Are You Safer Today?

A One Thousand Day Perspective on Counterterrorism since 9/11

It will soon be a thousand days since al Qaeda launched its first successful attack within U.S. borders. Since that time many changes have taken place inside our country and in the way we deal with other nations around the world. Most of those changes have been justified as steps that were necessary to insure that nothing like September 11th ever happens again. But how much progress have we really made toward that goal and how far have we come in reducing the likelihood that it will happen again. One thousand days has often been viewed as a period of time for communities and even whole nations to stop and take stock. What have we done right? What have we done wrong? What are our largest remaining areas of vulnerability? What are our prospects of getting hit again?

I think our efforts to prevent future terrorist attacks can be divided into three pieces. The first step was to hit al Qaeda and hit them hard. Take the battle to them and destroy their leadership; their ability to communicate; their ability to raise and transfer funds; their ability to attain weapons and to move members between countries and most importantly, their capacity to organize attacks against the United States.

The second step was to understand the factors in the Arab and Muslim worlds that feed this kind of senseless anger and why that anger has been directed toward the United States. Why did so many ordinary people in the Muslim world cheer on September 11th and what does it take to reduce or at least redirect the anger that is now so focused on the United States.

Thirdly, what are we doing to upgrade our defenses here at home? What goals have we set? Do they make sense? How well have we performed in reaching those goals?

I think the United States has for the most part performed well with respect to the first goal, particularly if we look at the early stages of our effort and if we view al Qaeda as an organization rather than an idea or a cause. The organization is largely in tatters. While a number of its most senior leaders have survived, the best evidence indicates that they have grave difficulty communicating with others in the organization or playing any kind of day-to-day leadership role. There are significant numbers of lesser members of the organization that are still at large and they are very dangerous. But they face much greater challenges moving about the world, receiving the training necessary to successfully execute large scale attacks and getting the materials and support necessary to launch such attacks.

The initial phases of our attack against al Qaeda were highly successful. The planning and execution of the overthrow of the Taliban government in Afghanistan was a high-water mark in our efforts against terrorism and the initial cooperation that we received in the wake of September 11th from not only our traditional allies in Europe but from nations across the globe that have at times been less than friendly to U.S. interests was also impressive.

But some how, we lost our focus. Having destroyed the Taliban’s capability to rule Afghanistan we did not move aggressively to insure that the government that we support could fill the void. We did not invest anything like the level of resources into Afghanistan that was needed to make rapid noticeable changes in the quality of life and we therefore did not have the leverage to strengthen the hand of central government to extend the rule of law and deny terrorists safe haven in large portions of the country. We also did not exert our influence to insure that the Afghan army that we were attempting to build was representative enough of the various ethnic and tribal groups across the country to become a credible force for stability and unification.

But the attack on al Qaeda began to loose steam outside of Afghanistan as well. Talented intelligence operatives with the highly specialized knowledge of Arab culture, language and political behavior were moved from the listening posts and operations centers across the Arab world where al Qaeda activity was most likely to surface to undertake a different mission. Financial resources and talented administrators and trainers who might have helped our allies in the Arab world improve their own military and intelligence capabilities against indigenous terrorist organizations were also diverted. The striking momentum, which we had in the early phases of our efforts against the Al Qaeda, has greatly dissipated. The organization has lost much of its backbone but many of its pieces are still out there attempting to reorganize and regenerate the segments that have been lost. We no longer have the focus to our effort to insure that that does not happen.

Still, you would have to say that our efforts against al Qaeda have been a success—at least if al Qaeda is viewed simply as an organization. The problem is that al Qaeda is as much an idea as it is an organization and ideas are hard to kill. Bullets can kill organizations—they sometimes only strengthen ideas.

As General Anthony Zinni said recently in a lecture before the Center for Strategic and International Studies, while we may be winning the war on terrorism on a tactical level, we don’t appear to even have a plan on the strategic level.

Osama bin Laden never intended al Qaeda to be the command structure for the jihad against the United States. The term “al Qaeda” means simply, “the base.” Bin Laden wanted to create a network to support and encourage jihad. He wanted to attack and overthrow the Arab governments around the world that he viewed as corrupt and out of sink with his views on the teachings of the Koran and he wanted to attack the foreign power that stood behind most of those governments—namely the United States. Bin Laden’s challenge was to create a blueprint that could be used for such attacks and inspire large numbers of disgruntled members of the Arab and Muslim world to follow that blueprint. He wanted to create a movement that represented more than a small army of terrorists—a movement that could bring down moderate Arab governments and drive the United States from the Middle East with the overwhelming support of Arab peoples.

