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Richard Miniter Interview

C-SPAN/Q&A
Host: Brian Lamb

BRIAN LAMB, HOST, C-SPAN: Richard Miniter, Author, Speaker, Blogger, why do you do what you do?

RICHARD MINITER, AUTHOR AND COMMENTATOR: Why? Because I feel compelled. I mean, I think some people have to go to the gym every day - and obviously I don't. I need to write every day. I need to think every day and write every day. And I can't think without writing. I mean, writing organizes your thoughts into something coherent.

I don't think my own opinion is all that valuable by itself. When I think about something and I've researched something, I've interviewed someone, then I think I have a contribution to make. And that's why I do what I do. And I like it.

LAMB: During the hour, I want to get to know you better but I also - we're going to jump all over the place, almost like the world we live in with the blogs. Why do you have a blog?

MINITER: Well, first of all, everyone else has one so why not? But also, blogs are kind of immediate and you're not waiting for something to be published. And I found that I was - I've been in daily journalism. I was at the Wall Street Journal and the Sunday Times of London, and that's, at best, a daily, and sometimes it takes longer than a day for something to appear in print.

And then I started writing books. And I guess writing a book is like, you know, an elephant giving birth to its calf. It takes more than a year to deliver. And I missed kind of the immediacy, being able to have a thought and make a contribution to the debate very quickly, especially when you're in these long book-writing phases.

So I was looking for something more immediate. And I couldn't take a job at a newspaper and write books at the same time - at least I thought I couldn't. So the blog was a great opportunity. And I've been getting a lot of great responses. And some readers are a bit nuts but, you know, it's amazing what you can learn from your readers. Some people are very thoughtful and say interesting things back. So it becomes a conversation. That's even more valuable.

LAMB: Well, this week the Pope came to town and you wrote about the Pope. The last thing I read on your blog - let me just try you out on that one. Why'd you write about the Pope?

MINITER: Well, I thought the Pope was a really important story that wasn't getting as covered as widely as it did. And I wanted to say something original and different. I wanted to say why it mattered, why the Pope's important, why religion's important. And I think the reason it's important is it brings hope to our lives.

And hope is absolutely vital. Hope focuses us on the future. I think the future inherently hopeful because it's changeable. The past is frozen and done. And if you meditate too long on the past, even a glorious past, it's inherently depressing. And I think part of what's wrong with modern society, we spend a lot of time thinking about our childhood, about ourselves, about things that are frozen in time. And the Pope reminds us about the future and about things beyond it.

And I thought also - I was - there were a lot of cheap shots against the Pope in the media. It kind of made me mad.

LAMB: Like?

MINITER: Well, like Bill Maher on HBO, you know, saying he was running a child-abusing religious cult. Boy, you know, I mean, I hope it doesn't come to that. I mean, that's just insanity. It's actually verging on bigotry.

So I wanted to - and then also I was kind of moved because I saw this old woman pushing a horribly deformed man in a wheelchair and yet she had a happy smile on her face. And she asked me - I was stopped at a stoplight and she was crossing. And she turned to me in the kind of conversations that only, I think, happen in America where two strangers spontaneously engage in conversation. She says to me, "How do you like living in the Pope's weather?"

And I found myself thinking about that question long after the light turned green and I drove away. I think she meant the spiritual weather, the environment created by being around someone like the Pope and how important hope is in modern society.

And it also made me think, why is it that so many people who like Bill Maher, who are wealthy, they live comfortable lives, why do they resent the tiny amount of hope that religious - religion - offers so many ordinary people? Why in this hard life would you begrudge any amount of hope and joy to some other human being? It seemed like an odd reaction to me.

LAMB: Are you religious?

MINITER: I am.

LAMB: What church?

MINITER: I'm Anglican. I was raised Catholic and then my family was - had a big problem with Vatican, too, and so we became wanderers. We went to the Ukrainian Uniate Church for a while. And as a young adult in college I found myself talked out of religion briefly.

But then after spending some time in Southeast Asia covering the Christian rebels in Burma and other places, I realized there was an emptiness in my life. And I began going to various churches myself looking for a home. I have nothing against the Catholic Church. I think it's a wonderful place in many ways. It doesn't suit me as well as the old fashioned Anglican Church does, kind of a conservative Episcopalianism where the language in the church book is almost right out of Shakespeare and doctrinally very similar to the old Catholic Church or the old Methodist Church, which is classic American Protestantism.

LAMB: The Miniter name, there are three Miniter boys that I've seen �

MINITER: Actually �

LAMB: � I mean, there are three that I know of.

MINITER: That's right.

LAMB: Tell us about your whole - how many were there all together?

MINITER: I am the oldest of six children. I guess my family really is Irish Catholic. And there's my sister, who is raising three children and writing romance novels on the side. There's my brother Henry who was �

LAMB: By the way, what's your sister's �

MINITER: � oh, Suzanne. Sorry.

LAMB: � does she go with Miniter, the name, on her books?

MINITER: I don't think she's had any published just yet. Maybe I could be wrong. There's so many details that don't get passed on to me. We're a large and spread out family. Then there's Henry, who does go by the Miniter name. He's a lawyer who spends his time defending doctors in New York. And he has a wife and two children.

Then there is Frank, who is an editor at the "American Hunter" magazine. He used to be at "Outdoor Life." And he has hunted all over the world. I mean, the big difference between Frank and I - we both go to lots of strange countries, Third World countries - I get shot at and he shoots animals. That's the big difference.

But he - he's a great writer. We �

LAMB: Where is he based?

MINITER: � he lives up in Upstate New York and comes down once a month to close the magazine at the NRA headquarters. But really passionate about hunting. He knows a lot about biology, well traveled, well read.

It's funny, we've chosen such totally different lives. And in all our travels - I've been to 89 Third World countries, he's been to at least that many, I think - we've never traveled together. And we're talking about doing that some day.

LAMB: Eighty-nine Third World countries?

MINITER: Right.

LAMB: We'll come back to that. Brendan.

MINITER: I'm sorry, I said 89 countries I meant to say, most of which are Third World Countries.

LAMB: Brother Brendan. Where is he?

