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| Speaker: | Robert Bonner, commissioner of the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, Department of Homeland Security |
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| Presider: | Stephen E. Flynn, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow in national security studies, Council on Foreign Relations; author, “America the Vulnerable: How Our Government is Failing to Protect Us from Terrorism” |
January 11, 2005
Council on Foreign Relations
New York, NY
Note: click here for the PowerPoint presentation that accompanied Commissioner Bonner’s remarks.
STEPHEN FLYNN: Good afternoon, everyone. If I can get your attention, please. I hope you perchance all get a bite to eat and a little bit of camaraderie, I think, going on here, which is wonderful. And now we’re going to turn to our program. The reason why you’re all here is to hear from Commissioner Robert Bonner, who runs the Customs and Border Protection Agency, under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Some of you, I know, are faces that we saw also last night. I learned, actually, in talking with Commissioner Bonner in advance of this last Friday, it’s actually his first formal event here at the Council. And we’ve been exploiting him heavily because of that. He attended a last night airing of “ The Dirty War,” a movie about a— that HBO has commissioned with BBC Film. It will be on HBO on January 24th. It’s the story of, essentially, a hypothetical al Qaeda attack on the city of London, involving a dirty bomb that originates in Bulgaria and is ultimately shipped and arrives in London, and the struggle of dealing with that. This kind of scenario is one that has literally kept Commissioner Bonner awake at night. And where the movie kind of left us hanging, to some extent, about what one can do about it, there has been real efforts made to manage this problem and others of a similar ilk that involve essentially this global movement of our transportation logistics system.
And I’m very pleased now to introduce Commissioner Bonner, who came to this job, arrived in Washington from Los Angeles, from the law firm he was working for, on September 10th, 2001. And he’ll talk to you about his second day in the office, I know, and how that has informed where he’s gone from here.
But you know, this is a particularly poignant topic for this audience, I know, here in New York. But it’s one that is very close to home for people who were in— who are in the then-Customs Services, now part of the Customs and Border Protection Agency, because the Customs Office, as some of you may well know, was in Tower 6— in World Trade Center 6. And so it just disappeared with the loss of the towers. Happily, all the customs people got out, and with no loss of life. But it’s something that struck very close to home for that agency, more than any other in the federal government. And then there is the whole issue of what happened immediately after 9/11, with suddenly dealing with how we inspect and secure the movements of peoples and goods across our borders, which we’re still wrestling with today.
Commissioner Bonner, you have the bio information here. But background on him is: He has served in a variety of positions in the U.S. government, as well as in the private sector. He was the assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, became a U.S. district judge, somehow gave up a tenured job on the federal dole to actually come back into government and become head of the Drug Enforcement Administration during Bush I, and went off and worked in the Los Angeles office as a partner in Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, and then was called back into public service, I think luckily for all of us, by President [George W.] Bush when he came into office, and assumed that job there.
Our format here today is, the commissioner is going to make a few opening remarks, with some visuals to help us. He’s going to spend about 15 minutes or so on that. Then I’m going to do the little give-and-take to flesh a few issues out, and then immediately turn into all of you engaging. And of course we’ll finish promptly on 2— at 2 p.m.
Let me point out a couple things about this meeting. It is on the record. We have some media who are capturing this event today. We’re very happy to have all of them. And the— we ask that you do the usual: turn off the cell phone, BlackBerries, et al, so we don’t have that menace in our time ahead; and that when we call on you, we have the microphones at the ready. And I’ll insist that you not talk until we get one in front of you, so everybody can hear you. OK? So that’s the plan of attack, and now I’d like to introduce Commissioner Bonner. [Applause]
ROBERT BONNER: Well, thank you, Steve. And let me say I greatly appreciate the opportunity to be with and speak with the Council on Foreign Relations— in fact, multiple opportunities that Steve supported me— but particularly to be able to speak to you about a topic that has consumed my energies and thinking for the last three years-plus. And that topic is global terrorism and homeland security.
Before I start, I just want to note that, as many of you know, this morning the president announced that he is nominating Judge Michael Chertoff to be the secretary of homeland security, and I want to say just a couple of things. First of all, I’ve known Mike Chertoff actually going back to his days when he was the U.S. attorney actually across the river here in New Jersey, and more recently worked with Mike when he was the assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. And that’s where he was, also, on September the 11th, 2001. And he was in the trenches, I can tell you that, in terms of the antiterrorism issue. Mike Chertoff is, I think, uniquely and superbly well-qualified to be the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and I’m very confident that he is going to be a strong and effective leader of the department, because I know that Mike Chertoff is someone who knows what needs to be done to protect America against global terrorism, and I look forward to working with him.
Let me say, sort of reflecting back a bit, that it was just last September that we marked the third anniversary of 9/11, and it was a somber reminder that our lives and our nation will never be the same. And I think, like all of us here in this room, the memory of September 11, 2001 is certainly etched in my memory. As Steve mentioned, I was— I had been nominated by President Bush to be the commissioner of customs actually back in May of 2001. I had gone through a confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee in the end of July of 2001, and I’d reported for duty in Washington on September 10th, 2001.
By the way, I was confirmed by the United States Senate a week thereafter, but on the morning of 9/11, I was in a temporary office in the Treasury Department, which, as you know, is next door to the White House, when the sirens literally went off to evacuate the Treasury Department. And I’d been in and out of government for many years; this was the first time I’ve actually been in a federal building where the sirens actually meant evacuate because there was a plane heading for Washington and they didn’t know where it was going to hit, but certainly the White House was one of the places that was of concern to the Secret Service. And as I was exiting the Treasury Department— I had a temporary office up on the fourth floor and it looked south, across the Washington Monument— and to the right of the monument, I can remember seeing what was an enormous plume of black smoke that was emanating in the air. It was so huge that I didn’t think of the other side of the Potomac [River], but I couldn’t associate it with anything on this side of the Potomac. And of course, it was shortly thereafter that I realized that that plume of black smoke was emanating from the Pentagon, which had just been hit.
