this in a very important way, which is, his successful attempts to get rid of inspector generals, really dismantling the accountability mechanisms within government, which is all part of the same story.

There's another piece of this, which is that the casting aside of accepted norms really shines a light on how vulnerable our constitution is, and our laws, and our congressional ability for oversight, because what it comes down to is trust-me-government, which means that if somebody in power wants to abide by laws in a certain limited way, in a certain structured and responsible way, then fine. If not, then we're in trouble. We have a system that's all too dependent on getting somebody who will be law abiding and norms abiding in office. It's a vulnerability we have to address as a nation.

VI: We do now have the Biden administration, which, by most accounts, is considered to be law-abiding. They talk about the rule of law. They are trying to restructure the government, to rebuild the bureaucracy, to create responsible governance, and to provide transparency. However, at the same time, there is another major political constituency very much alive in the United States that rejects the legitimacy of the last election and staged an insurrection to prevent President Biden from taking office, denies the Biden administration’s guidelines on how to combat a resurging COVID pandemic, and has state legislatures passing laws to restrict access to voting and prohibiting teaching of critical race theory. Aren’t these stark manifestations that the subtle tools we have been discussing have been successful in dismantling much of what we considered to be the fundamentals of democracy in America? 

Karen Greenberg: Well, I think that's true, but I think that accountability is really important here. I think that holding people - and I mean government officials at the top, not just the rioters themselves -  accountable, if they are found to be connected to the Capitol insurrection -  is extremely important. We can't run away from it again, we can't say, ”Oh, that was a top government official, so pursuing accountability is off the table.” What if they condoned torture? What if they lied about getting us to war in Iraq?, What if they can't do that anymore without facing consequences? It has to be that the people who brought this about at the very top are held accountable. Whether that means just naming the wrongdoers, and making it clear who led the deviations from laws and norms, it’s important.  Whether that means some kind of sanctions are imposed, whether or that means criminal prosecution for some, it's extremely important that this country stop running away from holding public officials accountable.

Leadership matters, and corrupt leadership matters too, and without leaders, I don't really know what would happen with the rest of this movement. It wouldn't go away automatically, but if you're given carte blanche to behave this way, and if the institutions and laws are changed to support this behavior, then, in fact, those who defy laws and norms will persist and will gain strength, and that is not a prescription for a healthy and secure democracy.

VI: To confront this culture of impunity, which has become established because of certain actions related to the subtle tools you have described, where do you see this demand for accountability originating? Will this come from Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice? Can we depend on the Supreme Court to rule on such cases? Can we depend on other institutions of government to step up and question the direction of the country? Will the current House committee investigating the January 6th attack produce the results you're looking for?

Karen Greenberg: The answer is, all of these things have to be brought to bear, and in particular, Congress and the Department of Justice. The abrogation of laws and norms in the Department of Justice is just unacceptable in a healthy democracy, and I think Merrick Garland, to his credit, has gone way out of his way to signal his determination to restore some independence to the Department of Justice. We'll see where that goes. He's taking many important steps in that direction.

Congress has to weigh in here as well. The insurrection committee is extremely important. The more I think about it, the more important I think it is. The committee has the ability to push back on secrecy just by its very investigation, redefine what kinds of things must be presented to the committee-- get testimony fromTrump and his associates in contrast to the  subpoenas that were regularly blocked during the obstruction of justice investigation. Congress needs to be able to hold public officials accountable and overcome these mechanisms for secrecy and for protecting individuals in the name of national security. Want to talk about an imprecise term? Here's one, national security.

Congress needs to start writing laws that are respectful of what laws are supposed to be - defined, limited, precise. You can't write a law that gives you carte blanche for using force forever anywhere you want, against anyone you want. It's not okay. This is really the point  - how do we protect our country from another Trump who might try to use the subtle tools to introduce authoritarian norms under the guise of protecting democracy? 

