Jeh Johnson

In my view, targeted lethal force is at its least controversial when it is on its strongest, most traditional legal foundation. The essential mission of the U.S. military is to capture or kill an enemy. Armies have been doing this for thousands of years. As part of a congressionally authorized armed conflict, the foundation is even stronger.

What got me motivated was my dad's idea that I go to Morehouse College in Atlanta. It's an all-black, all-male school. Martin Luther King went there. The most famous person in my class was Spike Lee. And I really caught fire. I was so inspired by the people around me that I went from C's and D's to straight A's by the time I left.

ISIL, AQ, now have the ability to literally reach into our homeland through social media, through the Internet, to recruit and inspire. It makes for a more complicated homeland security environment. And so it requires a whole of government approach, not just military and law enforcement, homeland security, aviation security, and the like.

That was the first major social sciences conference at which social scientists from all cultures wanted to reach a consensus on whether we can continue to pursue a national course in the social sciences or whether we need a cosmopolitan path that also connects us in a new way.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.

Though builders may build, in the main they follow the plans of architects. Teachers teach, but they must have a text. Politicians govern, but only upon the flow of commentary that raises them up or casts them down.