I ran— I don’t know whether we ran or not, I can’t remember— but down the four flights. There were 2,000 Treasury Department employees that went out onto 15th Street. And I walked out and I happened to see the acting secretary of the Treasury, Ken Dam, who had his vehicle there. And Ken waved me to get into the car with him, which I did, and we went over to the Secret Service command center, which was about five or six blocks away. And at that time, I established contact with U.S. Customs headquarters and in effect began my duties in earnest as commissioner. It was about 10:05 a.m. on that morning that, after being advised, I directed [that] the U.S. Customs go to what was called level one alert, and that’s the highest level of security alert at that time, short of actually ordering the borders and the ports of entry to be shut down. And as Steve mentioned, U.S. Customs itself was directly affected by the attacks of 9/11. Our customs house actually was at 6 World Trade Center. I’ll see if I can point that out here, get oriented. That’s 6 World Trade Center. It was, of course, destroyed when the North Tower here literally collapsed on it.
The day after I was sworn in as commissioner of United States Customs, I came to New York. I came to Ground Zero, where I visited the World Trade Center site, and I spoke that day to the stunned and somber customs employees. There were about 800 of them that had worked in that building. All of them did get out alive. But the image of the customs house that I saw that day, what was left of it, and even more of Ground Zero, will stay with me forever, for in that pile of smoldering rubble— we all saw that smoldering rubble that was stacked several stories high— I knew, and frankly, we all knew, that there were thousands of people entombed— thousands of innocent people entombed in that rubble. And on the morning of 9/11, I realized that my agency’s mission, U.S. Customs’ mission, had been dramatically altered. It was clear to me that the priority mission of U.S. Customs had changed from the one of interdicting illegal drugs, regulation of trade, collection of revenues, to a national security mission: preventing terrorists and terrorist weapons from getting into the United States.
And as you know, the effects of 9/11 still reverberate in America. Not long ago, with the release of the 9/11 Commission Report last summer, which evaluated what went wrong— as if every terrorist attack, no matter how well conceived or how audacious is preventable if only we reorganize our government some more, and if only we could connect the dots better. In terms of loss of life, 9/11 was the largest terrorist attack not just in the history of this country, but in the history of the world; 2,933 innocent people died on that morning. So 9/11 changed the United States, but it also changed the world forever, and it changed the way we needed to view national security. My colleague here, Steve Flynn, has pointed out that the United States— and I think correctly— had been lulled into a false sense of security with respect to global terrorism, perhaps under the illusion that somehow we were protected by oceans to our east and west, and peaceful neighbors to our north and south. Well, 9/11 utterly shattered that illusion. By 10:30 a.m., U.S. Customs had identified the probable hijackers, all 19 of them, through analysis of airline passenger data. And it is well known now all those 19 terrorist hijackers were trained by al Qaeda, an extremist Islamic terrorist group led by Osama bin Laden and his sidekick, [Ayman] al-Zawahiri.
Al Qaeda’s brand of terrorism is something beyond anything the world had seen before. It’s global in scope, and it goes beyond anything in terms of terrorist activity that I think the world’s ever seen before. And global terrorism, I believe, is the greatest challenge that we face in the 21st century. As communism was the security threat that dominated much of the 20th century, certainly the last half of the 20th century, this different “-ism,” global terrorism, is likely to dominate during the first half of this new century.
At the beginning of the Cold War, Winston Churchill warned of an Iron Curtain descending across Europe. Today, another curtain threatens to separate Muslim countries from the rest of the world, and that’s exactly what al Qaeda wants. Like communism, global terrorism is a challenge that will be with the West, I suspect, and the world, possibly for generations. Al Qaeda wants to exclude all Western influence and globalization from the Arab world, and more broadly, from the Muslim world. They want to restore the Arab-dominated caliphate of over 10 centuries ago, and they are using and they will use asymmetrical warfare to achieve their goal. They’ve recruited and trained fundamentalist Muslims and will deploy this cadre of jihadists in attempts to carry out large-scale terrorist attacks to kill innocent civilians, and we’ve seen that. And they also will conduct these terrorist operations in order to damage and disrupt the U.S. economy and, indeed, the world economy.
And this is the enemy that America finally came face to face with on 9/11, but the threat of further terrorist attacks from al Qaeda is a continuing one and it is real. And al Qaeda leaders, as you know, have vowed to strike America again, even harder than 9/11. We must not underestimate al Qaeda’s patience and determination to strike America again. We certainly must not become complacent. We must not let down our guard. But it is not just the United States that’s targeted by al Qaeda. It is Europe. We saw it in Spain. It’s globalization. It’s the global economy. But more, it’s attacking the forces of globalization that lead to economic uplift, to democratization and reform.
Those attacks weren’t isolated incidents. Of course, 9/11 wasn’t isolated. The actual— at least the first attack goes back to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, extends through the bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, post-9/11 attacks in Bali, in Istanbul, Morocco, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Jakarta, and Madrid, as [executive director of the United Nations’ Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate, Spanish] Ambassador [Javier] Ruperez knows well, on 3/11. This could— [this] list actually could be longer if al Qaeda plots had not been thwarted, and some of them have been. So we’d better understand the objectives of our enemy, and we understand the threat posed by al Qaeda. But one thing that was, of course, immediately apparent after 9/11 and, frankly, before 9/11, was that a policy of containment or mutual deterrence was not going to be effective against this type of enemy. We needed a very different strategy to deal with this new kind of enemy, and certainly we know now that lobbing a few cruise missiles into Afghanistan, as we did after the bombing of our two embassies in East Africa, only served to embolden al Qaeda.
