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| Speakers: | John C. Gannon |
|---|---|
| Tom Donolyn | |
| Mick Trainer | |
| Mike Weinstein | |
| Stephen E. Flynn |
September 20, 2001
Council on Foreign Relations
M: Thank you all for coming this evening in what is now the fifth of a series of meetings relating to this most important event of our time, to be followed by many more. As I mentioned at the last meeting, we are reorienting virtually our total program for the next few weeks to this topic, because I simply can’t think of anything that approaches it in seriousness. Now, the panel this evening of experts, we are bringing the resources of Council of Foreign Relations into play on this issue in force. And where we don’t have on our own staff of our senior fellows group-specific expertise, we’re looking to our membership.
I’ll probably be coming to some of you in this audience asking for help on other projects as we go along. I hope you will be willing. Five panelists this evening, John Gannon, Tom Donolyn, Mick Trainer, Mike Weinstein, Steve Flynn. I think you know them, but let me give you a little bit of background on each. John Gannon, now a Vice Chairman of Intellibridge Corporation, a former DDI, CIA, and Chairman of the NIC, National Intelligence Council, for the last five years. Tom Banolyn and John Gannon, by the way, was a naval officer in Southeast Asia in time of war. Tom Donolyn, Fannie Mae’s Executive Vice President, the Law on Policy—previously served as Fannie Mae’s Senior VP, General Counsel and Secretary, Assistant Secretary of State, and the second administration of Carter for Public Affairs, and he was the Chief of Staff for Warren Christopher.
Bernardi Trainer, Mick Trainer, Lieutenant General of the United States Marine Corps, retired, our senior fellow for National Security Studies at the Council, and Associate at the Center for Science and International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, a graduate of Holy Cross, a combat veteran of Korea and Vietnam, in service for the Royal Marines, and I first knew him as the Marine Corps Operations Deputy, where he was a prickly—a troublesome fellow, worrying the Air Force and the Army to no end. We were pleased when he went to the New York Times to become their military correspondent. (Laughter)
Mike Weinstein, also of the New York Times, an author of 1500 or so columns and a couple of books, now our director of the Geo-Economic Center of the Council on Foreign Relations; and Senior Fellow on International Economics. And Steve Flynn, Senior Fellow with the National Security Studies program, a coastguardsman, a 1982 graduate of the Coast Guard Academy, and a Ph.D. in international politics from Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy; and an officer who commanded at sea twice.
We have the usual rules, except this time we’ve got some press here tonight. And the press can take their quotes and use them as they see fit. But we won’t confine the questions later on to just the press. Everybody is going to be involved. Each member of the panel will speak for about five minutes, and then we’ll open up for press. And we’ll end an hour from now.
This is our look at the situation as we now know it, first of all from an intelligence perspective; next from a diplomatic perspective, a military perspective, an economic perspective; and finally, from a perspective of our security here at home. So our first speaker, John Gannon, you’ve got the floor.
JG: Thank you very much, Chuck. I want to make roughly five points. The first one on the issue of how I would describe the event of last week in terms of US government response. And I would describe it as a multi-point failure across several agencies responsible for both the physical protection of US citizens, and for intelligence. I think this is a major set of failures that have to be addressed in a very serious and sustained way.
The second point I make in terms of short term response, on the issue of how terrorists would respond to a military threat—I think we learned in 1998 and again I think we have to remind ourselves that the same complex of buildings in New York City was hit in 1993. So this is the second time that we are dealing with a major terrorism incident which I think compounds the sense of failure. But when we look at their responses to those events, the military responses in particular, my judgement is that the terrorists have seen the military response, that is, shooting missiles, bouncing them across the desert and killing several people in the process, as indicating a weakness and in ineffectiveness on the part of the United States.
The clearest demonstration of—or the clearest support of that analysis is that they hit us again so hard as they did last week. For the longer term—and I think this is really the issue here. We aren’t just talking about a—getting the culprits and having a near term response. The long term response against terrorism I think has to recognize four very significant changes that have occurred in the world in the past ten years. And they all have to do with the technological revolution that has taken place in that period and which continues.
And the first is that information has become available not only to good people who want to do good things, but to bad actors who want to do bad things. And that means information about you, information about airports, information about anything that will help them in their plan. And as we know, in this case we had terrorists who were using the Internet or at least allegedly in public libraries in the United States.
The second thing to which they have gained much easier or readier access is technology. And that is the technology to do bad things like build bombs and weapons that can obviously hurt the United States and the interests in the United States. The third thing which is much more accessible is finance across borders, a function of globalization. And Osama bin Laden clearly is a symbol of this, and the extent to which he has been able to build an international network that finances comparable operations, and I am not saying with certainty that he was behind this. But certainly he is the leading culprit. And there is no question he has the capability in his networks to do this.
The fourth thing is the ability of terrorists to—and adversaries in general to use what we call deception and denial techniques. That is, to use very sophisticated means to cover up—to cover their tracks, to keep secret their operations. All these things together have complicated the work of intelligence immeasurably. This also I think raises for the long term the question of how you structure a government to deal with these kinds of threats. I won’t go into the detail now, but I’m happy to address it in the Q&A.
But I will say that all of you are familiar with the Art Rudman report on national security in the 21st century, which made what yesterday we thought was a fairly bold proposal for restructuring our government, and which I thought when I first read it, although I was impressed, I thought that this was perhaps a bridge too far. I think if we look at it now, it may even look like a bridge too short in terms of what we need tod o in restructuring our government to deal with this kind of transnational threat. And I would emphasize that it isn’t just terrorism. This is also the issue of—the proliferation issue, narco-traffic(?), and the issue of threats to our space system, the cyber threat that we face, all of these are issues which are global in nature and are going to require a much more agile set of relationships in our government if we are to have a proper flow of information both to define problems and then to develop what I think are increasingly going to be multidisciplinary kinds of solutions to them.