While Osama bin Laden has suffered huge setbacks over the past thousand days, he has been enormously successful in the progress he has made toward his one strategic objective. He has captured the attention of Arab World and much of the Muslim world. To a remarkable degree he has even won their sympathies and in some instances their commitment. If we wish to reverse that, we must begin to think strategically as well as tactically. We must reshape the image that the United States has in the Arab and Muslim worlds and we must not only strengthen our friends in the region to resist terrorism but also encourage them to address the underlying problems that feed it. There is little hope for many of even the brightest and most industrious young people in most Arab countries. While the energy resources of the region have brought great wealth to a few and provided many governments with the resources that could have produced opportunity economies, a chance that has largely been missed.

How we change our image in the Arab world and what policies we should pursue to that end is an issue that will spark debate and some division in this country. That debate needs to begin and it is the responsibility of leaders in both the executive and legislative branches to initiate that national discussion.

Given how poorly we have done in stemming the anti American passions in the Middle East over the past 1000 days, it is even more important than we do a very good job in the third step, upgrading our defenses here at home. In evaluating our performance in this regard, it is important that we separate activity from progress. I am afraid that in many respects we have had more activity that we have had progress.

On September 11th, we had more than 130 agencies and activities of the federal government engaged in some aspect of homeland security. These pieces of the bureaucracy were spread across most of the Department’s of the federal government and there was no central oversight or way of monitoring how well they worked together to meet the common objective. Many of these agencies had only a fraction of the resources that were necessary to accomplish the security tasks that experts in the field felt necessary to do the things that government reasonably could do to prevent future attacks.

So what has changed after a thousand days?

We are certainly spending more money. The government is spending about $5 billion a year more just on airport baggage and passenger screening. We have expanded the size of the customs service and the immigration service. We have bought new equipment in our ports to screen cargo coming into the United States from international shipping and we have had a significant growth in law enforcement activities. But if you look at the challenge we face and the resources we as nation have to meet those challenges, I don’t think that there is any conclusion other than we are by and large trying to do this on the cheap. We are like a person with a good paying job that must get to work on time every day in order to keep the job. Instead of buying the most reliable car he can find, he gets a fifteen year old model—one that will get him there most of the time but which will eventually cost him his good paying job.

Failure in establishing our defenses against terrorism not only puts the lives of the men and women who might be killed at risk but to a substantial degree our whole capacity to generate wealth as a society. Although the greatest loss would be measured in human life, the justification for penny pinching on necessary security is fool hearty from a simple economic perspective.

OMB has prepared an analysis of homeland security spending which is seriously flawed in a number of respects. Programs that were not counted as homeland security a few years ago have now suddenly been shifted into the homeland security category in order to convey the notion of a greater increase in effort than has actually taken place. Nonetheless, the table is instructive for getting some big picture sense of what we are doing to address critical security issues. In total, OMB argues that we have gone from spending $20 billion a year or about two tenths of one percent of GDP in fiscal 2000 to $46 billion a year or less that four tenths of one percent today. That means that even based on OMB accounting our increase in homeland security spending has been less than two tenths of one percent. To provide some perspective on that number, the share of GDP paid in federal taxes has dropped from 20.8% to 16.4% during that same period—a decline of 4.4% or twenty two times the size of the increase in spending to protect against terrorism.

Another perspective on the level of effort we have made thus far is the oft-used analogy of Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor led us to the creation of the concept of Gross Domestic Product. The Roosevelt Administration believed that it might require 50% of our total output to take on the Germans and the Japanese simultaneously. They asked the Commerce Department to develop a method of measuring national output and they not only got a concept that is now used around the world to measure economic activity but also they were actually able to spend nearly half of the nation’s output on the war effort.

We do not need to put 50% of our output into this war or even 5%. Regardless of whether you think that our efforts in Iraq have an association with the war on terror—even they account for about 2% of GDP. But it is blatantly ridiculous to pretend that we have resource constraints for things that we seriously need to protect against terrorist attacks. Another attack could erase a trillion or two trillion dollars from the total valuation of the New York Stock Exchange. It could slow the pace of economic growth substantially for a period of a year or more. Again, the most important consequence of a terrorist attack is the loss of human life, but penny pinching on homeland security makes no sense even if we consider only the economics. In fact, the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security found that the cost of the 9/11 attack was nearly 2 trillion dollars, including the loss in stock market wealth, lower corporate profits and higher discount rates for economic volatility.