After 9/11, under the president’s leadership by the way, the U.S. adopted essentially a three-pronged strategy for responding to the threat of global terrorism. The first is, the administration recognized that we must have an offense that goes after the terrorists, the terrorist leaders and those who support them, and destroys the organizational infrastructure of al Qaeda, root and branch. And in less than three years, as a result of the efforts of the United States and our allies, we have deprived al Qaeda of its base in Afghanistan. We’ve killed or captured nearly two-thirds of the leadership of al Qaeda, including killing its chief of operations, Mohammed Atef, and capturing Khalid Sheik Mohammed, or KSM, who was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. And second, we must have a strong defense. And that’s where the Department of Homeland Security comes in.
But the third prong, over the long haul, is we must defuse the hatred and ignorance that motivates fundamentalist fanatical Islamic jihadists to join the ranks of al Qaeda and its associated terrorist organizations. The reconstruction of Iraq and its government could do more in time to achieve that third objective of the strategy than almost anything else, because a stable, economically vibrant, democratic Iraq will begin the collapse of al Qaeda and all it represents assuredly as Solidarity in Poland began the end of communism and the Soviet empire. And let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, al Qaeda knows this, as does its commander in Iraq, Mr. [Abu Musab] al-Zarqawi.
The administration is moving forward on all three of these fronts, as we must. And I’m only going to address briefly the second one today, and that’s the defense, because one of the most important steps that the president and the Congress has taken to defend against global terrorism was to establish a Department of Homeland Security. It’s the largest reorganization, as you know— it’s been said many times— of our federal government since right after World War II. The establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, which is almost two years ago now, was a reorganization on that scale of 1947, because it involves the transfer of something like 22— parts or all of 22 agencies of our government that are involved in protecting and defending the homeland.
The department, by the way, has a couple of core missions— actually three. One is to prevent further large-scale terrorist attacks in the United States. The second is to better secure critical infrastructure. And the third is, although it assumes failure, prepare for and respond to large-scale terrorist attacks— a mission, of course, that involves organizing first responders, such as local police and fire department and emergency medical personnel.
But let me tell you, little noted, but I’m going to note it here. One of the biggest ideas of the Department of Homeland Security— of that reorganization— was the creation of one border agency for our country, one agency within the Department of Homeland Security to manage, control and secure our nation’s borders at all its entry points and between, for all purposes— customs, trade, immigration, agriculture protection, and terrorism prevention. And that agency is U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which I’ve highlighted for your convenience here in the yellow box. But it was created by merging all front-line immigration and front-line agriculture inspectors at our ports of entry, all of the Border Patrol— particularly, think our Mexican our border with Canada— and U.S. Customs. So, it’s a merger, then, of all the border interdiction functions, and authorities, and personnel into one agency of the U.S. government. And Customs and Border Protection is the largest honest-to-goodness merger— I tell [current Secretary of Homeland Security] Tom Ridge this all the time— it’s the largest honest-to-goodness merger of people and functions taking place in the Department of Homeland Security. It involves 42,000 employees, which is about a fourth of all the personnel of the Department of Homeland Security, which will come as no surprise to anybody in this room when you think about the importance of the security of our border to the security of our homeland.
And the priority mission of this new border agency is very simple; it’s homeland security. And let me translate that. That means preventing terrorists and terrorist weapons from getting into the United States of America. And we must perform that mission— this is the realization I came to on September 12th and 13th— we have to perform that security mission without shutting off the flow of legitimate trade and travel, without shutting down our economy, without shutting down our sense of openness as a country. Those are what I call the twin goals.
But we’ve not just reorganized; we’ve devised and implemented a strategy to achieve those twin goals of security and, at the same time, facilitating the movement of people and goods, to secure our border and do both things. And I’m going to use— I want to just talk briefly about the maritime security initiatives that we’ve taken— that we’ve implemented— designed and implemented, to illustrate the overall strategy.
The greatest threat to U.S. and the global security in the maritime environment today, I believe, is the potential for terrorists to use the international maritime system to smuggle terrorist weapons or even terrorist operatives into the United States. Let me just talk about the risk for a moment. I know Steve has pointed out in his excellent book— I will refer you to it, “America the Vulnerable”--just in terms of ocean-going sea containers, we’re talking about roughly 9 million of these steel boxes, 20- or 40-foot boxes, being off-loaded at U.S. seaports annually. That’s about 25,000 a day every day. Think about the consequences if even one— a single one of those containers goes off. This threat requires a security strategy to identify, and detect, and deter that threat at the earliest point in the international supply chain. When I say the earliest point, I mean before arrival at our seaports.
The threat of terrorist attack using the cargo container, by the way, is not just an academic threat. Last year, two suicide bombers entered the port of Ashdod, Israel, hidden inside a cargo container, and they killed dozens of innocent people. Shortly after 9/11, Italian authorities found a suspected al Qaeda operative literally inside a shipping container from Port Said, Egypt, that was transiting through Gioia Tauro, Italy, and headed for Halifax, Canada. That container contained, besides a probable al Qaeda terrorist, airport maps, and ominously, he had a phony airplane mechanic’s certificate.