MINITER: Brendan is at a little newspaper called the "Wall Street Journal." He's on the editorial page there until recently he had a column of his own. And he's been writing there for the past four or five years. Before that he was at "The Washington Times." Again, great knowledge of history, well ranked long distance runner in high school and college.

And then the youngest is Liam. Liam is completing a degree in Physics.

LAMB: You know by now that people watching are saying, "Where did he get that suit?"

MINITER: That's right. I'm sure they are.

LAMB: Because you have - you have checks behind you and your suit's made of checks. We just - I had a brief mention before we started. Where'd you get it?

MINITER: Well, I got to know a guy named Keith Brigman (ph) years ago who make suits. And I always thought someday when I have a little money I'll have a suit made. And I happened to see this suit in Casablanca. And I thought, you know, men used to dress in a much more, I don't know, aggressive way, a much more fun way.

And it's not the kind of suit you'd go and buy in the department store. So I thought if I'm going to have a suit made, I may as well get something made that's fun and different. And it gets one of two very different reactions. People either like it or they hate it. And I guess that's true of my writing as well. So it's fun to evoke the response.

LAMB: What about the baby blue socks?

MINITER: Oh, Turnbull and Aster in London. I just liked the color and spent a whole eight pounds on them so it's just like $12.

LAMB: In your - you have three books or four - I've got three in my lap. One's called "Losing bin Laden," the other's called "Shadow War," and then the third one's "Disinformation."

MINITER: Right. And I wrote a book before that called, "The Myth of Market Share," which unlike the books on your lap was not a bestseller.

LAMB: Here's what I want you to parse, the dedication in your last book. And we'll take you through each step.

MINITER: OK.

LAMB: For Richard F. Miniter �

MINITER: That's my father.

LAMB: � my father, marine - when was he a marine?

MINITER: He was in the U.S. Marine Corps I believe from 1960 to 1964.

LAMB: And what impact did that have on you?

MINITER: Well, you know, people really never really leave the Marine Corps. I had an interesting conversation in Baghdad once with a guy named Major Hernandez who was a West Point graduate. He said to me, "Why is it that someone who serves in the Marine Corps for one term has a bumper sticker on his car and is proud to be a Marine for the rest of his life where somehow who graduates from West Point never has an I Love the Army bumper sticker or flag outside his house?"

And I think it's because the Marines are just different. They - it's a big part of their identity, and certainly a big part of my father's identity.

LAMB: Is he alive?

MINITER: He is alive. Yes.

LAMB: Where does he live?

MINITER: He lives in the Hudson Valley in Upstate New York with my mother.

LAMB: Then you go on in the dedication, police chief.

MINITER: He was briefly the police chief for this town called Rosendale, New York, about 5,000 people. And again, he brought the Marine training into it and set up a gun range to train all the cadets and started making a disproportionate number of arrests which drove the state troopers a bit nuts because he was very aggressive. This was in the 1970s.

LAMB: Marine biologist.

MINITER: Yes. He also got interested in the biology of the Hudson River and did quite a bit of work there. And as a kid in the basement there was a line of these scary looking Mason jars that had river snakes in them and all sorts of things.

LAMB: By the way, what year were you born?

MINITER: I was born in 1967.

LAMB: Historian.

MINITER: Well, he's not an official historian, but my father's a great raconteur and a great reader of history. And most of the really long conversations we've had have been about English history or Roman history. He has a pretty good knowledge of the Arab world. And we're both passionate about Africa but in different ways. I'm fascinated by going there and he's fascinated about reading about it.

I like the modern period. He likes the colonial period. But we've both talked a lot about that.

LAMB: How do you define his raconteur part of his life?

MINITER: My father has an incredible ability to tell you a story. He can tell you a story about looking for his lost socks and you'd be on the edge of your seat. And it's this great Irish gift, and I hope I have a small piece of it.

LAMB: Manufacturing chief.

MINITER: Well, he ran the - he met my mother on Wall Street in the late '60s. They left - when I was just a baby - left New York City to move upstate. And he ended up running a number of manufacturing plants and with his own theories, some of which did very well.

LAMB: Deer hunter.

MINITER: Oh, passionate deer hunter, in fact. All throughout my childhood the first week of November I was going to be cold in the woods with my father and we were hiding in a blind waiting for deer to come along.

And one of his proudest moments is this 1994 picture which he shot believed to be at the time - according to Bloom (ph) and Crockett (ph), whoever measures these things - the largest deer in terms of antler spread in New York that year. And he's got a very triumphant looking picture which I have on the mantle in my house.

LAMB: Where are you in the six?

MINITER: I'm the oldest.

LAMB: You're the oldest. Author.

MINITER: And the fattest, I should say. Author, my father has written a book. It's called, oh boy, I feel terrible now that I'm forgetting. My parents, after all the other six of us had left, adopted an emotionally disturbed child. And he kept - my father kept a diary every day of the development of that child who was adopted at 14 - or taken into the house at 14. I think he was adopted at 15.

And so it's a year in the life of an emotionally disturbed child as he encounters a family, a real family, for the first time. And we've - there's so many people warehoused in institutions in this country. And, you know, human beings have just never known a family or any kind of real human relationship, just these cold transactional institutional relationships.

And so it's a story about this boy's transformation in the presence of my father and mother. It's a really moving book.

LAMB: Where is he now, the boy?

MINITER: He is - you know, I don't know for sure. I believe he's still in New York. He's a chef.

LAMB: Mine owner.

MINITER: Well, under New York law, if you have clean fill that is dug, you have to get a mine permit and you are a mine owner. So my father is very proud of the fact that he is a mine owner just because he sold off some clean fill from the back acreage behind the orchard.

LAMB: What about mom?

MINITER: My mother worked for Dean Witter, the man, met my father on Wall Street. She was - she had worked on the Goldwater campaign just before they met. And very determined, strong woman, started her own business in the teeth of the Carter recession, 1979, went and set up a card table between a washing machine and a dryer in a department store and started doing people's taxes. And now she does investments and she has a whole financial consulting business in Stonebridge, New York. It's called SCM Tax Prep but it does a lot of other things.

LAMB: As we said, we're going to jump all over the place, so for a moment we're going to talk some politics. And I go back to your blog - this is from April 8, 2008 - winners and losers of the Petraeus hearings. And you start out with Senator McCain failed to appear presidential.