It should also be pointed out that the Administration’s 05 budget attempts to make a case that we can in future years reduce the size of federal deficits from the current record levels and still be able to afford additional tax cuts. In making that case they project future year spending levels in various categories of the budget. With respect to Homeland Security, spending is essentially locked into place at current levels. What OMB is telling us, is that unless the American people or the Congress forces a change in priorities, what we have now for securing the nation is all that we are going to get.

But the real question is, is that enough? Are there things that we really ought to be doing, which the resources we have allocated to the problem don’t allow us to do?

One lesson from September 11th that virtually no one could miss is the need to secure our airlines and our airways. We have spent considerably more on this objective than on any area of homeland security. But there are a surprising number of resource issues still unaddressed with respect to protecting our airways.

We still do not have an effective system of explosive detection. Put more directly, it is still much too easy to get explosive materials onto passenger airlines.

The Transportation Security Administration identified equipment that could have provided us with that capability. Although expensive, (it would have cost close to $3 billion to install the equipment nationwide) it would have dramatically improved our capacity to detect explosive materials and in addition, it would have significantly reduced the number of screeners required in airports around the country. The savings in TSA personnel costs from the use of this equipment was, in fact, estimated to be large enough to offset the entire cost of the equipment within a period of only a few years.

The Transportation Security Administration proposed to OMB that the agency go forward with the purchase of a major portion of the needed equipment when it was preparing its plans to meet the 2002 explosive detection requirement set in law. OMB decided, however, that the expense could not be accommodated within the tight but arbitrary limits for homeland security spending which the President and the Director of OMB had decided to impose. Republicans in Congress also adopted a budget resolution that did not provide the Appropriations Committee with the latitude to move forward with the purchase. As a result we do not have an effective system of detecting explosive materials and that failure relates entirely to artificial constraints on resources and incompetent budgeting. TSA has recently acknowledged that the more expensive machines would pay for themselves within 3 to 5 years.

Following September 11th there was broad recognition of the fact that we needed to restart the sky marshals program and insure that there were enough marshals on domestic and international passenger flights that potential highjackers would always have to calculate the possibility that a sky marshal might be present on a targeted flight.

While the exact number of marshals that the President and the Congress agreed were necessary has remained classified—few people realize that we are no longer operating at that level. No one has come forward with convincing arguments that the level was too high. That adequate safety can be assured at a lower level. We simply, once again, allow arbitrary budget limits applied to one small portion of overall budget policy to drive a decision that may put a great many Americans at risk. Under the President’s budget submission for Fiscal 2005, we will have 20% fewer sky marshals than the President and the Congress agreed just two years ago that we needed. That is in spite of the fact that there has been a significant increase during that period in the number of domestic and international flights and in the number of passenger miles flown.

We have had—and continue to have—serious problems with respect to communication between military pilots who have the ultimate responsibility of insuring that commercial aircraft are not used to crash into buildings and the commercial aircraft and the FAA system that controls them. Quite simply, military and commercial flight systems cannot simply and quickly talk to one another and the potential that leaves for miscalculation and mistakes is horrific.

Despite the fact that this problem could be solved for relatively little money, the military felt the commercial system should foot the problem and the FAA and the airlines felt it should be addressed in the military budget. OMB decided the cheapest solution was to sit on their hands.

Finally, last fall I decided for them. The $10 million that was required was earmarked in the Defense Appropriation bill. I suppose that is a good ending except the delay in funding means that the system will not be operative until 2006. That not only gives you one other thing to think about when you board a plane but it gives more than a little insight into how decisions about homeland security resource needs are being sorted out within the executive branch.

While these examples of inaction with respect to airway security are serious, they do not begin to compare with the nearly total abdication of responsibility with respect to rail transportation. As the recent attacks in Spain have demonstrated our enemy is not wedded to attacks on any single mode of transportation. He will watch and wait until he finds a vulnerability that can be exploited. There are two serious vulnerabilities with respect to rail. One is Attacks against our freight rail system that handles a huge portion of the materials, products and chemicals that allow our economy to function and the second is attacks like those in Spain against some portion of the roughly 13 million Americans who use passenger rail systems each day.

Luckily, the Department of Transportation and other agencies in the executive branch began a process of sharing classified threat information with the nation’s rail freight carriers in the late 1990s. The plans developed as a result of that process are in place and provide a foundation for very significant security upgrades. But the plans are dependent upon the federal government meeting certain obligations it made during the planning process. Specifically, federal security forces are required to monitor tracks and facilities. Not only have we failed to do this but we have not designated the agency or department that will supply the forces or established a means of training them.