The last point I’d made is that in my judgement in the years that I worked in intelligence, the analogy of a war with regard to the fight against terrorism is problematic. Not in the sense that a President is free to use whatever metaphor he wishes to use to mobilize our people at a time when clearly we needed to be mobilized and encouraged, but if you look at the record of our successes and failures with terrorism, I believe that we have succeeded when the terrorism has been in fact embedded in very clear foreign policy about a particular region of the world in which terrorism is occurring. Jerry Adams was a terrorist, Arafat was a terrorist. But we saw the terrorist issues in a much broader context where we were able to proceed with a multi-front policy—a diplomatic policy, a political policy both in terms of our own government and governments in the region; and we were able to in fact have considerable success against terrorism.
And I would emphasize that terrorists are not just people. It is also a method that they use. And we have had success, the Spanish have had success, most of the European countries have had success when they have seen the terrorist problem in a larger context, and then been able to develop the appropriate set of policies to deal with it. I would also add that as we look at—and we really do have to look at a very fundamental way of how our government responded here. I would argue very strongly that we need to invest much more strongly in diplomatic resources that will help us both to understand the complexity of the issues in parts of the world where I don’t think we have a very strong understanding or I think adequate policy at the moment; and also I think to have the diplomatic resources, frankly, to do the kind of negotiation that multiple levels that—where it is necessary in order to deal with the issues that surround terrorism. So I will stop there and give Tom the next round.
M: Tom?
TD: Thank you. Thanks for having me here tonight. Let me also make five one-minute points if I can, on a diplomatic side. First, I think that the Bush Administration has done a first class job in the initial outing here on the diplomatic front. I would hasten to add that the hard part is still ahead, as the administration moves to define the scope, timing and operational details of the anti-terror campaign that it has undertaken—an introductory point.
My first major point though, I think we’ve seen a real paradigm shift in our foreign policy in the Bush Administration. The Bush Administration in the wake of the events of last week, the horrific events of last week in Washington, New York and Pennsylvania, has adopted as a central organizing principle of its foreign and national security policies, the effort against terrorism. And it’s better viewed I think this gentleman is describing it as a campaign, not a single military battle but specific objective—but I think that the administration has lighted onto this, in light of the threat, as a central organizing principle of this foreign policy.
Importantly, from this flows a paradigm shift in how terrorism is battled by the United States, shifting really from what has been principally in my judgement a law enforcement and legal approach, whereby you try to capture, apprehend, and bring to trial, to justice, and to ascertain guilt or innocence of terrorists; moving instead to terrorism as a national security concern where the United States will apply its full range of hard and soft power assets, including military, political, diplomatic, economic, intelligence and cultural.
Indeed, the President tonight—and I have a copy of the press release that R.E. Fleisher put out this afternoon, late this afternoon, the speech will say the following: “We will direct every resource at our command, every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war to the disruption and defeat of the global terror network.” I think that will be the core quote from tonight in the President’s speech.
So it is at the core of foreign policy, and it will be the principle effort I think in the national security and foreign policy area of the Bush Administration, at least in the first term of Bush’s tenure. An interesting question is exactly what this means. Is this the same in terms of being a central organizing principle as was defeating the Soviet empire during the cold war, where we basically made it really the central and in many cases the sole issue on which we dealt with countries again in the past on other issues, in which we made have had an interest—point one. I think it has become the central organizing principle on the way, but which the President will see the success or failure of his administration on the national security side, and maybe more broadly.
Point two—as I said, I think the administration has had a lot of success to date on the diplomatic front. The UN resolution, the General Assembly, and in the Security Council, NATO invoking Article 5, working through an amazing array of countries for positive statements, looking for assignments for countries in this initial coalition from financing to staging, to other kinds of support. My main point here too though—and obviously it’s an often-made point, is that the ability to keep together the coalition as it moves from rhetoric, that is, supporting the principle that we are against terrorism and the horrific events that happened on September 11, to supporting action, is going to be the acid test of leadership and diplomatic skill by the United States.
My view is that we will need a series of coalitions to do different things. There will have to be a coalition that is willing to work with the United States to act against the perpetrators. I think we can put that together, frankly. There will have to be a broader collection of nations, as broad as possible, for the longer term effort, because it’s not possible to undertake a longer term effort against terrorism absent working with other countries, if you are going to cut off financial support, eliminate safe havens, limit safe havens, collect intelligence and deal with cross-border issues. But I’m pretty optimistic that that coalition could be put and kept together, if the administration targets its efforts well and explains them well. And the first effort around that will be tonight by the President.
Point three—as I said, I’m optimistic about the ability to put together an initial coalition, and match it up with action. But the rubber will meet the road, it seems to me, in at least two important areas. First, if we find state sponsorship of the acts in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington on September 11, that will change the dynamic dramatically. If it’s found that Iraq and Iran supported in a direct or an indirect way this action, that will put us in a more conventional military posture with them. And it is going to be very difficult to keep the other coalition. And obviously it means a lot more in terms of our efforts—an exceedingly complicated finding that would be.
Additionally, what do we do with current state sponsors of terrorism, who sponsor terrorist groups who weren’t involved in this specific incident, going forward. The definition that the President laid out in the initial statement on Tuesday, September 11, the night of the events, was quite broad. And in working through this definition, it is going to be a real diplomatic task. For example, who gets in this coalition? Do we give a pass to countries that support—there is a lot of terrorist groups out there. There’s lots of people who work on these issues, I see in the audience, Hesbola(?), Hamman(?), Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Algerian groups and others.