MINITER: That's right. Well, I didn't see any command of the details. His speech was halting. He has that unfortunate eye blink which makes it hard for people to look at him straight on on the television screen.

And so much of what the modern presidency is about is being able to connect to people through television screens. Whether that's a good thing or bad thing, it's just - it's how life is.

I thought he also was down in the weeds in the details when really the bigger questions, the questions a president would ask, would be the broader questions. What about the - what are the long-term trends in Iraq? That - and there are long-term positive trends which McCain did not even address or explore. There's economic growth, for example, in Iraq. Per capita income has tripled since 2003 according to OECD.

We see the number of attacks on not just U.S. and allied forces but on Iraqis themselves have dropped by more than 30 percent. And then what about the structure of the insurgency that seems to be falling apart. So the numbers of al-Qaida have dropped from more than 20,000 in '05/'06 to less than 2,000 today. And they're very much hunted they no longer control territory.

So his inability to sort of lay out the big picture in a powerful presidential way, I think, was an opportunity missed by McCain.

LAMB: You say Senator Webb of Virginia sounded equally foolish. What are you referring to?

MINITER: Well, he actually had a very important question which is much of the success of the surge, the policy designed by General Petraeus, actually was achieved by the Anbar tribes, these Sunni Arab tribes some - I need to read (ph) some of those shakes (ph) out there - who just got tired of al-Qaida and rose up against al-Qaida and drove them from the Anbar province.

So it went from being the deadliest province in Iraq out of the 18 to the safest for American and allied forces. And the - you know, Petraeus has been getting credit for that. Webb says, "Well, wait a minute. The Sunni tribal rebellion in Anbar began before the surge began. So how can he possibly take credit for that?"

Very important question. But - and then he marred it, I thought, by going on about his son and think he knows this to be true that the rebellion started before the surge because his son, who's a rifleman in the Marines, had cycled through Iraq, which is very odd. It sort of opened a window into Webb in his conspiratorial mind that no one in power, a general, for example, is not someone to be trusted but someone at the very bottom who might have a, you know, small view of something, is someone you can trust.

And I think that's part of this modern corrosive skepticism against authority which is so destructive for our culture and our country. So I always thought it looked dumb. If he had - what he was saying was factually true why not just state it as a fact and assume the good will of listeners?

LAMB: Senator Clinton looked school marm-ish with her glasses on.

MINITER: That's right. Her glasses were perched at the end of her nose. She seemed kind of sleepy and prone to lecturing and asking a series of very small bore questions. Again, presidents look at the big picture. The details are best left to aides. You know, you're looking at the landscape. And she missed an opportunity.

I think she also missed an opportunity to apologize to General Petraeus. If she said that she, you know, accused him of fabricating the year before and now results have borne him out and she wanted to apologize for them. That would have, I think, brought her a lot of good will. And it was an opportunity missed.

LAMB: Barack Obama's name I did not see.

MINITER: Barack Obama was not at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. He was later at the Foreign Affairs Committee hearing.

LAMB: Did you watch it?

MINITER: I did but not at the time I wrote that blog.

LAMB: What would you say about him?

MINITER: Barack knows how to sound good but there was no real substance to what he had to say. He didn't ask any particularly hard questions. And there were hard questions asked by other senators. Senator Ben Nelson, for example, wondered why, if other countries are loaning Iraq money - all other countries are, in fact - why we're the only ones giving it to them. You know, maybe we should be a bit hard headed about it and make sure that what we give them to build infrastructure - which is a capital asset - we at least get paid back for.

LAMB: Any of these men/women can you support for president?

MINITER: Well, luckily as a journalist I don't have to endorse anybody. I like Bob Bartley at the Wall Street Journal's position which is that journalists - or editorial writers, anyway - should endorse principles, not people. I think it's a very unfortunate year. It's the first time in, I think in American history, we have three senators running. And I don't think senators make particularly good executive leaders.

I've interviewed two out of the three of these people. Hillary has not sat down with me. And it's been a while since I talked to McCain. I don't think any of them, frankly, would make good president.

LAMB: So what are you going to do?

MINITER: Maybe I'll vote present or write in Mickey Mouse. I don't know. Maybe I'll think about it some more and come up with a more reasonable response.

LAMB: Go back to your beginning. You were born where?

MINITER: I was born in Staten Island, New York.

LAMB: 1967.

MINITER: Yes.

LAMB: Went to high school where?

MINITER: In upstate New York at a Catholic high school, John A. Coleman High School.

LAMB: University, college?

MINITER: I went to Vassar College, more or less by accident. That's a whole long story.

LAMB: Why? When did it turn from being a women's college?

MINITER: I believe it changed in 1969, which is the source of a lot of jokes. But, you know, Vassar is more or less near by the Hudson Valley. And it was a great education. I learned a lot. And I met a lot of people who were very different from me, and that was a big education.

I had grown up around middle class people. Vassar was strange and interesting for me because I met people who were very wealthy. And it was a different way of looking at the world - and maybe not a very good way in many ways. But it was a real culture shock for me.

LAMB: At the end of one of the biographies I found on the Web - and I was all over there looking for anything I could find on you just to see what pops up - education, Miniter graduated from Vassar College with a degree in philosophy in 1990. His thesis was on the German classical liberal Wilhelm von Humboldt's, "The Limits of State Action," the work that inspired John Stuart Mill to write "On Liberty."

MINITER: That's right.

LAMB: Break that down.

MINITER: Well, I was reading "On Liberty," as many kids were required to in college, and I noticed - I always read the footnotes. And I noticed there was a footnote and it was a very interesting footnote on paraphrasing - now it's memory, it's been years. But he said the most interesting mind in Germany and the first person to get this right was Wilhelm von Humboldt. And that was it.

So I had to track down Humboldt and find out who he was. He was a Prussian aristocrat, but he was a liberal in the 19th century sense, a free-market conservative, I guess you'd say, in American terms. He didn't like class structure. He didn't like snobbishness. He believed powerfully in education.

