The constitutionality of the War in Libya is a secondary issue, Cain told me. He expressed uncertainty about whether we should still be in Afghanistan, said he'd be comfortable with intelligence agencies spying on Americans without a warrant for the purposes of counter-terrorism, and insisted that a warrant should be necessary for police to enter an American's home. Cain expressed support for the PATRIOT Act, and suggested that if 90 percent of a counter-terrorism law is sound we shouldn't worry about the other ten percent. Finally, he said that the TSA lacks common sense, and that harsher laws may be the answer in the war on drugs.

Those are just the highlights, of course. A very lightly edited transcript is below.

Do you have thoughts on the War Powers Act and whether President Obama is permitted to be in Libya right now?

My thoughts are less on whether he has the authority to do what he's doing than why is he doing what he's doing. Clarity of what he's doing and why is more important than whether or not he has the authority to do it. I call it foggy foreign policy. It's not real clear where we're headed with that situation. We should have had a very clear plan before we got involved. So now the issue of does he have the power to commit resources at this point - to me that is not as big a question as why are we there, whose side are we on, what do we expect to gain out of this, and how long is it going to take? The bigger question is what I'm most concerned about.

If you were elected president, what would you need before committing American troops abroad? Would you feel like you had to go to Congress or that you could order it on your own authority?

First, I would make sure that the mission is clear. Secondly, I would make sure that we had the resources to accomplish the mission. If we had the resources to accomplish the mission, I would want to know, how long is it going to take? Or give me some rough range of how long it's going to take. And yes, once I define all of those factors, I have no problem going to Congress and respecting the Constitution in terms of what we need to do. The biggest issue here is, what's the mission. How does it best serve the interests of the United States of America? That's what I want to know before I commit our men and women in uniform. And the third thing is if we cannot win what is our exit strategy? I'm not real sure what we're doing in Libya, or what the exit strategy is for Afghanistan. That is why I categorize this as foggy foreign policy.

Do you think we still belong in Afghanistan?

I can't answer, because I don't have all the information that the president has in making that determination. Whether or not we should have gone in the first place? That's also is a fuzzy kind of thing. What's the mission in Afghanistan? Based on news reports, going to Afghanistan was supposed to be to help them fight off the Taliban. i think that's the mission, but I'm not sure. If that's the mission the next question is can we win in this fight against the Taliban. I don't know the answer to that. All I know is if you look back in history Russia tried the same thing. And they finally gave up.