Do countries get a pass and get to get in this coalition because they weren’t involved in this incident, and give rhetorical support? I’d argue against that. What do we do with those countries? How hard do we press them? And how much support around the world can we get for acting against countries who are not involved in this particular incident—a real challenge. And state sponsorship, and how we deal with countries who support other terrorist groups is a real challenge for the administration.
Point four—it’s absolutely critical for the administration to keep in the front of its mind that it has to maintain the high ground internationally, and be very conscious not to allow this effort to be caricatured in a way that it is seen anywhere in the world that it’s crusade versus jihad. And that is quite important for the administration to keep right at the front of its concerns. The President will do a lot of that tonight in his speech. And there needs to be a continuing effort.
And the last point I’ll make is the continuing need to explain ourselves, and to reach clarity here as we go along. And I think the first step tonight by the President speaking to the Joint Session is an important step to explain from beginning to end the argument as to what we are doing, why we are going to do it, what is going to be required, and the time frames, and not try to lead this through sound bites. I think actually the speech tonight is absolutely necessary and probably a little overdue. Thanks.
M: Thank you. Mick?
MT: Thank you, Chuck. I can report to you tonight that the Pentagon has a tight lid on any military activities other than the movements that you see on television, which in large measure have a psychological effect not only on the American people, but presumably on the international community. This tight lid I think is because of concerns for operational security, or because they really don’t know what the hell they are going to do. And it is probably a little of both. But I think planning is going on but it is going to have to be very, very fluid.
Now, from a military standpoint, we are looking at two aspects of this, two levels. One is the international campaign against transnational terrorism. And the other is—a subset of that, more specifically—the business of going after bin Laden. And in the short time I have available to me, I’ll focus on the bin Laden issue, which is a rather more concrete problem for the American military. And I would say that we have all sorts of assets to do the job. We can send in the bombers, and we can fire the missiles, which was kind of the standard routine from the past. Or as people are saying, you know, we can put ground forces in there to do the job with focus on special operations capabilities.
So all of those things are available. But in the military profession, we have a saying that amateurs talk about strategy, and professionals talk about logistics. And I might add in this particular instance, to logistics we can also add the business of intelligence. If we are going to effectively use military force to take down bin Laden and break the back of his cells within Afghanistan, we need the basing, the staging places, to do the job.
We also need the real or near real time intelligence on what’s going on. We are marvelous in terms of technical intelligence, as you probably now, with intercepts and surveillance and that sort of thing. But the nitty gritty intelligence, the operational and tactile intelligence, we don’t have that capability. And we are not going to be able to develop that overnight, which brings me to the point of the importance of the peripheral nations. The Pakistanis of course; even our nemesis, the Iranians; and the former republics of the Soviet Union, and the Russians themselves, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkemenistan.
We have to approach them to provide the staging basis, and the overflight rights, to do the things that we have to do. And equally important as part of this dual track approach, they have to provide some of the intelligence for us to be able to react as to where bin Laden and his crowd is, what they’re doing. And if we have those things in precise measure, then we can make use of our forces to take him down, whether it’s by air, whether it’s through missiles, or whether it’s putting special operation forces and other on the ground.
And then there is another group that could be of enormous assistance to us, and that is known generally as the Northern Alliance. This is the group that is north of the Hindukush. These are made up basically of tajeks(?), as opposed to the pushtans(?) and pathons(?) to the south that represent the Taliban. They’ve been fighting ever since the removal of the Soviets from the area. They were led by a very able anti-Soviet leader, a man by the name of Massoud who was assassinated not too long ago. And the Northern Alliance would like nothing more than to assist the United States in taking down the Taliban, and with it the bin Laden crowd.
So I think there is an opportunity there for intelligence, but not only intelligence, but also for a logistics and for a basing capability for our ground forces, the special operations forces. It’s a daunting task to deal with this particular problem, because there isn’t a specific nation-state that is involved, except this more clearly-defined in terms of Afghanistan, but not in terms of the entire campaign against terrorism. But I think that in the process, it has to be a phased process, and the first phase of the process against international terrorism worldwide is to take down bin Laden and his crowd.
And I think if we are successful diplomatically and economically, to enlist the coalition, the peripheral states as well as the intelligence that can be provided by the overall community of nations that is currently supporting us, I think that we can get bin Laden one way or another, in a reasonable period of time, a period of time that’s well within the patience window of the American people.
M: Thanks, Mick. Mike?
MW: The question that seems to be on everybody’s mind besides the intelligence issues and the military issues is what the effect of all of this is going to be on the economy. And that is an easy question to answer. I don’t have a clue. But neither do the journalists and the pundits and all that you’ve been listening to regularly since last Tuesday. And if there is one message I’d like to leave with you, it’s to make a fundamental distinction between a plausible story and an accurate story.
We hear lots of plausible stories, people that are connecting the dots from A to B to C to D, and wind up with a recession or some kind of economic turmoil. The airlines are firing 100,000 people. The insurance companies are going belly-up. The tourism industry is going belly-up, and on and on and on. And from that, we are to conclude that this economy is going to be heading south very, very quickly.
That may happen. I can’t tell you it won’t. But there is reason to be quite cautious about listening to plausible stories. By plausible stories, I mean stories that stack up one sentence after the other that are not logically incoherent. But for which there is not a shred of evidence and in particular, one ought—the only thing we can do is look back to history to ask—does it give us a clue as to what might happen. And it is an interesting observation, I think, that if you go back 50, 60, 70, 80 years, and ask yourself, “Is there an instance of a one-shot event that ever turned the economy around one way or another?” I defy you to produce that for me.