But most importantly he wanted a very limited state, maybe even more so than Mill did. He felt free speech was very important, but he thought that commerce, business is a form of free speech. So just as it's wrong to stand over Picasso's shoulder and say, "You know, I think you should put a little more blue in the canvas here," it's wrong to get involved in the nitty gritty business decisions and tell people how to put together their works of art which happen to be profitable businesses.

He also thought the main purpose of the state, which is an argument you never hear of, is the full development of the individual. And he thought that required hard work, a variety of situations. In other words, people living in lots of different ways. So the individual has a wide number of choices.

But most importantly that the individual cannot be buffeted from the consequences of his mistakes or his triumphs so that, you know, you immediately get the positive or negative feedback of your actions based on what you do.

And so, you know, for a 19-year-old Reaganite, this was very exciting, intellectual stuff. And it was fascinating. We're ultimately in aesthetic argument for liberty which we don't see any people make ethical arguments. People make political and pragmatic arguments. But an aesthetic argument, idea that the only way the individual can fully develop is if he's free. And what freedom means is he can't be helped - at least helped too much - by the state, let alone stopped by the state, was fascinating to me.

And so that was my thesis. I wrote about that.

LAMB: Did you get an A?

MINITER: I don't remember. Probably not given the - my poor writing ability and the left wing tendencies of my professors.

LAMB: John Stuart Mill and "On Liberty," you see it pop up all the time. What's it about and do you agree with it?

MINITER: Largely I do. Mill was a fantastic writer. He was a 19th century Englishman who believed that people should be free to say what they like in print and in public. And he thinks that - and the argument at the time is what if people say things that are wrong? And Mill's response was that you get a livelier impression of the truth when it collides with error than when it's left alone. I think that's almost word for word.

So "On Liberty" is an essay, depending on who prints it, about 80 to 90 pages, in the spirit of defense of free speech, individualism, and a free society in general. And I think more people should read it.

LAMB: There's another connection here on people - writers and all. Have you ever been married?

MINITER: No. I've never been married.

LAMB: I discovered on the Web that you're getting married.

MINITER: Yes.

LAMB: But it's interesting how far you can take this. You can find and you can go through the process and even get the pictures of the two of you together celebrating life, talking about the marriage and all. Heather Smith, she has a blog.

MINITER: I'm sure she does.

LAMB: And I guess - I guess I would ask you this, are you aware of how public you can be?

MINITER: I don't read her blog mostly because I wouldn't read her diary, either. So I don't know what she has on there. But yes, we were engaged to be married. And she's - she does take a lot of pictures. She has a very - I think those of pictures have been posted because other people have e-mailed me about it. There's a picture of me, I went to a conference in Cairo. I went to see the National Democratic Alliance, Mubarak, the governing party in Egypt. And they're trying to live up to their name and be democratic.

And a day or two after that, since we were still in Cairo and she had never been there before, I took her to see the pyramids. So there's a ridiculous picture of me in a linen suit smoking a cigar riding a camel with the pyramids in the background. And I've gotten a number of e-mails about that.

I certainly didn't post that ridiculous picture, but I think she did.

LAMB: Does that describe you, though, that picture? I've seen it. Our audience is seeing it now.

MINITER: I'm sure they have. Well, I guess I have an unlimited capacity for ridiculous. I mean, look at this suit I'm wearing.

LAMB: Up at the top of her blog is this little box with a caricature of President Bush. And it says atop, "Saving Your Ass," and at the bottom, "Like It Or Not." Have you ever talked to her about that?

MINITER: No. I have no idea what she's doing with that.

LAMB: You've never seen this blog?

MINITER: I wouldn't - like I said, I wouldn't read her diary and I don't read her blog for the same reason. I assume that this was - these were private notes to her and a collection of her friends on MySpace. I didn't realize �

LAMB: No. This was - I did not get to this through MySpace. Just keep - you can type in Richard Miniter and Heather Smith and this comes up.

MINITER: Wow.

LAMB: But the other thing I wanted, though, to ask you about because she does list books, obviously books that she's very much in favor of. And I just - there's a lot of names here. Russell Kirk.

MINITER: Right.

LAMB: Joseph Campbell, Andrew Roberts, G. Gordon Liddy, Whittaker Chambers, Peter Hitchens, Eric Shawn on the U.N., Milton Friedman: Free to Choose, Tear Down This Wall: Ronald Reagan, Richard Miniter: Disinformation.

MINITER: Well, I'm glad she's plugging one of my books.

LAMB: Thomas Merton: No Man is an Island, St. Augustine: City of God. Those names, when you hear them, are you on - you two in sync?

MINITER: Largely, yes.

LAMB: What does it define you as, though? Give us an overview of what you think beyond this.

MINITER: I don't agree with Russell Kirk on everything but I find him a fascinating person to read. I met him about 15 years ago. And at the time I was much more libertarian than I am now and I asked him - it was during the first Gulf War - whether he stood by what he said about being opposed as he was in the '60s to the warfare/welfare statement. That was his phrase.

And then he said that he was. And it was interesting listening to his answer. Kirk is - Kirk's the conservative mind is not necessarily a polemic. It is a tour through history and very elegantly done. And it gives you great insights into a number of thinkers. And he tries to argue that many of them were conservatives, conservatives before their time.

But I think, you know, I think everyone should read "Conservative Mind," or "Witness," for that matter, by Whittaker Chambers, very well written and psychologically very honest, even - the author's even hard on himself in a number of places.

The only other writing I've seen similar to that is (INAUDIBLE). I mean, it's daring and it's honesty. And usually when someone is daring in their honest, it's a fraud, like Mersaud (ph). But no, this is the real thing. You can tell it when you read it.

LAMB: By the way, are you working on a book right now?

MINITER: I am.

LAMB: About?

MINITER: I am writing about the bloodiest battle in the history of the U.S. Navy Seals which was fought in Afghanistan in June/July of 2005.

LAMB: Why are you writing about this?

MINITER: I want to bring attention to men who sacrificed their lives for this country. I think some of these guys - one of them is one that won a congressional metal of honor. Three out of the four died. I think at least Danny Deets who was another one of the fallen deserves congressional metal of honor.