When you think about it, the container is the potential Trojan horse of the 21st century. But a container can be used to transport more than just terrorists. A number of national security experts— and I certainly include Steve in this— have pointed out the vulnerability of ocean-going cargo containers to terrorist exploitation. A weapon, by the way, could be obviously concealed inside a container where the container can literally be made into a weapon. A 40-foot container could become a missile that’s literally wafted into a U.S. seaport on a container ship and unloaded at one of our ports. For historical reasons, most of the U.S. seaports tend to be located right in the middle of some of our nation’s largest urban areas; New York is no exception. All of our cities started off as seaports— New York, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Seattle.
By the way, if you’re wondering, this is downtown Seattle, Washington. That’s part of the container port. This is also part of a— but you can see part of the container port of downtown— and Seattle is literally a stone’s throw from downtown Seattle. So a 40-foot container loaded with ammonium nitrate— just a conventional explosive that was used in the Oklahoma City bombing, by the way— could create a huge blast. It’s estimated to be, by the way, 10 to 20 times the blast of the Oklahoma City bombing.
But the sum of all fears, and [novelist Tom] Clancy said it, is a nuke in the box. One does not wish to be alarmist here, but this much is known: And that is, if we’re going to face reality, we know that bin Laden has been trying to get his hands on a nuclear device or fissile material in order to make one [a nuclear weapon] for at least six years. And we also know, or reportedly, that he met with Pakistani nuclear scientists some years ago. But it’s not just a nuclear device— although the consequences of that are so great that we need to do everything we can to protect our nation. But it’s not just a nuclear device we need to worry about. Some of you were here last night and you saw the screening of the HBO movie “Dirty Bomb” about a radiological bomb. And a terrorist attack using a container to conceal a so-called dirty bomb, or radiation dispersal device, could probably stop global trade in its tracks unless we have a maritime security system that can detect and deter such an attack.
The good news, by the way, and there is some good news to this story, and that is that we have developed, and we have made some considerable progress in implementing such a strategy, and it’s done essentially through four interlocking, interrelated initiatives. The first is the 24-hour rule; the National Targeting Center, which houses our Automated Targeting System; the Container Security Initiative; and the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism [C-TPAT].
Under the first one, we obtain advanced electronic information on all cargo shipments to the United States, 24 hours before those cargo containers are loaded at the foreign seaports— not arrival in the U.S.; before they’re loaded at the foreign seaports. That’s the 24-hour rule. Second, we developed the Automated Targeting System and evaluate at our National Targeting Center in Virginia each and every one of these containers for terrorist risk before they’re loaded on board vessels bound for the U.S. Third, by partnering with other countries— our trading partners— we have implemented the Container Security Initiative, or CSI, at now 34 ports outside the United States. With CSI, we’re able to inspect high-risk containers before they’re loaded on board vessels bound for the U.S. And as you can see from the left-hand side here, we’ve made extraordinary progress. We are in 34 of the largest cargo seaports outside the United States that ship most of the volume of cargo containers to the U.S. I worked with Ambassador Ruperez, by the way, for putting CSI together for the large container port in Spain, Algeciras.
And the fourth initiative is the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism, which I talked about this morning at the breakfast— our partnership with the private sector, with major importers and ocean carriers. Under C-TPAT, we have increased security of the supply chains from the foreign loading docks to the U.S. port of arrival. In exchange for customs and border protection, giving the goods shipped by C-TPAT partners, by these companies, faster processing through the U.S. ports on arrival. And Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism, C-TPAT, started in December of 2001 with a mere seven companies that stepped forward to be the founding partners with us. We now have over 8,000 companies that participate in this program, and it’s by far the largest and, I believe, most successful government-private sector partnership to arise from 9/11.
In addition to those four initiatives, we’re also moving forward with the smart box, which we began piloting last year with some of our C-TPAT partners. And the smart box is securing cargo containers with an embedded electronic container security device that allows us to determine whether a container has been opened or tampered with at any point along its journey, from— literally from the foreign manufacturer to its arrival here in the U.S. And since 9/11, we’ve also added technology and equipment at our ports to better detect nuclear and radiological weapons, including deploying very highly sensitive radiation portal monitors at— well, we have over 300 deployed right now. We’re continuing this. By the way, it’s not done. But that, along with large-scale whole container X-ray and gamma-ray imaging machines [that] we’re also using at virtually all of our ports of entry that allow us to literally take an X-ray image, if you will, of a container in a matter of a couple of minutes, that— those machines even help us detect heavily shielded material.
So every one of the initiatives I’ve described is designed to make our borders smarter, and many of them are to extend our borders by pushing our zone of security out beyond our physical borders. And every one of these initiatives— and this is the key point here— is designed to meet those twin goals I talked about. And that is vastly and materially increasing security, but doing so without choking off the flow of legitimate trade. And let me tell you one other thing. Not one of those initiatives existed before 9/11.
So let me— I’ll wrap it up. I just want to say that after 9/11, we knew we had to act, and act quickly, and we did act. We still have much to do. We reorganized a huge part of our federal government, we’ve ratcheted up border security, and we’ve implemented some very sweeping initiatives to protect global trade, and travel, and the global economy. But you know, the question is, can we get it all done? And maybe we’ll talk about that in just a moment. But let me just say that what is critical here to combat terrorism, is that we keep the sense of urgency that galvanized us shortly after September the 11th.
And the other thing it’s going to take is a strong and abiding commitment, not just by the United States of America, but by other nations, in partnership with the United States and with the international community. Thank you very much for your attention. [Applause]
FLYNN: OK. I think we’re now going to make the screen go away, and we’ll head right here and then carry on the conversation. Well, I know you probably all have a lot of questions, but I’ll get, in my presider function, the first one. Some of the folks in this room are aware of the scenario that I wrote up in the book that you’ve mentioned here, and we saw it played out last night in the HBO flick, which would be an al Qaeda successful attack: despite the best efforts that have been made, a weapon of mass destruction gets into the United States, goes off in our seaports, perhaps two or three, as has been their modus operandi. If that were to happen today, how would the U.S. government like you to respond? And what would you like— how would you like it to work out, both with the reality, as you think it is, and how would you like to work out if we had more time, more progress made?