How do we do that? That's something that I think is beyond Congress and the courts, it's something we have to think about as a society at large in terms of how we think about qualifications for president. Who knows where this conversation could go, but it's only at very early stages and we don't have a lot of time. As we know, the 2022 congressional elections are a profoundly important test of the direction towards which the country is headed.

VI: In your introduction when you refer to the writings of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and his concept of a societal pendulum constantly swinging in cycles between established norms and safeguards and the kind of extreme positions characterized by a Trump administration, you warn that the pendulum may in fact not be functioning as Schlesinger describes but may be dangerously in a state of statis. How can the country get out of this point in time?

Karen Greenberg: What that signifies is the greatest danger of all - that there's always been a complacent feeling among Americans that the pendulum will, as you say, move back and forth between more conservative governments, on one end , and more liberal democratic governments on the other. There's been a longstanding assumption that while the swings may be painful for whoever is not running the show at the time, there is trust that the perpetual back and forth momentum will continue, keeping things in balance.

As it stands now, we may have lost that balance. We may have lost that momentum. The question is, what will bring it back? I will say that I think there's kind of a measuredness about Biden, a way in which he honors process, a way in which those that he's surrounded himself with acknowledge that how they act, in what they say, can help restore the culture of governance. In other words, I think that the pieces are in place for restoring a cyclical momentum towards a better and better democracy. But it's all still on very, very precarious ground.

VI: Another mechanistic analogy that could be pointed to, and actually Schlesinger even talks about “the scary voyage into uncharted waters of the ship of state,” is one of an ocean-going ship as it makes its way across open waters battered by waves and winds. What keeps the ship stable and on a straight path to safe harbors, are gyroscopes. Placed in the hull are spinning gyroscopes that help balance the ship against these external and potentially destructive forces. If our ship of state loses its gyroscope, if that mechanism that keeps things stable and moving forward is malfunctioning, how do we recognize this situation and take appropriate measures?

Karen Greenberg: First of all, I love the metaphor. I think the constitution is the gyroscope. I think that the sign of the gyroscope functioning well is the Supreme Court. I think that unfortunately the idea that the Supreme Court may have been transformed to the point where it can't perform a non-partisan function is really significant and future decisions will serve as a litmus test as to whether or not the gyroscope is keeping the ship of state on course. And, above all, it is the president who needs to understand the important functioning of the gyroscope.

VI: We need an experienced navigator - a president who sees the obstacles obstructing the country and can steer around them.

Karen J. Greenberg: Yes, one whom we can call The Navigator.

VI: We will see what happens in the next year, how the current navigator is able to get us through this challenging tempest.

Karen Greenberg: Yes we will.

VI: Karen, we're coming to the end of our time. As you know  we like to end on a positive note, and I think this is one where we can see a way forward. We know the country is in troubled waters but it has weathered a lot and we should have the confidence it can emerge on the other side. Staying aware of the threats we face is one of the biggest challenges. To help us do this you have written The Subtle Tools which provides the necessary narrative to how the country got to this point in time and what must be considered to make sure our democracy is not being systematically dismantled.

Karen Greenberg: This was a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much, John.

Karen J. Greenberg is the Director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law, an International Studies Fellow at New America, and a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Greenberg specializes in the intersection between national security policy, the rule of law and human rights. Greenberg is the host of "Vital Interests Podcast," and the editor-in-chief of three on-line publications: The CNS/Soufan Group Morning Brief (2007-present), the CNS/Aon Cyber Brief (2011-present), and Vital Interests Forum (2019-present). She has written and edited numerous books including: Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump (Princeton, August 2021), Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State (Crown, 2016), The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days (Oxford, 2009), Reimagining the National Security State: Liberalism on the Brink (Cambridge, 2020) and The Torture Papers: the Road to Abu Ghraib (Cambridge, 2005). Her work has been featured in the NYTimes, the Washington Post, the LA Times, the Nation, the Atlantic and many other major news outlets. She is a frequent guest on national television and radio shows.