We have an $11 trillion ocean liner. It doesn’t get buffeted by one-shot events. And while the events in Southern Manhattan were horrific—I lost friends, I lost four former students, and my wife who volunteered to do therapy as almost all therapists are doing in New York—her first patient was to talk to a high school student at Styvescent High which is right next door, who witnessed with her friends people holding hands, screaming, jumping out of 90th floor windows—these events were horrific, but if we become callous for the moment and ask, “Okay, so what’s it going to do to the economy?” The answer is if it remains a one-shot phenomenon, history tells us very little if anything.
We’ve had earthquakes here and abroad. We’ve had assassinations here and abroad. We’ve had a 20 percent meltdown on Wall Street in 1987. The economy didn’t notice. And it will not notice one—the amount of real estate, the buildings, the phenomenon that took place in Manhattan is not a significant factor for an economic system. And I’ll come back in a minute to what the vulnerabilities are. But taken by itself and based on history, there is no reason to project a cascading set of terrible economic events.
People also—we’re sitting here now after Wall Street fell another 300 or 400 points today—I didn’t see the final close, I was on a train from New York. Obviously it’s fallen thousands of points. People then connect the dots, Wall Street falling, these thousand events, Oh my God, what that’s going to do to the economy. Again, let history be your guide. If you ask the question, “How many economic downturns in the entire 20th century were caused by declines in financial markets?” The answer is one. And it isn’t the one you think. It was 1903. And I don’t think a lot of you are sitting around trembling that we are going to get a repeat of the 1903 downturn.
Again, things that may seem to be connected in your own minds rarely are in an economic sense. And by the way, there is good reasons for that. And again, at the risk of sounding callous and crude, yes, the airline industry is going to be in serious trouble. Yes, the tourism industry at least in terms of transcontinental tours, intercontinental flying, is going to be in serious trouble. But you have to ask yourself then, so what? If people stop flying to England, will they start motoring around the United States? Is Motel 6 going to pick up where the international airlines are going to be suffering? Are we going to have DVD industry and Blockbuster picking up business that would otherwise have gone to somebody else?
This economy has an incredible ability to be flexible and adapt. And if we are not spending dollars in one place as consumers, we are almost invariably spending them somewhere else. Again, as an economic system, there is astonishing flexibility and adaptability. Let me jump to the next part of the story. Let’s assume in some sense, bad things do cascade. I can’t prove they won’t. It’s certainly plausible, it’s possible. I don’t know that it can’t happen.
We’re not passive sheep. It’s not as if our economy moves in the direction that we can’t alter. We have Alan Greenspan and the fed. We have Congress. And here is a case where Congress in fact already shows its ability to turn around quickly and respond. Our monetary policy will respond if the economy keeps on heading down. Congress is already prepared to pass a payroll tax credit or something else that gets money into consumer’s hands relatively quickly.
Again letting history be the guide, it’s not a sure thing. It’s not fine-tuning, it’s not precise. But we sure as heck know enough to keep the economy from continually falling downward. We’re not the Japanese, we’re not tied as they are either by way of ideology or by way of bad economic circumstances to begin with. We start with a budget that’s in massive surplus. There is no problem here with Congress turning around and passing sizeable immediate tax cuts or spending programs. We’re not in the Japanese straightjacket.
The last point I want to make is the following: Are there vulnerabilities? Yes, and they’re considerable. One political, one economic. The economic is consumers. The vulnerability is if we really get into a war time mentality, I think that requires something more than a one-shot act of terror, no matter how horrific. But if there are other incidents, however less severe, and then consumers begin to cringe, and not only do they not spend on the international travel, but they also don’t spend on local travel. They don’t spend on restaurants, they don’t—they start saving. Not something I would easily predict, not something you’d find repeated in history very much, but that could happen. That’s a vulnerability.
But again, it’s not as if Alan Greenspan wakes up in the morning and sees that happening. It’s not as if he doesn’t know how to respond, doesn’t know exactly what to do and will take action—that won’t be perfect, whatever. There is a lot of conversation about whether this will tip the economy into recession. That conversation is largely artificial, because there is nothing terribly important or interesting about the number zero. Whether this economy is creeping upward at point-one percent and however slowly it’s been growing in the third quarter of this year, or whether it is decreasing at point-one percent, isn’t terribly different. And so whether we are knocked into recession as an arithmatic phenomenon, is not the issue, is not the big issue that frankly the journalists tell us it is. So let’s not get too caught up in that.
The question of course again is whether we get locked into something that begins to spiral. And that again as I said, we’re not—as a policy matter, we are not locked into a course of action that we can’t reverse. Another issue that arose in the last couple days is whether there is a problem financing whatever military responses that we have to undertake. And that question is almost laughable. This is a country that spends no more than a couple of percentage points of its output on its military. You can then ask an interesting question whether we ought to be spending more or less, but you surely can’t be serious about asking the question, “Can we afford to spend more or less?” That is a non-issue.
M: If an event such as this had been presented at an earlier time in response to a crisis when say Jessica Matthews was the director of the Washington program, or when Elton Frye was the director, they would have had four people up here. They would have had an Intel guy, someone to speak to the diplomatic component, someone to speak to the military component, and probably someone to speak to the economic component. But most likely, it wouldn’t have occurred to them to have someone her to speak to them on the security component. And it seems to me that that’s not only appropriate now, it is absolutely essential. Steve?
SF: Thank you, General. I think we need to be clear about what happened on September 11. What we had was a catastrophic event on our homeland that came as a result of people who were living in our homeland, who boarded domestic airlines and turned them into missiles and drove them into the World Trade Center towers and into the Pentagon. It seems to me that we should be talking about the vulnerability of our homeland to that kind of catastrophic event as part of the conversation about what that event means, and what we should be doing now that we are in the post-World Trade Center world.