BONNER: We need to make more progress on the strategy and the initiatives I’ve outlined. But the idea would be, first of all, that that strategy and those initiatives increase our chances of preventing that from happening in the first instance. But there’s another reason for building the security system that’s made up of those four initiatives and other actions that we’ve taken. And that is, that if there [is] a terrorist incident, a terrorist attack exploiting the means of global trade— and by the way, the principal system of global trade, if you don’t know it, is containerized oceangoing shipping— if there is an attack, that we have a security system in place that will allow us, if we have to take down the system, to recover from it and to bring the system back up as rapidly as possible. And when I say as rapidly as possible, I mean that allows us the ability to bring it back up within 28— 24, 48 hours of the incident.
Now, every incident has to be evaluated, as you know, Steve, in terms of what was the incident, what’s the terror, what’s the intelligence surrounding the incident. But, if we have— we are building and we have built some big building blocks for a security system that would allow us to go to the new secretary of homeland security or the president and say, “Look, we now know that we can secure the movement of trade, and we have our security system in place that allows us to check things before they leave foreign ports and the like.” So that would be what I’d like to see happen.
Now, the question is— you asked me specifically about the HBO movie. And the realities are, I think there would be tremendous pressure put on the decision-makers in the U.S. government to simply shut down any goods coming into the United States. And the key here is to have a recovery plan so that we can start the system up as quickly as possible, so that we don’t bring down our economy simply by virtue of the fact that there’s been a terrorist attack using and exploiting the means of global trade.
FLYNN: Are you comfortable with where we are for a recovery plan right now?
BONNER: Not entirely, no. Although I must say that there’s been some very, very good work done on this by— within the Department of Homeland Security by something called the I-STAFF [Integration Staff] there. But we haven’t been put to the test. We have run scenarios, by the way. We’ve run a “dirty bomb” scenario in a number of places, including Seattle, Washington, and so forth. But I do know that this is one of the items we discussed at the Cargo Security Summit that we had in Washington last month. And I do know that there is within the Department of Homeland Security a recognition that part of what we need to plan for is this contingency planning, so that we have a reasonably good idea of how we bring the system back up, if we have to take it down.
FLYNN: Maybe as a follow-on here, one of the initiatives you talked about was the Container Security Initiative. The Council on Foreign Relations was probably a good place to try to push that one further. It involves, of course, overseas jurisdictions allowing your agents to be essentially on their soil, in their jurisdiction, to work with them side by side to do inspections before items are loaded, destined for the United States. I suspect initially there was some concern that countries would be apprehensive about granting that authority. What has been the experience, and how do you see this thing progressing as we look in the months ahead?
BONNER: Well, it’s, I think, gratifying that actually many countries of the world have seen that even if they don’t view themselves as a threat for a terrorist attack, that there’s a great importance to better securing the movement of goods and trade between their country and the United States. And frankly, I must say that the countries immediately understood that they needed to overcome the issue of having a small number of U.S. personnel at their seaports, really working with the targeting and exchange of information— they do the inspection, by the way, we get to observe it— but that it was in their interest to have this security system in place because they needed— it’s an insurance policy for them to protect against the movement of goods from, let’s say, Rotterdam to the port of Newark over here, or from Singapore to the port of Los Angeles; that they knew that they needed to step up to the plate and join with us in partnership. And that’s what they’ve done. These are agreements, these are bilateral agreements.
And I must say, the Dutch were first, by the way. And once the Netherlands said, “We’re going to join the Container Security Initiative,” it was amazing how fast other ports in Europe wanted to join, because the next day I actually signed an agreement with Belgium for the port of Antwerp, and two days later with France for the port of Le Havre. And of course, we’re in Algeciras, Spain, working with the Spanish government. And in Asia, Singapore was the first country to step up to the plate. It may have something to do with the entrepreneurial spirit. But once the political leadership of these countries understood what we were talking about, and the benefits to detecting— being able to detect and, therefore, deter potential terrorist use of the trade lanes between Rotterdam and the United States, they said, “How do we sign up? How do we get this started?” So that’s why we’ve had, I think, some incredible success bilaterally, working with other countries the world in getting the CSI, the Container Security Initiative, in place.
FLYNN: Is there a reciprocity arm to this?
BONNER: There is a reciprocity. We make it available. Obviously, that’s an analysis of the threat. There are only two countries, actually, that have stationed their customs inspectors in the United States. But every country that’s participating can, if they choose to do so.
FLYNN: OK, very good. Let me open it up to the audience. The two rules of engagement here are give us your name and affiliation, and wait for a mike. Go over here. Kimball.
QUESTIONER: My name is Kimball Chen. I’m at Energy Transportation Group. I’m involved in international energy trade and shipping. Commissioner, you’ve discussed cargos which might be hidden. Well what about cargos which are perfectly legitimate, but which could be turned into weapons by personnel on board ships? For instance, the myriad LPG [liquefied propane gas] or LNG [liquefied natural gas] ships, chemical tankers— the whole area of legitimate waterborne trade and legitimate cargos, which properly directed and steered into a port on board could create an incident? Your container initiative deals with what’s hidden. But what about things that are not hidden?
BONNER: Yeah, I understand. And look, this is an issue too. I didn’t— given the limited time, I didn’t address everything we’re doing in terms of the movement of goods or vessels or vehicles, and so forth, into the U.S. But we have been working— and by the way, I give the U.S. Coast Guard enormous credit here because they’ve been the lead in terms of working with U.S. Customs and Border Protection to do a number of things that reduce the danger, let’s say, of an LNG ship, or something like that, being turned into some sort of a terrorist weapon or vehicle.