As unnerving as the lack of progress in securing our heavy freight and passenger rail systems may be, the security efforts in behalf of transit systems is even worse. The White House has failed to mediate the dispute between the Departments of Homeland Security and Transportation over who is actually in charge of transit security. Both departments have rejected a General Accounting Organization report recommending a resolution of the issue. The impasse continues despite the fact that it is halting any significant progress in securing the systems and the fact that transit systems have been the most frequent targets of terrorist attacks. These attacks have included buses in Israel, the subway system in Japan, and the commuter rail system in Spain.

Despite the dispute over who should be in charge of transit security, neither Department is willing to spend even a small fraction of the security related costs most experts feel is necessary. Department of Transportation security funding for transit systems totals $ 37 million in the current year and the Department of Homeland Security has allocated only $115 million over the past two years. In contrast, the transit industry estimates that $6 billion is needed for security training, radio communications systems, security cameras and limiting access to sensitive facilities.

What is the Department of Homeland Security’s answer to these unmet needs?

They testified as recently as this spring that more funds are not necessary until they have had a better opportunity to define the problem. That is an orderly approach which we should applaud as long as the Department can guarantee al Qaeda’s cooperation with their schedule. My concern is that the Department is likely to get some help that they have not asked for in developing a definition of the transit security problem. The Department has clearly become aware of how vulnerable they are to criticism on the lack of serious attention to transit issues. I classic move to cover their bureaucratic backsides, they only weeks ago issued a directive to transit systems ordering them to take a serious actions that the Department’s own data collection systems indicate that the vast majority of transit authorities across the country have already completed.

Since September 11th the vulnerability that has troubled many experts the most has been maritime cargo and the exposure of our ports to a nuclear, chemical or biological attack from a weapon placed in a shipping container. As the President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Tom Donohue has pointed out, such an event could not only cause death and destruction on a scale too massive to even measure against the attacks launched on September 11th, it would virtually shut down our global trading system for an extended period of time. The economic consequences of that would be almost incalculable but terms like economic downturn or recession would not be appropriate in describing the probable aftermath.

While the Bush Administration has spent billions looking for new technologies that would have the capacity to knock a nuclear warhead out of the sky if it were launched in the nose cone of an intercontinental ballistic missile, and investing in the development of other technologies that are intended to serve that purpose but probably cannot, they seem virtually clueless to the fact that a rouge state or a terrorist organization can simply place such a weapon in a shipping container and explode it upon arrival in New York Harbor or in Los Angles, San Francisco, New Orleans or Boston. A ship can transport a far less sophisticated weapon than that which could be placed on an ICBM. It can be massive in size and it does not need to even be thermonuclear in order to cause massive numbers of casualties, destruction and economic chaos.

So what have we done to protect ourselves? Protecting our ports is not unlike protecting our airports. We need to have a number of security perimeters. The first should be overseas. That requires a whole new approach to cargo inspection. It requires that our inspectors leave the United States, establish cooperative relationships with port security officials in countries around the world that ship to the United States and beyond that they establish a system of certification and best practices with major exporters around the world.

This is not a Democratic proposal. This is roughly the proposal that George Bush’s own appointed head of the Customs Service, Bob Bonner, took to the White House in months immediately following September 11th. It is the proposal that the Council on Foreign Relations Task Force, headed by former Senators Rudman and Hart have endorsed. It is the proposal that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has written editorials to support.

But the White House waited until last year to request the first dime for this effort. What ever presence the United States has had in foreign ports over the past one thousand days has been entirely as a result of Congressional increases to homeland security spending—increases that were opposed by the White House, increases that the White House threatened at various stages in the legislative process to veto and increases which on one occasion the White House did veto.

Last year, the White House reversed themselves and requested some portion of the funds that were needed for container security. Their position changed from, “we can’t afford it” to “we needed to wait.” That is a turnaround and I suppose we should welcome it. But the $126 million, which the president has proposed for FY2005, will not fund the program. It will not even allow us to fully staff the 45 foreign ports where DHS had planned to inspect all manifest documents. It will not permit our current foreign inspection programs to become permanent. We are currently in only 17 ports. We currently have no container security presence in China, the biggest US trading partner in terms of cargo containers. The number of cargo containers arriving to the US from China is more than three times those arriving from Hong Kong. .