And I think that's the future of the war on terror. It's going to be increasingly fought by Special Forces. So I think really since they're fighting in our name, have a moral obligation to understand who these guys are, what their lives are like, what is it like, you know, fighting in these environments, what they're doing for us, what the sacrifice in the people at home. You know, I've interviewed a number of widows and mothers and fathers who have lost their sons. What it's like to live with that kind of loss, what that sacrifice means for the country.

I just - it's also a chance as a writer to write a really powerful narrative.

LAMB: When did you start it?

MINITER: I've been at it now for more than two years, and it may be another year before I get to the end basically because the Seals don't usually allow people to write about them. So it's been a very halting, highly negotiated process.

LAMB: Who do you have to negotiate with?

MINITER: Well, first of all, the individual Seals themselves are more important than with Navy special warfare. I mean, this is a very secretive bunch. They don't like to have their names in the paper. Tracking them down was hard work. I mean what I did is since their names don't typically appear in news stories, I looked at funerals. And photo captions actually are reveal names that news stories don't because the photographer just says, "I'm sorry. I just took a picture and we couldn't get the spelling of all your names."

So I started looking at local newspapers near where seals would be buried in Hawaii, San Diego, and elsewhere, and looked at photo captions which are not usually available on Nexus. You usually have to go to the library and do that.

So I had names and then I started calling and tracking down people and family members. A lot of detective work.

LAMB: Where have you traveled to get this story?

MINITER: I traveled to Iraq. Some of them were there. I traveled all throughout the United States, northern California, southern California, Colorado - it's where the Deets family lives in Littleton, New York, and interviewed a great number of people. And I'm planning to go to Afghanistan in June.

LAMB: Who publishes your books?

MINITER: Well, these - the books you have there are published by Regnery. My new publisher is Simon and Schuster.

LAMB: Let's go back to 2003. You had one on '03, '04, '05.

MINITER: Yes, I think that's right.

LAMB: "Losing bin Laden" is about what?

MINITER: That's a history of al-Qaida and Clinton. Basically the big question for me on 9/11 - where my brother, Brendan, almost died, by the way - was how do we get here? How did it happen that we were suddenly attacked? There must have been something that came before. And what did we know about al-Qaida and when did we know it?

And virtually all the sources in that book are from the higher ends of the Clinton administration. And many people see it as a criticism but it's - I think it's really just a history. If you want to know what we knew about al-Qaida in the Clinton years and what we could have done to stop it, this is your best bet.

LAMB: That was 2003.

MINITER: That's right.

LAMB: How'd it do? It was a New York Times bestseller.

MINITER: It was a bestseller. Yes. I think it got as high as number seven on the list.

LAMB: How close did we come to catching bin Laden?

MINITER: Very close a number of times, and killing him a number of times.

LAMB: How close did you come to where he is?

MINITER: Oh �

LAMB: Physically. Have you ever been to Afghanistan?

MINITER: I've never met bin Laden. And if I knew where he was I'd go collect $50 million. I've talked to people close to him, though. I interviewed his emom in Khartoum, Sudan. I interviewed his long-term roommate. Basically when he wasn't with his family bin Laden would share a large room with a number of his men, no love of material comfort.

The most interesting interview I think I had with bin - regarding people who knew bin Laden was with his gardener who went to his house in Khartoum. I noticed there was a willow tree, and willows, as you know, drink an enormous amount of water and they're perched on the edge of the Sahara Desert. Why would a man plant a willow tree in his yard knowing the cost in water?

So I tracked on the gardener who lives in Khartoum and, through an interpreter, we spoke. And the gardener said he explained patiently to bin Laden how much water a willow would consume but the man wanted it to simply show his neighbors he could afford the water bill. I thought that was interesting. It's a side of bin Laden we don't see, this egotistical, arrogant side, this very Saudi upper class side.

And I interviewed the son of the head of the intelligence service in Sudan, the Mukabarat who used to go to horse races with bin Laden. And bin Laden is a Salafi, which is a very strict interpretation of Islam. Well, the Sudan's a former British colony. They were, I think, January 1, 1956, was when they got their independence. But still there's a number of British influence there, including the horse races where they blow the trumpet at the beginning or the horn.

And bin Laden would always put his fingers in his ears to block the sound of the trumpet, not because he didn't like the trumpet, because in his version of Islam, all musical instruments are forbidden. And then he would watch the horse race and the next one he'd be covering his ears again.

And his friend, who I interviewed, the son of the head of the Mukabarat is a strong Islamist but just thought bin Laden was ridiculous.

LAMB: By the way, how did your brother almost die, Brendan?

MINITER: Brendan was working at the Wall Street Journal at the time on 9/11. And he lived, at the time, just across the river in Brooklyn Heights. He'd take the 8:30 subway which would put him at number five World Trade at 8:45 in the morning and he'd begin the walk up to the street level and run across the street to the Wall Street Journal. And the first plane hit, I think, at 8:48.

And I was working for the Wall Street Journal at the time in Brussels. And I desperately tried to get in touch with him. He was incommunicado for much of the day. Of course, all the phones were locked up that day. And I knew the timing. I talked to him every day. We were very close. And he was almost certainly in that building. And I had hoped that he'd gotten out but I couldn't reach him. Nobody in the family had been able to reach him.

And it turned out he was just saved by blind luck and a certain degree of fastidiousness. He was standing on a subway platform waiting for the 8:30, and just as he was about to board it, he looks down at his crisp, white shirt and sees a few spots of blood. He cut himself shaving.

So he goes home and changes his shirt and gets on the 8:45 train. And that train stops at Christopher Street, never, of course, went to World Trade because of the first - the plane had already hit. And he saw it all. He saw it covered in the grimy white dust, saw the people jump and saw the towers fall.

LAMB: How long did you work for the Wall Street Journal?

MINITER: A couple years. I left within a month of the 9/11 attacks.

LAMB: Let's briefly go over your own work history. When you left school in '90 �

MINITER: That's right.

LAMB: � where'd you go?

MINITER: Well, before I left school I had worked for Dow Jones newswires and for a local paper, the Poughkeepsie Journal, which is now a Gannett paper. And I'd always wanted to go into journalism.

I got hired by the American Spectator, by Bob Tyrrell, and spent summer working there. And as that sort of fellowship money was running out, I looked around for something, landed with competitive enterprises because I'd get to write about environmental policy, which at the time interested me a lot. And Fred Smith, who ran the operation, was very happy to have a lot of young people around to research things and write them and get them published. And so I got to write a lot. It was a great education for me learning how Washington works.