It strikes me that what we really are right now focussed on is sifting through rubble on the one hand and making rubble on the other. But the real show-stopper issue of the fact that this illustrated that we have no credible security within a transportation system that is the arteries that feeds our economy, or access to that economy. I’m not an economist so I may get into the problem over overstating but certainly as someone who has seen it in operation—that poses a real problem for this country, particularly over the long haul.
This is what we did on the afternoon of September 11. We know we grounded the air fleet. What probably is less well-known is that we also virtually closed every seaport in this country, and we effectively closed the border with Canada. We effectively closed the border with Mexico. We essentially imposed a quarantine or blockade on our own economy to provide us with some sense of reassurance that that would make us more secure. The fact of the matter is we have a system up to this point where the aviation sector is bar none the most secure part of our transportation modes. I’ll bet that makes everybody warm and fuzzy all over.
Our maritime sector has virtually no security. The Port of Long Beach, for instance, which is the biggest port in our country, has only rent-a-cops, not a single sworn policeman offers security within the port of Long Beach. And that is where so much of our trade comes from Asia. It’s a huge task. We’ve got something like 489 million people, 127 million automobiles, 11.5 million trucks, close to 5.5 million-44 containers in maritime form, 820-odd-thousand planes, commercial planes, another 220,000 vessels. Who is going to inspect all that?
And if all of it, as it seems these terrorists were able to demonstrate to us, is susceptible to being turned into a conduit for a catastrophic event here in our homeland, then what you should be surprised at is the way in which all the agencies responsible for overseeing those sectors did, was to turn off the spigot. We essentially applied a tourniquet to our transportation arteries as our only way to protect ourselves presumably from this threat.
Now it’s a week later, what’s happened? Well, the border is basically opened back up, up with Canada. Why is that? Well, it’s probably because Customs ran out of money for overtime. It also is because of the fact that General Motors or Ford was talking about shutting down five assembly plants for a week because it couldn’t get parts from Ontario. Our transportation system matters to a great degree, and that transportation system is a global one, and basically we saw any policing of it as essentially adding friction to it and therefore, it was an inconvenience.
The only thing we wanted to see from an INS agent when we arrived from JFK or Dulles is “Welcome Home.” Anything beyond that was something that was undermining our competitiveness, causing disruption to our comfortable lives, and the result in this to make sure that they couldn’t do much more than that. We made sure that they have virtually no resources to actually do anything but say, “Welcome back to America.” And now we are surprised, shocked, that somehow the system could be exploited to cause a catastrophic event.
But are we focussing on that? No. We are focussing on a manhunt. We are focussing on finding the numero uno terrorist of the world, the FBI Most Wanted, and we are going to go after him. And that will make us secure, by golly. It reminds me a bit of the Pablo Escobar days, they’re going to take out Pablo Escobar and stop the cocaine from coming into the United States. The last time I checked, purities are up, price is down. One thing I can assure you of is the fact that the drug traffickers are moving a lot of merchandise right now because there isn’t a single Coast Guard cutter patrolling the Caribbean. But we have them surrounding the Port of New York, the Port of Charleston, basically standing there fending would-be terrorists from coming our way.
Here is what I think is frightening about this. It’s a bit like—America has faced in this situation, much like the British were faced just a few months ago with hoof and mouth disease. The problem is we know a bit with hoof and mouth was that when it broke out as an epidemic, the problem is the incubation period is such that you can’t really with confidence identify a disease-free cattle or sheep versus one that is diseased. So the place(?) had a singular option in order to restore its credibility of that market, was to cull it. Kill it, start anew.
To some extent, I think that is what we are seeing in the aviation sector. But if we have another event, and I think it’s likely we will, that exploits the surface mode or the C-mode, we’ll be faced with the same situation. We’ll have to turn it off, sanitize it and somehow make ourselves feel more secure by starting again. I think the disruptions to that are more than just the inconvenience of it taking a lot longer to get around than it used to. I think it has significant economic repercussions, in a society built around outsourcing and just-in-time delivery systems, and zero inventories.
Now we may have the vitality to essentially absorb that competitive edge. We’ve got nod(?) of that without real disruption to our lives, but it certainly should be something that should be I think of some concern. But here’s where we are. I would suggest that we are much now like on the homeland dimension of this like the Navy found itself in the post-USS cold war here this past summer in the Persian Gulf. Because the Navy really has protection capability in theater as was demonstrated by the US cold(?) attack. All bin Laden had to do is talk on a cell phone about possibly having another such attack, and the Navy had to essentially pull chops(?). Now we are going to be looking hard for terrorists everywhere, and we are going to see a lot of stuff that is going to scare us. And here the President of the United States, we’re now talking about a world where the weapons of mass destruction and biologic chemical weapons will much more easily come in a container and a truck, I assure you, than be deployed on a missile. And you are faced with a system that does not credibly offer you any security if you just keep turning it off every single time.
These are complicated issues that suggest that what we should be thinking a lot more about in this time is about how we deal with this vulnerability, how do we seize the moment, essentially, of public unity and concern to direct it to a kind of approach that makes sense. Let me finish with a few ideas about a make-sense approach.
What I suggest is that there is no way that you are going to be able to inspect yourself into security when you face the kind of numbers that are suggested. If you assume that every user is potentially an equal threat, then you are just going to shut down systems in order to try to make yourself more secure. And to some extent, to a large extent, that is what we are trying to do with aviation. Maybe we can make it work there. It will not work on surface, and it will not work on maritime.
So what do we do? I would suggest that we think instead, rather, you have to find a way to essentially do what I call “reverse profiling.” You’ve got to focus on how do you validate legitimate uses of the system as legitimate. And those users have to do things to bolster that confidence. So in other words, the goal is to try to take the overwhelming haystack of legitimate users, whether it’s people or goods, who travel throughout our transportation networks, and come across our borders, as such, so you can essentially set them aside and focus on your limited resources, on those which are high risk.