More troubling than the mere question of resources is the lack of political or bureaucratic clout behind this critical initiative. If having inspection agents working with foreign customs officials is the be a truly effective means of understanding what is in foreign ships before they leave for U.S. ports, it requires developing long term relationships between our agents and those who control the foreign ports we wish to monitor. This involves a new level of training and expertise for our customs agents. It involves establishing continuity in the relationship with have with host governments in terms of what we expect to get and what incentives we can provide to those who cooperate. Nothing could be more destructive to this effort than to rotate agents with only a few months of experience in and out of foreign ports based on a deliberate system of staffing through temporary assignment…but that is precisely what we have done. In the few foreign ports where we have a presence that presence is a U.S. customs officer detailed there on a six-month temporary duty assignment. Those agents don’t even know what the problems were between the U.S. and the host government when the program was initiated. They are certainly not people that officials of the host government would want to invest much time in getting to know—they will be gone before there is any pay off in developing a relationship.

If the overseas effort to identify and insure the contents of cargo containers is the outer perimeter for protecting our ports, the ability of the Coast Guard to interdict, board and inspect U.S. bound shipping at sea in the next perimeter. The Coast Guard’s capacity to perform that function has also been restrained by lack of resources. The Administration frequently states that the Coast Guard is now boarding all vessels that are deemed to be “high interest.” They do not mention that only 20% of all other vessels are boarded.

Observing and tracking and controlling ships as they approach and enter into American waters are the next perimeters in securing our ports. Systems have been developed that are very similar to the manner in which air traffic control directs airplanes entering into U.S. airspace and approaching U.S. airports. These systems, however, are available in only nine ports leaving 45 major ports without such a system. Again, this not only penny wise and pound foolish with respect to port security it is also a bad decision simply with respect to good long term cost effectiveness. The more automated systems not only permit more rapid detection of ships that are not following control directives, they can be operated by fewer people and are long term cost savers.

Inside our ports there are numerous critical issues. One is preventing unauthorized persons from having access to ships, containers or port storage areas. A second is protecting hazardous chemicals and materials from attack. The Coast Guard estimated that the 185 commercial seaports in the United States would need about $7 billion in funding to access vulnerabilities and take necessary action to correct those vulnerabilities. These port authorities do not in most instances have the revenue raising authorities to pay any significant portion of these costs. This year was the first time the Administration requested any money for this purpose, and it only requested $46 million. The Congress has been able to appropriate only $587 million or less than 10% of the money needed.

Another major priority has been securing our land borders—In particular, the 3000 mile (this number is 5000 if you count the Alaska portion) U.S. border with Canada. Despite our continuing strong economic and political ties to Canada, the situation of the two nations with respect to potential terrorist attacks is quite different. Canada’s role in world affairs and the perception of Canada by the international community make it a less likely target of attack. At the same time, Canada’s vast natural resources and relatively small population has led to far more lenient immigration policies than those in place in the United States.

As a result there will continue to be differences between the two countries on how external security concerns are managed. That means that controlling our border and the movement of people and cargo across that border is suddenly a matter of much greater concern.

Recognizing that concern, the Congress incorporated language in the Patriot Act calling for the tripling of the number of border agents and inspectors on the Canadian border above the levels we maintained on September 11th. According to data as of October 2003, we were still more than 2000 people short of this goal. In addition, there was a clear need for significant additional equipment on the Canadian border to insure that those personnel were efficiently used. This included items such as air stations, radiation monitors, and surveillance equipment.

To date we have fewer than about 3,900 agents and inspectors on the border, in other words about one third of the positions promised in the patriot act are still unfilled. Further the 05 budget promises no increases from current levels and the President’s out year budget projection provide a strong indication that personnel strength at the border will decline rather than increase over the next five years. With respect to equipment, we have provided the first air station (not requested by the Administration) and some radiation monitors but have made no critical investments in things such as surveillance equipment.

In responding to the events of September 11th it was clear that the brave men and women serving in the police, fire and emergency medical units in New York, New Jersey, Virginia, the District of Columbia and Maryland needed a significant amount of equipment and training to more effectively respond to the types of attacks that occurred on that day. In addition, it was readily apparent that first responder units across the nation did not have most of the equipment that would be necessary in the event of a nuclear, chemical or biological attack.

The needs of local first responders were spelled out in some detail in the Rudman Hart reports for the Council on Foreign Relations. However, the federal government has chosen to leave local governments with the vast majority of the burden and since the Federal Government has the primary capacity to support such investments in the tough economic times, our progress in equipping first responders has been minimal.