Then I went to produce a PBS television series called "Technopolitics: The Politics of Science, Technology" �

LAMB: Is that Jim Glassman's show?

MINITER: It became Jim Glassman's show. When it started out it was hosted by a guy named Tim White. It was produced - the executive producer was Neal Freeman, I think you know. And I don't think the show's on the air anymore but after two years I left that to join, "Insight," which was then the Sunday magazine of the "Washington Times." And that was a great opportunity.

LAMB: How long were you there?

MINITER: A couple years. But I got to report from all around the country. And they really believed in investigative reporting. And it was a real chance to develop those skills.

Then, I mean, an ill-fated move to California and ended up launching a radio show which was distributed to public radio stations nationwide called "Enterprising Women." This was the reason my interest had shifted from the environment to business.

And I was kind of interested in the whole "Forbes" magazine approach to business journalism, really looking at the nuts and bolts of the business and how it worked the way a mechanic would look at an engine. And I decided I'd do this on radio because no one was doing it.

It turned out that I was a little ahead of my time, that 1996 was not a great time to people who weren't that interested in business news on public radio. So that ultimately was a flop. And I started writing for Reader's Digest magazine. And I started doing a lot of traveling to Third World hot zones, Sudan, Uganda, Laos, Cambodia, I went inside Burma with the rebels a number of times, wrote about it for the Reader's Digest and for the Atlantic monthly, cover story for Atlantic monthly called "The False Promise of Slave Redemption," where buying people out of slavery doesn't make sense in Sudan.

LAMB: All through this process, is it hard to make enough money to live?

MINITER: Yes. It's tough. It's really tough as a freelance writer, especially when you don't have anything - any kind of main behind you. You know, you're just you. You're a shingle out there.

LAMB: In 2004 you wrote this book.

MINITER: "Shadow War," that's right.

LAMB: What's it about?

MINITER: That was a bestseller as well. That had basically a reported argument that basically we are winning the war on terror. I argued that we killed or captured more than 5,000 al-Qaida operatives in 102 different countries since the 9/11 attacks.

But it's also a very honest book. In that book I look at some of the intelligence failures that hadn't been reported. And I was basically trying to open a window for an honest discussion about the war on terror, not an ideological one.

LAMB: One of the things I pulled out of here was a fellow named - is it Sayid (ph) or Sayid (ph) from Khartoum in Sudan? You had an exclusive interview?

MINITER: Oh yes, the deputy director of Mukabarat. Yes. Sayid (ph), yes.

LAMB: Tell us about him.

MINITER: Sayid (ph) is an interesting guy. He - it's even interesting how he got to his position because his family has an Egyptian background and the Sudanese and Egyptians have distrusted each other for not just centuries but dozens of centuries.

But he was one of the principal deputies of the Mukabarat, their CIA. And his job was to work with the CIA station chief who some of the Sudanese did not trust and try to share information relating to al-Qaida. After 9/11 a number of our countries, Algeria and Sudan especially, wanted to reach out to the United States and show that they could be helpful in hopes of reviving their relationships with the United States.

LAMB: Why would he talk to you?

MINITER: Well, for a couple of reasons. One, I've been going to Sudan for a number of years. So I developed great sources there. And they knew that I wasn't going to spin things. I was going to report them as I was told them. Of course I was going to double check them. That's one reason.

Another is that I knew someone who was very close to him named David Hoyle (ph) who had worked for the Sudanese for many years, a Rhodesian guy. And he knew - Hoyle (ph) trusted me to tell the story and Sayid (ph) trusted Hoyle (ph). Sayid (ph) knew me for a number of years as well.

And also really there were very few people trying to talk to them, especially Americans.

LAMB: You go - the next page here where it starts, it says that Sudan's many offers to help the U.S. fight terrorism were spurned by the Clinton administration. In February 1996 and again in March 1996, senior Sudanese officials in Khartoum and Washington offered to arrest bin Laden and turn him over.

MINITER: That's right.

LAMB: The Clinton administration debated a proposal and ultimately turned it down. Why?

MINITER: Why did they turn it down?

LAMB: Yes.

MINITER: There were a bunch of reasons. One is they were concerned that if they brought bin Laden into a U.S. court and he was acquitted that they'd have egg on their face. There's a big debate between the political parties about how to deal with terrorism that pre-dates 9/11.

And the Clintonian view, if you will, is that terrorists are essentially criminals so they deserve to have - they should be tried in U.S. courts with proper judges and have a full panoply of civil rights. The problem is it's very hard to gather the kind of high level sort of CSI type level of evidence in other countries against terrorists, especially in a, you know, relatively primitive country like Sudan which doesn't have DNA analysis and collection, for example.

So it's hard to make the case in a court of law, and especially in 1996, that bin Laden was a dangerous guy. And they were afraid they'd lose. That's one reason.

Another reason is that they were afraid that - remember 1996 was a presidential year - that Bob Dole, who was the Republican contender for that year, would lambaste them saying that they're working with terrorists. In 1993 the State Department had said that - had ruled that Sudan was an official state sponsor of terrorism.

So negotiating with them for the capture of bin Laden would have been working with terrorists. And that doesn't play well, either.

LAMB: How much of this war was fought around politics?

MINITER: The war on terror?

LAMB: Yes.

MINITER: I think it's inherently political. I think that the right and left see the war differently because of their different histories. The right sees it simply as an enemy force that must be combated using all means, information warfare, actual warfare, propaganda, and so on.

But the left, at its extremes, is tied to violence. We see that virtually all the modern terrorist groups - the western European, the South American, the North American terrorist groups in the '60s and '70s, people like Obama's old friend, Mr. Ayers, who bombed the Pentagon - they're extreme left wing movements. I'm not talking about your ordinary liberal or ordinary leftist, you know, people who subscribe to the nation, they're not terrorists. I'm not saying that at all.

But at the fringe you have these people who bomb things, who kill people, especially in the '60s and '70s. And so the intellectual history of the left is different. And there's sympathy and they're willing to tolerate violent political acts or willing to see violent acts as political acts, makes them a lot more conflicted in fighting the war on terror than the right who sees it as a straight-up good-guy/bad-guy situation.