Part of it, by the way, is the— through the International Maritime Organization. Essentially, we do security vetting. There’s a requirement to have a security plan and security vetting of the crew members. We also get both U.S. Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection the names of the crew members, we vet them for terrorist watch lists and multiple terrorist risk factors, and so forth, and if the vessel is deemed to be of a concern or a threat the Coast Guard goes— and we go with them if they want us— and board the vessel and prevent it from coming into port. So there are security aspects that go beyond the Trojan horse, the container— cargo container, but still I think if you look at the overall analysis, the cargo container is one of the areas of great concern. But we are also looking at the other areas.
We also look at break bulk cargo [loose, not containerized, cargo]. Somebody said, “Well, do you look at break bulk?” You know, if you saw “On the Waterfront,” you know that there weren’t any containers then; it was break bulk. There’s very little break bulk, actually, that comes in from Europe or Asia transatlantically or transpacifically to the U.S. But nonetheless, we also target and look at the potential that something could be concealed in so-called break bulk cargo.
FLYNN: Great. Next, let me go down here in the middle. John?
QUESTIONER: John Lenoir with the Department of Justice. Quick, sir, is there a CSI-type of program with our land partners in Canada and Mexico?
BONNER: Yeah, there is. In fact, what we’ve done is, is we’ve— we actually pioneered CSI— I should give credit where credit’s due here— with Canada, and we did it through what was called the In-Transit Cargo Security Initiative. Before CSI even got off the ground on a handshake with the Canadians we said, “Look, we’re concerned about cargo containers that are being off-loaded at the ports of Halifax and Vancouver that are essentially being transshipped to the U.S., and let’s set up— we want to put some people up there, we want to do our targeting, and we’d like you to do some inspections of those things we identify as high risk.” So we actually started this off with Canada at its three big ports, including Montreal.
But we’ve also implemented with Canada and with Mexico what we call the Free and Secure Trade Initiative [FAST]. Free trade, we’ve got that under NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement]; we had to add the security to this trade. And we do that by essentially using— enrolling the importers and foreign manufacturers into the C-TPAT path, making sure the truck drivers— the trucking companies themselves are C-TPAT, and the drivers are fully vetted by us, that they do not propose a terrorist risk or, for that matter, a smuggling risk. And so, we’ve literally implemented what is a FAST lane, an expedited treatment with Canada and Mexico for, if you think about it, commercial trucks. And we also have, by the way, some incredibly good security that we’ve put into place for the rail crossings— well, the rail cars that are entering the U.S. from Canada and Mexico.
FLYNN: Up here in the front.
QUESTIONER: Aristide Zolberg, New School University. Commissioner, you’ve been talking largely about cargoes, but there’s also the issue of persons, and one of the major findings in various analyses of 9/11 was the weakness of intelligence connections. For example, the State Department awards visas without— at that time, at least, without access to FBI files and so on, and I think Mr. Flynn has brought that up in his book as well. Now, I’m wondering, in the reorganization that you started out with emphasizing, has progress been made along those lines in somehow getting information and the intelligence flow into the system?
BONNER: Yeah, a lot of progress has been made, and it’s really looking at the flow of people as a continuum of travel, and it starts from— at least if a visa is required, it starts with the issuance of the visa by our State Department at an embassy or a consulate through their consular offices, and literally extends to the port of entry at the border. And we’ve made a lot of progress in making sure of this: one, that information that the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] had or the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] has results in a— if we have a name and biographical data or even biometrical data— that that goes into the terrorist watch list. And we are, by the way— I wish we had been faster; we’re still in the process of what I would call developing a master terrorist watch list of known or suspected terrorists. But we have that watch list; it’s now just being made into a comprehensive poll.
The State Department has access to that. Us, Customs and Border Protection, as the border agency for people entering the United States, we have it— it’s automated and that sort of thing. And as you know, we’ve gone a little bit even beyond that in terms of now being able to biometrically identify somebody who’s been issued a visa by the U.S. government at a consulate in Abu Dhabi or Riyadh. We can actually biometrically determine that the person that’s been issued that visa, who has been vetted through all the terrorist watch lists, is in fact the person issued that visa biometrically through a two-print system. So a lot’s been done.
By the way, this is not complete either, but a lot has been done to address the concerns both Steve has raised and, frankly, that were legitimately raised in the 9/11 Commission Report, because first of all, as the border— the INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] really wasn’t focused on national security or the terrorism issue before 9/11. Partly because of that, there is no INS today. It was abolished two years ago. And 85 percent of the INS, actually, the frontline immigration people, are part of Customs and Border Protection, the border protection agency. So we’ve also reorganized to be more— I think more effective and efficient at our border.
FLYNN: Question right here in the front.
QUESTIONER: Moushumi Khan, law offices of Moushumi Khan. Commissioner, can you please shed some light on the recent incident over Christmas weekend at the U.S.-Canadian border where U.S. citizens returning from a religious conference in Toronto were detained and fingerprinted for several hours? There was a spokesman for the Homeland Security Customs and Border Protection, and I’m quoting her, [who] said the agents stopped anyone who said they attended the three-day convention, Reviving the Islamic Spirit, based on information that such gatherings can be a means for terrorists to promote their cause.