The next thing you want to be able to do is go to point of origin. Trying to detect and intercept the stuff in US context is a bit like trying to catch minnows at the base of Niagra Falls, a rather silly exercise. But upstream, there are places that make sense, that cause least disruption, and here we may talk about international cooperation by going to the place where these things originate from, and trying to make sure that they are secure.
And finally, what you—to get here, you need to look at what I call in-transit visibility and accountability. That is, as it moves through the system, you make sure that you actually can verify what’s there as legitimate, and then share information, ideally private sector users of the system, tell us up front who they are and what they are so you can meld that against your intelligence, intercept that which is high risk, and not disrupt the whole darn thing. That’s an illustration, I think, of the kind of—I hope—thinking that we should be engaged in, in this post-September 11 world, there is a lot more obviously involved, but it’s time to have the dialogue about how national security has come home, not how we can basically route out problems overseas.
M: Thanks, Steve. I had panned a really wonderful question here to get this kicked off. But I’m just going to turn it straight over to the audience, and anybody in the press first? Okay.
DB: David Bilard(?), formerly State Department. My question is for (Inaudible). I remember back in 1996, (Inaudible) I think it was right after COBAR, there was a major Presidential effort to combat terrorism. We had a G-7 ministerial(?) led by the Attorney General. We had 50 ways we would cooperate on intelligence, and law enforcement and customs, in order to get at terrorism. But in the end, we didn’t’ want to share intelligence with close allies who we couldn’t necessarily trust to protect it. Even our closest allies like the Brits wouldn’t pass asset forfeiture laws, the kinds that we had. And so a lot of well-intentioned efforts didn’t succeed. How will this time be different?
M: Well, from the intelligence standpoint, I think this is a very serious issue. And I think we really do need to concentrate on the question of why did this happen, and why did we fail so badly across so many agencies. And look at what these terrorists did. They were able to operate cells across many distributive points around the world. They were able to move people, finance across borders relatively easily. They used state of the art information technology. And they had very sophisticated operatives, which to me personally is one of the most frightening aspects of this whole thing. And we do have to focus on the people, if we are going to have a long term strategy here. Operatives who are very comfortable in our society, had lived here, married, had children, and were here for some time in very carefully planned operations.
What you see here I think is a—it’s a serious threat that comes from distributed points around the world, and in the network world. And you have to ask yourself the question—this is—after you see what the terrorists did, then ask how our government responds. Go to a deputy’s or a principal’s meeting, and you get the Department of Defense, you get the—our agencies are still very strong, and it isn’t just a question of sharing with allies and other intelligence services, which I think needs to be enhanced. But it is also just a question of sharing within our—the only agencies within our government, how information is developed and moves, how priorities are kept. And whenever you see—I mean, whenever the issue of handoff comes up, you know, “Oh, we passed it on to another agency,” so it was somebody else’s responsibility, then you know you’re—that is the fundamental issue we’re dealing with here. And that is why I think the homeland defense argument I think is ...
(SIDE B)
M:—look at Art Rudman, the recommendation, the basic recommendation
they’re making about a homeland defense agency is to have an agency that is going to dispense with all the barriers that exist across our agencies, and have one agency that is going to set their priorities, it is going to bring together all those large and small components within agencies to deal with counter-terrorism, and put them in one place, or at least make them accountable to one place. But the point I made earlier, it is not just terrorism, it’s a whole series of issues in a transnational front, that I don’t think we are dealing efficiently with as a government. And I think in a networked world, you’ve got to have a government that is networked, and much more networked than the one that we have now.
So—and again I would return to my point that I think we—as you look at our response, and as we look at now part of the world that we knew too little about, and I think we do have to deal with that, we are essentially confronted not just by the Middle East as the breeding ground, but we are also confronted by central Asia and South Asia, and the post cold war period after the collapse of the Soviet Union—we have to have a policy that is much more informed by the realities of that part of the world.
So the fundamental issue to me is how we respond, or how we prepare, respond, and protect the American people from this kind of threat. Because the threat is going to continue, whatever we do. And all the studies that we have done including the Bremar report on terrorism asserted that if you get rid of Osama bin Laden, the basic threat remains. It will hurt him, it will hurt his followers for a time. But the fact is, look at all those people who with seething heard of the United States carried out the operations they carried out last week. We have got to do a better job of getting to the bottom of why they feel the way they feel, the issues that they represent coming from the part of the world they come from, but also just how we as a government respond, and our capability to respond.
M: Tom, did you have something?
TD: I have a thirty-second statement on the political diplomatic side. I don’t think that the current situation can be compared to the situation at the Lyon Summit, 1996 or any previous time. This is a galvanizing event. And as with galvanizing events, things that didn’t seem possible the day before and would have been the subject of some nonsensical principles meaning about whether we are going to do X, Y and Z in the financial world or the intelligence world or the military world, things that were unthinkable the day before or hard the day before, are very thinkable and a lot easier.
M: Mr. Taub?
MT: Marvin Taub(?) with the Shorenstein Center at Harvard. I have a question for anyone on the panel that chooses to answer it. The President has spoken about an act of war. And he has said that the United States must now be engaged in a war in a crusade against terrorism, by which I assume he means global terrorism and not just the bin Laden network. Let’s be specific on Ammus(?) and Islamic jihad in the Israeli/Palestinian context. Are we now supposed to say to the Israelis in this fight against terrorism, “Go get them” or is it going to be our responsibility to go get them? And if either goes and gets them, that’s going to fight the larger diplomatic purpose of trying to calm things down in that part of the world, and bring the Israelis and the Palestinians together. So in this concrete sense I would seek your guidance as to what it is that is going to happen here, or what is it that is happening now?