Of the $98 billion in first responder needs identified by the Rudman-Hart report, the Feds have produced less only $14.5 billion, or 15%. As a result only 13% of fire departments can respond to a HAZMAT incident. An estimated 57,000 firefighter’s lack the personal protective clothing that would be needed in a chem-bio attack. An estimated 1/3 of firefighters per shift are not equipped with self-contained breathing apparatus and nearing half of the available units are 10 years old. Only half of all emergency responders on shift have portable radios. And we still have massive needs for interoperable communications equipment. We will probably never know how many victims in the World Trade Centers could have been saved if they knew to evacuate the buildings. We know that this was a communication problem, pure and simple and disastrous.

These are only a few examples of where we have cut corners in establishing the best line of defense that we are capable of here at home.

But there is more to the story than simply talking about resources. In many instances, we have not had the leadership necessary to organize available resources in effective ways. In its first year of operation the new Department of Homeland Security has even disappointed those with low expectations. The bureaucratic snarls have been so intense that the Department did not on its first anniversary have a working phone directory. My staff has been asking for one for more than six months and has yet to receive it. Also, it has been reported that when callers phone the Department’s hotline number, it just rings and rings. Members of Congress from the President’s own party have expressed grave concerns about the inability of the Department to respond to requests for information in any kind of a reasonable time frame.

One possible cause of the rampant chaos at the department has been the injection of a huge number of political appointees. Since the creation of the Department more than one quarter of all personnel who have been hired for departmental operations have been political appointees. These individuals often appear more fixated on positioning themselves politically than on the nuts and bolts security problems that the Department must address. We have seen a huge number of press releases promoting the Departments efforts but we have few concrete efforts worthy of such promotion. We still do not have regulations regarding---------

Typically political appointees remain in their appointed positions for less than 24 months. At that point, they are off to some other part of the administration or headed back into the private sector. Building true long-term competency within any Department is therefore heavily dependent on recruiting a professional and committed career staff. But the 114 political appointees now swarming the halls at DHS have if anything impeded that process. Of the 500 career positions needed to run the department, 171 remain vacant. One of the most critical positions in any Department is that of Budget Director. In only 14 months DHS has had three budget directors.

I spoke to a group of reporters at the National Press Club about a year and a half ago about where the country stood at that time in protecting itself against terrorist attacks. I feel that the coverage of that event was fair and I think we exposed some problems that as a result of that coverage have been fixed. But I also think that the press and the public have a presumption that this is such a complex issue that we simply have to trust the President and his advisors in the Executive Branch to do what is right. I think many of my colleagues in Congress have felt the same way. While I understand people’s tendency to leave this complex calculus to the “experts” I think this town is currently awash in new information about the decision making process within this administration that indicates that is a bad idea.

First of all, that is not the approach to decision making that the Constitution requires of us. It is our job to second-guess. When so much is at stake, the Congress, the press and the public have the clearest of obligations to insure that the decision making that is taking place within the Executive Branch is measured, deliberate, based on the best available information and consistent with the quality of judgment befitting the seriousness of the risks to which we are exposed. Had that happened in the wake of 9/11 or even a year and a half ago there are many points in this statement that I might have been able to leave out.

Secondly, I think that there is much of what I said a year and a half ago that did not seem at the time credible. While the facts presented in that statement were well documented it presented a picture of executive branch decision-making that was wholly inconsistent with what the nation or the press corps wanted to believe. They could not accept that in this moment of great national crisis that we did not have systematic methods of screening information, examining policy choices, debating the pluses and minuses of each alternative and making strategic choices based on an exhaustive effort to find the best possible alternative. But in recent months we have learned time and time again that this was not the nature of decision-making within this administration. Ron Suskind, using the exhaustive notes and papers of Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill tells of an extraordinary decision making process in which information is collected on the basis of decisions that preceded them. Richard Clarke describes a process both before and after 9/11 that was quite similar. Bob Woodward states………….Ect.

I am not optimistic by nature. Perhaps it is merely my nature that leads me to believe that the cauldron that is today boiling in Southwest Asia, North Africa and the Middle East will spill over once more onto the shores of North America. If we are not ready, I do not want to look myself in the mirror for the rest of my life and wonder why I didn’t ask tougher questions or insist on more responsible policies. I think the overall performance of our government to date in the area of homeland security merits a greater sense of skepticism and urgency on the part of the press and the general public as well.