BONNER: I guess I could say a couple of things about it. First of all, we— in utilizing our authority to— which we have, with respect to U.S. citizens and non-U.S. citizens— the authority to question— detain and question people about their purpose for entering, their identity, that they are who they say they are. I mean, these are functions that historically have been performed, actually before 9/11. I mean, this is authority— this is not new authority, but it’s existing authority. And secondly, we have— we have taken— I can’t go into all the details here, but I will tell you that we take intelligence, including strategic intelligence, in terms of who may pose a potential risk, to make sure that we have identified that person and have had a chance to talk to that person.
So I don’t want to speak about the specific incident, but we do have the authority, and frankly, we do exercise the authority to make sure that we have talked to, and we’re satisfied that the person entering is who they say they are, and that the person entering is not a terrorist threat to the United States.
FLYNN: I guess maybe— in this instance, is going to a convention in Canada on this related topic, by definition, going to lead to that kind of scrutiny?
BONNER: Well, let me just speculate here. I won’t go— but what if you had information that in conjunction with one or more conventions that were Islamic conventions that there was an increased concern about individuals that may be coming back— either coming back or posing as U.S. citizens who might be coming from those conventions. I’m not going to speculate on whether that’s the case or not, but I will say that we have reason to be concerned. We are going to exercise our authority to make sure that we understand who a person is and that they are who they say they are— I mean, you know, you don’t even need a passport to come across the Canadian border— and be satisfied of that. So you know, that’s our responsibility.
Ultimately— I started off in my remarks; I said the priority mission is keeping terrorist weapons and terrorists from entering the United States. And so it does mean people are inconvenienced. Of course, we’re all inconvenienced for national security issues. There is [a] certain inconvenience that goes with that, and sometimes that means that somebody is going to be essentially sent to a secondary questioning, and for a more thorough questioning to make sure that we understand who they are and they are who they say they are, and their purpose for entering the United States. By the way, we also, in certain situations, want to make sure that that’s consistent with— it’s believable that their purpose for entering the United States is the reason they’re giving.
FLYNN: Great. Back here. Judy Miller.
QUESTIONER: Commissioner, Tommy Thompson, the outgoing secretary of HHS [Health and Human Services Department], expressed concern about agro-terrorism, and as we know, the last few epidemics have occurred outside of the borders of the United States— BSE [bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease] in Canada, FMD [foot-and-mouth disease] in the U.K. Do you share his concern? And how much are you spending on that kind of inspection of goods coming across? Is that enough? And finally, would you identify for this group what you feel to be America’s greatest vulnerabilities in your area at the moment?
BONNER: OK. Yeah, look, I don’t know— I have great respect for Secretary Thompson. I don’t know that I would make the comment exactly the way he made it, as he’s going out the door. [Laughter] But needless to say, I mean, if you think about the issue of global terrorism and our enemy, I mean, one concern is potential contamination, if you will. This is bioterrorism, agro-terrorism, but [there is] some potential contamination of goods that are food products that are being imported into the United States. And we share a responsibility with the Food and Drug Administration [FDA], with U.S. Department of Agriculture, with Health and Human Services to prevent that.
How do you best do it? Certainly we worry about that issue. We have implemented certain things that we think reduce the prospect for that happening. And they include getting advance information about goods that are being shipped into the United States, including food products: who’s shipping them, how many times they’ve shipped them, are they part of C-TPAT, other issues. No.1: so it’s getting information and doing some risk targeting, and then inspecting things that are— we believe based upon strategic intelligence or otherwise could be a higher risk, and that’s inspecting it for things like existence of cyanide and other issues.
We’ve also— we’ve gone so far, two and a half years ago, that I authorized and we began deploying for the first time in our country’s history what we call chem dogs. These are detector dogs. I mean, customs has used them historically to detect illegal drugs and even money. We’ve trained dogs to be able to detect against potential chemical weapons on a pre-release basis. And I’m talking about sarin gas and cyanide and the like. So we’ve done some things. Now, I don’t know that it’s a perfect system, and obviously I do have concerns about this area. But we have taken some, I think, reasonable and prudent steps along with the FDA.
One other item, by the way, in terms of advance information, has been the Bioterrorism Act, which has required that advance information be provided to the U.S. government. We’ve worked— we work arm in arm with the Food and Drug Administration. In fact, they have their people that work side by side with us at our National Targeting Center to identify what— our potential risk for intentional terrorist contamination of food products.
FLYNN: And the thing you most worry about, of all the things?
BONNER: Oh, yeah.
FLYNN: [Laughter]
BONNER: Boy, I’ll tell you, that’s a tough one. After seeing the film last night—
FLYNN: [Laughter]
BONNER: No, the— look, I think the thing I worry most about is— it’s lower probability, but the consequences are so momentous— is the nuclear threat. And it’s not to say here that bin Laden or al Qaeda have a nuclear device. I don’t think they have it. But they want to get it. And if we’re dealing with this enemy for another two years, or five years, or another decade, I’m very concerned that at some point they’re going to get one. If they get one, we know where they’re going to try to use it. And so I want to make sure that we— that’s one of the reasons that we have been so aggressive to move out with a combination of technologies— not just radiation portal monitors, although those are important, highly sensitive radiation portal monitors, but using a combination of technology— using our best risk assessment tools, in terms of identifying potential shipments, whether that’s a land vehicle or whether that’s a cargo container, or however you would potentially try to smuggle in a nuclear device, and to also push our zone of security, our border, outward.
You know, look, why do we have CSI? We have CSI because, look, we could search everything on arrival, or we can search everything we think is a potential risk on arrival. We shouldn’t search 100 percent, by the way— [we] don’t need to do that. But we could search everything we need to, except for something that may go off. And that’s either a nuclear device, or it could be a dirty bomb and that sort of thing. And therefore, we want to have an extended zone of security to detect and deter that from happening.
So that’s— I don’t know that I should have singled out one concern, but it is a concern, probably, I think about more than anything else. And we need to have a zero-tolerance policy against any kind of nuclear device getting into our country, period.