M: Who would like to take that?
(Overlapping Voices)
M: A short answer is just a bit down the line, as I said. But as I said, Marvin, I think it is a—it’s a core question as to the definition of what the effort is. And I think as I’ve said that the effort will be in phases. One, to go after the perpetrators of this particular act with all the resources that we have, which is absolutely necessary to do. And I think the President and the international community will do that. Second is to make it untenable for states to support and host terrorism. And I think you’ll see an effort along those lines. But it will be a multi-faceted effort, not just military but also economic, financial, intelligence efforts, to do everything that we can do within the international community to make it untenable to host or support terrorists.
As I said in my remarks, I don’t think that these states who—you know, and I gave a list and there is a longer list than the list I gave of terrorist groups out there, should be given a pass because they give some rhetorical support to international effort. I think we need to delegitimize terrorism. I think we need to call upon states and the Middle East and elsewhere to stop efforts to make terrorism idols and to say one thing at international conferences, and another thing on their controlled media. And it has to be that kind of comprehensive effort.
M: Marvin, I think you asked the $64,000 question. What’s the definition of terrorism? And who is a terrorist? When is he a terrorist, when is he a patriot fighting a legitimate battle? It’s a subjective judgement at this particular point. But if the President of the United States has set us on a course to crush international terrorism, he had better be a little more definitive about what international terrorism actually is.
M: Yes, sir?
JS: I’m Jeremy Stone with Academy(?) Diplomacy. I wanted to say something about defending the country. I don’t think we have to close all the ports or all the land lines to protect the country. These guys were intent on highly leveraged carnage which would be very dramatic and symbolic. And their second act will be similar. It will involve targets that are economically very key, or targets that might cause a lot of damage like a nuclear reactor plant. I think we need to have a kind of red team and blue team exercise in which some very smart people try to duplicate the thinking of this very smart group in Afghanistan, and try to figure out which unthinkable things might be attacked next.
Short of weapons of mass destruction being involved, most things attacked wouldn’t have very dramatic significance. So we have to figure out exactly what has to be defended. I think this exercise should be done in part in the non- governmental sector by task forces of the Council or Carnegie to make sure it’s done property, because the bureaucracy is very overloaded, it’s very easy for them to leave the unthinkable, unthinkable. But if a pamphlet were to be put out by one of these groups about things they thought might be next steps, maybe they could hold the bureaucracy’s feet to the fire, make sure there was some action.
M: Could I make a comment on that? You know, during World War II, Winston Churchill was smart enough to bring together a bunch of eccentrics. And we did the same thing. Douglas Fairbanks was one of them on the reception side. But bringing together people who are outside the box, that don’t belong to the bureaucracy, don’t belong to academe, don’t belong to the press or anything else. These are eccentric people, artistic people, stage people, and set them to work to think outside the box on how to deal with—both offensively and defensively, with an intractable problem. And I think this is something that could benefit us. Because we just don’t understand these people.
These weren’t peasants that took this operation, these were sophisticated, educated people who gave their lives. Well, the sort of mentality that most of us have in this room, because of our culture and experience, just allows us to think of things in kind of a standard form, but putting together the eccentrics that are available in this country, we might come up with a pretty good idea of how to defend something and how to act against it.
M: We’ve got some pretty eccentric panelists right up here.
M: Chuck, could I make a point about that?
M: Certainly.
M: I just left government(?) a few minutes ago, and actually we had—I agree with you that we should have an outside group do it. But the point I want to make is that I think when you do do this kind of exercise, and we have done them fairly routinely, you come up with so many options, it is frightening. I mean, we can talk about terrorists using a boat with conventional explosives to blow up a fuel depot in Baltimore or Boston. We can talk about using a truck to blow up any number of buildings, and we have made ourselves vulnerable when we put 50,000 people in one building complex. We spent a lot of time worrying about the potential that we know these groups have for biological events using chemical weapons, the capability to get to use laser technology to shoot down a satellite in a society that is increasingly dependent on satellites.
I can run all these things. And the point I want to make to you is that in dealing with our Congress on this, one of the great frustrations is that we can’t come to grips with the threat assessment that comes out of all this. There is so much on it. And what the terrorists did to us in this case, and I think they probably know how worried we are about these speculated things, they essentially conducted an operation that was low tech. This was 1970s terrorist methodology, converting airplanes into bombs or missiles or firebombs, whatever you want to call them, and used implements that essentially you can buy in a hardware store to take over the aircraft.
So while you’ve got all this worry about the high tech end of what they can do, they went back and did a very low tech operation, but in a very, very sophisticated way. And so—and at the center of this, I believe, is the issue again of people. Because when you lay out the menu of all the frightening things that they can do and have the capability to do today, the common denominator is it takes people who have that seething hatred of the United States, and that was a common denominator of all these people. Why do they have that hatred? Even after they come to the United States, and as I said to many friends this past week, I always argue, you can get some of these people to come and live here or change their attitudes. Well, they came and they lived here. Their attitudes didn’t change at all. They maintained this ferocious ideological commitment to their cause.
I’ve also argued that if you can get to terrorists’ anger at marriage and family, it can make—it can certainly blunt the ferocity of their ideological commitments. These terrorists, some of them had marriages, were married, had families, and lived in the United States. So I think there is a kind of a bumper sticker to me that says something like, “It’s the people, stupid!” We’ve got to focus on that part of it also. What kinds of people are capable of doing what these folks did to us last week? And how do we get to the bottom of understanding them and the region of the world in which this kind of attitude is bred?
Because there is, as I say, a seething hatred of the United States which was sustained through experiences which I would have argued would not have kept that attitude.