LAMB: You mentioned Bill Ayers. And the conservative talk shows talk about Bill Ayers and Osama bin Laden all the time. Why?

MINITER: Well, there is a connection. I mean, Ayers was a terrorist, carried out bombings of the Pentagon �

LAMB: When?

MINITER: � police headquarters. I'm not an expert on Ayers. I think we're talking about the early 1970s. But at the time there were a number of American terrorist groups. The Weather Underground, for example, you had the - or a little bit later than that, the Patti Hurst gangs, Symbionese Liberation Army and so on.

You had all these extreme ideologies justifying violent action against ordinary people. And I think in a liberal society, in a free society, you cannot tolerate violence of any kind. You can't let the vigilante take law into his own hands. You can't let an ideology drive a bunch of people to arm themselves with automatic weapons and make bombs in the basements and attack their neighbors.

LAMB: Why do you him a friend of Obama's, Senator Obama?

MINITER: Oh, because he is. And because Obama has told us that they're friends. Those are his words that early campaign meetings for his senate campaign occurred in Ayers' living room. That's the way Obama's characterized it and I think Obama's telling the truth.

LAMB: In your second book, in the epilogue you wrote neither the president nor the press has managed to make the war on terror into a comprehensive narrative. Instead it is presented to the public as a string of shootouts and arrests with no sense of the big picture.

MINITER: Yes, I think it's all episodes and no story. And I think that's why the war on terror seems so incomprehensible to people. One of the things that Ronald Reagan, and for that matter FDR and Lincoln, were very good at is telling the story. This is why we're fighting. This is what we're doing. This is why we're justified. This is why we think we're going to win. This is why morally we should win.

We don't get that. The news coverage is very fragmented. If we hear about a bomb goes off here and arrest is made there, there's no connection to a larger picture. There's no context. And it would be as if sports reporting was - I was - I pick a pro team and occasionally tell you about a score of a game. I'll tell you what the game is or where it was played or why, what relationship it was to other games being played, you wouldn't - sports wouldn't make any sense.

Well, if you applied it to the war on terror, it doesn't make any sense to people. And I think a lot of the skepticism, a lot of the suspicion about the war on terror, is because the lack of a narrative. And I blame the president for that, frankly. I know - I talked to Bill McGurn who was then his chief speechwriter. And Bill said, very directly that he was told by the president that he doesn't - the president doesn't like anecdotes, stories about real people.

Well, stories about real people are how much people understand how the world works. You ask what kind of a guy is Joe? And we say, well, let me tell you about Joe. And you tell a story about his generosity or his sloppiness or his hard work or what have you and then you have a picture who this fellow is.

If you just stick to bland generalizations, toothless characterizations, people just - this sounds airy. And people I think distrust in the airy. They want the concrete, the hard, the direct, simple. And I'm not saying they're simplifying things, but I think a president, especially when we're at war, has a moral obligation to give you a very good understanding of how it's going and why the sacrifice is worth it. And I think the president's failed to do that.

LAMB: If you had to pick one of the characters you've met in your life and written about, who would you pick and why, as someone you found interesting.

MINITER: I find everyone I talk to interesting.

LAMB: But pick one that - anybody that you've written about and tell us why you thought he or she was interesting.

MINITER: Oh boy. Well, you know, I spent some time with a guy from Koran (ph) University in Khartoum. It's funny how all my stories come back to Sudan, but this guy had lived with bin Laden for years. And it was interesting talking to him and getting the perspective of a radical Islamist, you know, somebody who thinks it's OK to kill civilians.

I asked him why. And he said, "Well, the Koran says that at the end of time everyone will be judged by Allah and given one last chance to convert to Islam." So all we're doing is speeding up the time table because if they die and they blink for one second and they're at the end of time and they have that same choice that they would have if we didn't kill them. So we're really doing them no harm.

Now, of course that's a - I think its nonsense. And it's evil nonsense. It justifies the killing of people. But it was interesting hearing the justification. And it was said to me in a very calm matter of fact tone of voice. This man had earlier poured me a cup of tea. He didn't mean it an unfriendly way.

And that ideological remove from real life - my grandmother would say it's the kind of idiot that's so crazy that only an educated person could believe it. That was fascinating to me.

LAMB: Why do you mention your grandmother? What was she like?

MINITER: My grandmother Lea Letobin (ph), was an enormous influence on me. She had a houseful of books, she and my grandfather. And so as a kid, I was able to read really interesting things at a very young age. She didn't talk to children as children but as little adults. So you could learn a lot, and she was always good for a conversation. And full of a lot of wisdom. I learned a lot from her.

LAMB: Where'd she live?

MINITER: She lived about a mile down the road from me and my parents on a mountain upstate New York.

LAMB: You mom's mom?

MINITER: My mom's mom.

LAMB: The third book, the most recent, "Disinformation: Twenty-two Media Myths That Undermine the War on Terror," came out in 2005.

MINITER: Right.

LAMB: One of the myths, you say, is about the suitcase nuclear bomb that will go off here in the United States. Just in the last - this week, I don't have the quote in front of me, somebody of some note testified before Congress and said, "In the next 10, 20 years, there will be a suitcase bomb, 10 ton - 10 kiloton bomb expected to go off near the White House and it'll wipe out 100,000 people."

MINITER: Well �

LAMB: You say it's a myth.

MINITER: � I think it is a myth. And my reporting shows it to be a myth. Now let's be clear what I mean. Were there ever portable atomic devices developed by the United States and by the Soviet Union? Yes. Most of these man portable devices don't fit in a suitcase. They fit in a number of trunks and they weigh hundreds and hundreds of pounds. So they're not exactly carry-on language.

But also you have to remember that these small atomic devices are very difficult to maintain. You have to regularly change given that the way the heat caused by the radioactive element changes the metal around it.

But more importantly, in 1991 the United States signed a treaty with Russia to destroy this entire class of weapons. And I tracked down a woman named Rose Gottemoeller who is the Department of Energy person sent to Moscow to supervise the destruction of all these weapons. And she says she still gets calls about the suitcase nuke from time to time. But she watched every single one to be counted and destroyed. Every record in the Russian archive confirms this.