FLYNN: Well, we’ve got a lot of hands here and not much time. Right down the middle here. Sir?
QUESTIONER: Commissioner, I’m Dick Huber, head of American Commercial Barge Line. We pick up a lot of those boxes as they come in. But I really wanted to direct another question to you. A few years ago, we had a system that worked pretty well, this INSPASS [Immigration Service’s Passenger Accelerated Service System], which was biometric, [and which] seemed to me like a good control mechanism, expedited people’s passage through customs. And it’s gone away. Why?
BONNER: Well, partly because the INS went away [laughter]--that’s a little too simple— and partly because we were focused on some other issues that we needed to be focused on. But your question is a— it’s a good question. It’s something that I’ve been looking at over the— nearly the last year. And that is, how do we put some additional better security vetting into what I’ll call the old INSPASS system and restart a trusted, vetted passenger program for bypassing not just immigration but it’s CBP [Customs and Border Protection]--immigration, customs, and that sort of thing— through a biometric identifier? And I’ll just tell you we’re pretty close. Stay tuned, because I know that I— and I think Tom Ridge and the department supports the notion that we should reinstitute this.
For what? Two reasons. It’s the twin goals. You increase security because somebody has given you a lot of information about who they are. We’ve been able to interview them. We’ve been able to take biometric fingerprints and digitized photos, whatever we want, and we can concentrate, and we can facilitate, expedite their movements, so they move faster through JFK [John F. Kennedy Airport] or LAX [Los Angeles Airport]. And we can spend more of our inspectional time about people we don’t know anything about, who are a potential risk. It fits within, shall we say, the paradigm we’ve done for cargo. And now that we have the immigration authority— at least entry immigration authority. I don’t— by the way, interior immigration— shall I say, thank God? It’s another agency in the department. That’s the thorniest political issue of all. But immigration authority at our ports of entry, at our border— we have that authority. And so we can now do this. And I would like to do this. And I believe that we will— sooner than later, we’ll be in a position to launch this.
And I’d also like to— one other thing, just because most people don’t know this— but we have also launched— just begun a bi-national kind of program that would work both ways— trusted, vetted passenger program, bypassing immigration and customs. We started enrollment for this with Canada, our logical partner here. It’s called NEXUS Air, and the pilot is Vancouver Airport. You get to bypass— we do pre-clearance there, so you get to bypass customs and immigration [in] U.S. going out of Vancouver, and you bypass Canadian customs and immigration coming back in. So we’ve actually already started this program. We’re looking to expand that to other countries as well. But I think it’s— shall we say, I think it’s an idea whose time has come.
FLYNN: On its face there’s real schizophrenia here. There is a risk-based approach to cargo and conveyances, and so forth, you’ve outlined, and then we’ve got kind of this craziness we’re doing on the people side where we’re— is there a statutory barrier? Why can’t we just move forward?
BONNER: Well, a lot of it is that I think TSA [Transportation Security Administration] has somewhat been straitjacketed. Now, we’re talking about customs and immigration here. But the reality is, TSA, another agency, a sister agency of the Department of Homeland Security, has started a registered, trusted passenger pilot program, I think, in five cities. But we need to make sure that we figure out a way how these link together, and so forth. That would be smart, it seems to me, that if you enroll in one, you get the benefits of both, and so on.
But I suppose— look, I mean, there are a few little complexities you need to work out here, and particularly if you’re doing bi-nationals, you’ve got to explain very carefully— both countries need to know how it’s going to work. We’ve been able to do that with Canada. I’d hope we would be able to do it elsewhere. And we need to coordinate within the department. It’s easier— now that the main operational agencies of the department are within one department, it’s easier to do that because we now have one secretary, one department that oversees both customs and border protection, and TSA, and the U.S. Coast Guard, and so forth.
But I— it adds a little bit to the complexity where you’re trying to think about this in terms of, well, I can think about it in terms of bypassing customs and immigration, if you’re trusted and vetted and we don’t have to worry about you as a terrorist or as a smuggler. TSA has some statutory mandates, so I don’t know how much they’re going to be able to relax that without changing the legislation that was enacted shortly after 9/11.
FLYNN: OK. Unfortunately, we’re down to our last couple of minutes. You spent most of your time here today with us today telling us what you’re trying to do, and how essentially the U.S. government is trying to manage this problem. Maybe a final word, what would you like us to do to help you in your job; if there is a sort of final message for us as an audience here at the council, what are the kind of things you’d like to see for us to do to help you as you move forward?
BONNER: Well, I think the most important thing really is to— we need to keep that sense of urgency that we had. And I would encourage everybody in the Council to— one, to be involved in terms of the kinds of strategies that are going to make sense for helping to protect our country, helping to secure what is our critical infrastructure. I mean, that’s all— the maritime transportation system, it’s a critical infrastructure. Our economy collapses if it has to be shut off. And there are other areas.
So, look, I think there’s that. The other thing is, I’m talking to a Council that has a lot of representatives from the private sector here, and some of them are involved as importers and the like, or on boards of importers. But as I was saying this morning, there’s really no reason not to try to understand what is a government-private sector partnership, like the Customs Trade Partnership [Against Terrorism], and make sure that companies that are involved in the supply chain are participating in the partnership with us, not as a matter of government fiat or regulation, but dialogue, discussion, and increasing the security of the supply chain. So that’s something else I think members of the Council could help us do as they understand what we’re trying to do, and have tried to do, to better protect the security of our country.
FLYNN: Well, thank you very much, Commissioner. Obviously this problem’s not going away, so hopefully a conversation. Thank all of you for coming. [Applause]
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