M: Just a quick word, it’s just that while I think there are a limited list—if you care to look at these—a limitless number of scenarios of what could be targeted with the catastrophic events. But for international terrorism to work, you have to consummate that by moving people, and moving off into devices, and exploiting a system. And that system is a transportation sector that brings a lot of these peoples and goods to us. That system can be I think better policed. It is not now. The key is there are a lot of agencies who are in charge of sort of monitoring that, but they’re all just a piece of an elephant. Just take four data points, you would think. If we had a suspect ship with a suspect kind of crew with a suspect cargo, based on where it comes, arriving in Boston at the same day. And L&G, it looked like a natural gas tanker was coming in, you would say “Somebody may want to look at that ship.”
Those four data points would not meet right now. ONI would know something about the ship, Customs would know something about the cargo. INS may or may not know something about the crew until the crew actually arrived. And in the cabin, the (Inaudible) Coast Guard cabin, we know about the L&G schedule, but they would never come together. So there are clearly things that we can get beyond as a team. And we know there will be common exploitation of this system, and there are folks out there that we can bring these elements together. And that’s why I think one of Art Rudman’s main objectives, that is to say you’ve got to somehow herd those cats, so you have sufficient data elements to be able to act on intelligence in a way that you can prevent these hopefully before they materialize.
M: Right here, this gentleman first.
BC: Bill Courtney, DanCorp(?). In the past when we had cold war crises, we often relied on foreign assistance and on public diplomacy and radio broadcasts as key elements to build international coalitions for our purposes. To what extent do you think in addressing this issue a major change in our foreign assistance strategy should be part of the solution? And secondly, promotion of human rights and democracy in the Middle East/South Asian area, and use of public diplomacy to help facilitate that. And this is for Tom.
TD: I think that with respect to foreign assistance, I think there is going to be a lot of that involved here. Putting together the kind of coalition the President is talking about will require us to meet the demands of partners, you know, Pakistan is the best example that we have today, right? There is going to be a general train of—essential—and it’s potentially in an essential staging area, and logistical area, and it meets actually all the key elements you laid out, logistics, intelligence, staging, for any potential operation. And there is going to be a price for that, and it is a price that we should be willing to pay.
Jordan is another example. I don’t know if you have seen the public appearances by the King in the United States and around the world in international meetings. They’ve been spectacular though in support of this effort, and they’ll be—I think we should stand up in the foreign assistance realm, and pursue it much more aggressively as a priority. And we’ll have to, I think, as this effort goes forward. With respect to public diplomacy, I think that Bill Safire had a very interesting column this morning with respect to psychological warfare through public diplomacy. And how we go about putting that together is an everything—and getting that back as a competency is an important question I think to be part of this as well.
The last thing I’ll say with respect to public diplomacy is that—to reiterate the point I made earlier, which is that I do think we need to, as part of putting together this coalition as I mentioned to Marvin, I think we do need to insist that if you are part of this coalition, if you agree with it rhetorically, you need to act. And part of acting means that you don’t say things differently on the ground in your country than you are saying at these international meetings. That is one of the biggest failings the United States had, and I take some blame for this, in the Clinton administration. That was one of the biggest failings we had, for example, in the Palestinian/Israeli situation where we tolerated them not preparing their people for peace in the Palestinian territories. And this goes on all through the Middle East with this kind of dual game, I think that’s played that we shouldn’t—it’s not exactly public diplomacy but it is an aspect of trying to delegitimize terrorism and bring publics along.
M: Last question right here, this gentleman.
JN: Hi, Jamie Nutsel(?), my question is for Tom. Sorry to overload you. But given that there is such pressure in the United States right now to do something which means getting troops out into the region; and given that there is an increasing awareness of how complicated it is going to be, and that the traditional terminology of war doesn’t really apply, it seems to me that once the troops get out there, there is going to be a whole new dynamic of what it feels like as a country to have our boys and girls, or whatever, out in the theater. How do you think that is going to change American attitudes regarding this fight against terrorism? And how can and should the administration now be thinking about that potential future?
TD: Yes, sustain—and other folks here have talked about this, but sustainability is obviously a key challenge here because it is going to be, as everyone on the panel has said, a long effort. And the President will lay that out tonight. I think that there is actually a pretty good degree of understanding in the public right now, there has been a tremendous amount of information put out to the public by the media and by the administration, by commentators. And I think it had the effect of deepening the understanding.
Now, we are a country that has a famously short attention span. And I think it will be a—it is just a central challenge. It is one of the things that the administration will have on its lists of things to do, which is to sustain support. Having said that, you know, as you know, and again John Otis(?) can talk to this, a lot of the things we will do here will not be front page spectacular successes. There will be big successes, but not kind of spectaculars, you know, that will be things that you’d want that you are going to have a parade about. So it is a very different kind of effort to sustain.
Part of it I think will be to keep a focus on the homeland defense issues here, you know, the President can fight this effort abroad, and I think the Congress and the Administration needs to focus very hard on educating and looking down the line for potential next—possible threats here and putting I think a big civil defense effort together that people can get their arms around and get into. I think all those things are part of it. Sustainability is just obviously a key thing both in terms of domestic support and in terms of international coalition. I don’t know if other folks have a point there.
I just—my sense is, and General Trainer said this earlier, I think that there is a depth of understanding of this and sustainability in the American public right now, and General Trainer, you said that earlier, I believe. I think it’s sustainable.
M: Let’s hope so. We’re staying with the council rules. It’s 7:30. In the coming days and in the coming weeks, we’ll be adding program content. And we’ll be blast-faxing these things to you often with no more than one day advance notice. Please keep your eye on your faxes. We have a terrific program coming up next week, watch for that, and the week to follow. And stay with us on it.
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