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| Interviewee: | Stephen E. Flynn, Ira A. Lipman Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism and National Security Studies |
|---|---|
| Interviewer: | Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor |
June 18, 2004
Stephen E. Flynn, the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, says the 9/11 Commission hearings that ended June 17 show that “if we had a government that was truly focused on it as a threat, there were reasonable odds that [9/11] could have been prevented.” The author of the upcoming book “America the Vulnerable,” Flynn adds that the hearings should finally put to rest the charge of an operational link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. “There’s never been any evidence I’m aware of that there was an operational connection between Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda. I haven’t seen any new evidence to the contrary,” he says.
Flynn was interviewed by Claire Miller, research associate at cfr.org, on June 18, 2004.
The 9/11 Commission staff report says the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) were unprepared for the attacks launched on 9/11. Have air defense and communication between NORAD and the FAA improved?
Air defense capabilities certainly have improved in terms of the ability for NORAD to scramble [immediately launch] aircraft and have a protocol for what to do when they are up there. But what’s still problematic is the hand-off between the FAA and NORAD. As the 9/11 testimony highlighted, the challenge is getting the communications right while the government is still in a process of reorganizing in the area of homeland security. You have the TSA [Transportation Security Administration], the Department of Homeland Security, and the FAA, which is still under the Department of Transportation. All of this undoubtedly requires some sorting out of who’s got authority over what. It’s still unclear whether or not the agencies have all the protocols worked out or have exercised them adequately.
Do you think air defense officials have adequately shifted their thinking from responding to pre-9/11 hijackings, in which hijackers landed planes and issued demands, to the new threat of suicide hijackings?
The biggest changes that happened to deal with the aviation security threat were two things that have nothing to do with what we are talking about: hardening of the cockpit door and changing the behavior of the passengers.
In what way has 9/11 changed passengers’ behavior?
The expectation of passengers pre-9/11 was that when a plane got hijacked, they were going to a warm place that serves lousy food for awhile until people sorted it out— the model of the Cuban hijackings. And on the American Airlines flight [that crashed into the World Trade Center], you can hear [hijacker] Mohammed Atta saying, “We are going back to an airport.” He was very much playing on that set of expectations.
Much of the focus of the 9/11 Commission was on threat information being shared among the U.S. government players, and the extent to which the secretary of transportation and the head administrator of the FAA were cognizant of the threat data. [But also,] this was information that perhaps should have been more widely shared with the general public. At the end of the day, a lot of homeland security is not going to come by scrambling airplanes or by officials acting in a seamless fashion. It requires informed citizens and participants in these sectors to both identify the threat and figure out ways in which they can manage it. When you are entirely reliant on this very formal and largely secretive process to manage this security threat, it’s very frail.
The 9/11 Commission reiterated that al Qaeda remains intent on striking the United States, possibly with WMD. How prepared are we for a WMD attack now if al Qaeda succeeds in obtaining chemical, radiological, or biological weapons?
We are neither well-prepared to detect WMD that comes across our borders, nor are we well-prepared to respond to a WMD attack effectively should it reach a target inside the United States, and that’s particularly true for urban areas.
What’s the impact of the 9/11 Commission’s finding that al Qaeda and Iraq did not cooperate? In recent days, the Bush administration has stood by its earlier claims that there was a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.
There’s never been any evidence I’m aware of that there was an operational connection between Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda. I haven’t seen any new evidence to the contrary. The administration is relying on evidence that contact was made. Well, the real question they should ask is if that contact actually relayed itself into any operational relationship. There’s clearly no evidence that that was the case; the commission hasn’t been able to find that that was so. And so jumping to the conclusion that there was a close working relationship is something I find somewhat incredulous because of what al Qaeda [a radical Islamist organization] represents and the nature of the secular regime in Iraq. The old adage is the enemy of your enemy is your friend. But it never seemed to me particularly credible that these two enemies would be operational friends in pursuit of their objectives, which were never symmetrical. Saddam was very much interested in controlling more of the world, not in destroying the modern system [as al Qaeda is].
Have the 9/11 Commission hearings demonstrated that the U.S. government had enough clues about the attacks prior to 9/11 that it might have been possible to stop them?
The data that the 9/11 Commission is unveiling shows that if we had a government that was truly focused on this as a threat, there were reasonable odds that it could have been prevented. We’re seeing, as a result of the commission’s report, that the Department of Defense was not focused on catastrophic attacks, certainly not those that would originate here. The administrators within the domestic agencies that held this responsibility were not treating it with a real sense of priority. There’s clear evidence that there wasn’t the real focus that the nation should have had on trying to deal with the problem. If they had the focus, it’s reasonable that somewhere along the line, the alarm would have gone off, and we could have prevented this thing. Or, again, if we had talked candidly about the threat with the American people, they would have at least been able to take matters into their own hands, perhaps, and that would have been a [measure of prevention].
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