Meanwhile the Russians sent an official here to watch us destroy these things. They were never successfully deployed by either side. And the idea of a small arms atomic weapon was something that was a fascination in the late '50s through late '60s. But by the 1970s it had been pretty much ruled out.

So these weapons - even if any survived - do not exist.

LAMB: Can't you make a new one?

MINITER: You could but it takes an enormous - people say it's - anybody can go on the Internet and get the plans to make an atomic bomb. That may be true. I haven't gone looking so I don't know for sure.

But the material needed, as the Iranians are finding out right now, to make an atomic bomb require vast industrial infrastructure, which the Iranians thankfully don't have and most people don't have. So if you're going to get, you know, high - you know, make a high speed centrifuge, for example, to increase the potency of the uranium, if you're going to go that way. You know, just constructing such things takes an enormous investment. So it's not as easy to do.

It might be easier as a theoretical - a matter of theoretical physics but as an engineering and practical perspective, it's very hard.

LAMB: One of the things you sense from time to time is that people start off, especially with the war, with a certain political point of view.

MINITER: That's right.

LAMB: Sort of republican - this is shorthand, you can correct us - for the war, liberal democratic against the war. And then you see journalists on both sides. I wonder if you start out feeling if this war is right, you come up with these 22 myths that fit your initial feelings about the war. And I should start with that by asking what is your attitude about this war?

MINITER: Well, actually this book is partly inspired by C-SPAN.

LAMB: Really?

MINITER: Yes. I was sitting in for an interview in '04. I think it was Washington Journal. And I forget who the interviewer was. It was a woman. And she asked me - I think it was about the suitcase nukes. No, no. I'm sorry. She asked me about bin Laden being trained by the CIA. She treated it as a fact.

And then I was sort of reflecting on all these questions I'd gotten in television and radio interviews from people who were very certain of things that just weren't true. And so I think both the left and the right had used various myths, various misunderstandings, the idea that bin Laden has kidney problems. The idea that bin Laden himself was a rich man. The idea that the CIA trained bin Laden. The idea that poverty causes terrorism.

LAMB: That Halliburton made a fortune.

MINITER: That's right. In fact, they tried to sell Kellogg Brown that wrote the - division that had the Iraqi contract, because they were unhappy with the returns they were getting. And the reason is because the government, these contracts say precisely how much of a profit they're entitled to, which I believe - it's been a while since I looked at this so I could be wrong - but I believe the number is six percent, which is not a large profit margin, you know, compared to other industries.

LAMB: Your twenty-second myth is the U.S. border with Mexico is the most likely place for al-Qaida terrorists to sneak into the homeland.

MINITER: That's right. Well, I looked at this extensively. I talked to people at Homeland Security, at the FBI, and many other places, border patrol. The bigger threat for al-Qaida is actually from Canada. And there's a lot of reasons for this, one of which is and Canada has three unique advantages for al-Qaida. It has a large Arab immigrant population, so Arabs from Middle East could blend in. It has a very generous - one of the world's most generous - welfare states.

So we know from captured al-Qaida manuals what their operators are urged to do is to get on welfare wherever possible. That way they don't have to work. They can work full-time on terrorism.

And thirdly we know that that border is very porous, on one of the longest stretches of unguarded land in the world, and, in fact, impossible to patrol. Where we have a lot of resources deployed on the Mexican border, Mexicans do not have a welfare state and there are not large immigrant populations to blend into.

Add to that the Canadians seem to have hampered their counter terrorism activity with a lot of political correctness, which is not the case in Mexico.

LAMB: If one of the candidates calls you in and said, "Mr. Miniter, I really like what you've been saying and writing about. I want you to tell me what to do about the war from here on out."

MINITER: I think my first reaction is he must have called me by mistake.

LAMB: But if somebody - or Mrs. Clinton called you and sitting there and said, "Tell me what to do." What would you tell them what to do from here on out?

MINITER: Well, first of all I would say provide understandable narrative. Explain the war to the country in a way the country understands. Honor the heroes, the people who fought in this country's name and died or lost a leg or an arm. Explain why it's important that we're fighting these people. Who it is we're fighting. This is not a war against Islam. This is a war against a sect, a radical fringe group, that might be 20,000 to 25,000 people worldwide. I'm not talking about a very large group.

Imminently defeatable. And you can explain why the war is winnable. We also have to realize that one of the most effective ways to fight terrorism - yes, it's important that we're killing them, it's important that we're capturing them, disrupting their financial networks - these are all extremely valuable. Targeting their training camps, targeting their recruitment efforts.

But we need to go deeper. We need to rage an ideological war the same way we raged a war against communism. Ultimately I think the Arab world is debating modernization itself and which path they should go down. And obviously you want them to go down the path that leads toward us for free markets, democracy, freedom, peace, tolerance of religious minorities like Christians and Jews and so on.

This is a great debate. It's not going to be ended in the next four to eight years, but it's important we participate and provide the ideological tools for our friends near our border to favor us. And that's something that's sadly lacking. This used to be no ideological or informational warfare thinking at all.

LAMB: How long can we keep spending whatever it is, $12 billion, $14 billion a month on the situation in Iraq?

MINITER: Forever. The United States is six percent of the world's population, more than 35 percent of the world's economy. You know, I mean, there are - we spend roughly $1.2 trillion out of $12 trillion of our money on government services.

And there's a great number of things the government does which it could stop doing and no one would notice, for example, subsidizing ads for tourism in other countries, building roads and national forests for logging companies.

So there are a lot of other things you'd want to cut first. But that said, I think, you know, I think some of the democratic opposition to the war, and senate especially, is very sensible. If the Iraqis have the second largest pool of oil in the world, they should be deploying those revenues to finance their own reconstruction and development, not depending on us.

LAMB: Richard Miniter, "Losing bin Laden," the book in 2003, "Shadow War," 2004, "Disinformation," 2005, the blog, RichardMiniter.com?

MINITER: That's right. Yes.

LAMB: Your next book on the Navy Seals is what year?

MINITER: Hopefully next year. It's called, "Some Gave All."

LAMB: Thanks for joining us.

MINITER: Thanks, Brian.

END


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