obviously the pentagon is trying to manage the situation as best as they can. but i think all of us should reflect on why exactly are we doing this. why are we doing this? i'm going to go back at this. i've asked my team to review everything that's currently being done in guantanamo. everything that we can do administratively and i'm going to reengage with congress to try to make the case that this is not something that is in the best interests of the american people. >> reporter: likewise, the president said it's not in the country's best interest to keep the across-the-board spending cuts known as the sequester. >> it slowed our growth. it's resulting in people being thrown out of work. and it's hurting folks all across the country. and the fact that congress responded to the short-term problem of flight delays by giving us the option of shipping monies that's designed to repair and improve airports over the long-term to fix the short-term problem, well that's not a solution. >> reporter: and that was a recurring theme, mr. obama arguing that the failure to a

the pentagon has said it would take as many as 70,000 troops on the ground to be able to get some certainty about control those weapons. we're talking about another full-scale war. >> brown: kori schake, feel free to respond to that, but i want to put it in the context of all what the congressman we heard in our setup talk about the american financial, the lack of an appetite, i think, of more intervention after 10 years. >> absolute, the american public is war weary, and they should be war weary. the problem is the syrian government is taking advantage of that war weariness to do truly atroacials, inhuman things. it's a war crime to use chemical weapons. right. so they are capitalizing on our desire, as president said, for the tide of war to be receding. unfortunately, we don't get to choose whether the tide of war is receding. the government of bashar al-assad is making that choice and the choice they have made is its to kill 80,000 of their own citizens, and the longer that we let this civil war burb on, the greater the likelihood that the rebels will take assistance wherever they can ge

>> well, there are a number of options that the pentagon has prepared for the president. the administration today has made it clear that whatever they decide to do they want to do it in concert with other countries so it's unlikely to be unilateral. but the types of things that you hear about range from air strikes on syrian air kraflt-- aircraft and artillery, so they run able to deliver these weapons. commando raids into the country to try to secure chemical weapons stockpiles. so these are the types of things you hear about. what you really don't hear about and what even people like senator mccain would not be advising would be any sort of a ground invasion of the country. there's no appetite for having american boots on the ground. so that's almost certain not to be an outcome of this. >> brief final word from you, amyÑi smithson, how challenging is it to secure sites like this, in essentially a hostile country at war. >> tremendously challenging. we're probably talking about weapons that are man portable, if they are loaded already, if the agents are loaded already

and rumsfeld was furious at the pentagon he inherited and wasn't equipped to fight this kind of war. so he was trying to push them more and more into intelligence gathering, man hunting in some now famous memos that rumsfeld wrote that sort of expressed his concern about these things and what we saw with the c.i.a. was weak after 9/11. president bush gave the c.i.a. lethal authority to capture and kill al qaeda leaders which it hadn't had for decades so they become much more into the killing business and the military business. >> warner: now when did the c.i.a. -- they've started out capturing and interrogating terror suspects in these secret sites. when did they shift their focus and embrace the policy of targeting and killing them instead? >> there's a critical moment that i write about in 2004 when the c.i.a. inspector general writes a pretty devastating report about the abuses in the c.i.a. prison and really it had this effect not only within the agency but in the bush administration and ultimately congress, as we all know, the american public started learning the details. the fi

the pentagon has a different policy. what they say is that they've developed these force-feeding protocols from the federal bureau of prisons years ago when they were first confronted with the hunger strikes. so there are international human rights and medical organizations that say what the u.s. is doing down there, feeding them twice a day with these tubes tethered up their nose, down the back of their throat and into their stomach, twice a day, there are organizations that say this is wrong, that they should be allowed to choose to starve to death if they want to. >> suarez: recently there was a raid in the prison itself. what were the conditions that prevailed in the so-called communal areas? what had the authorities at guantanamo allowed life to become for many of the detainees? >> this raid took place in the show case communal prison, camp 6. this was a place where... which was closest to a p.o.w. camp than anything that had ever existed at guantanamo. detainees lived in groups of 10, 12, maybe 18 at a time. they a