Good afternoon.
It is good to be here among colleagues and friends. I would
like to thank Harold Milstein--not only for the invitation,
but for his leadership. To Mayor Bloomberg, Commissioner Kelly,
my former colleagues in the U.S. Attorney's office, District
Attorneys, Tom and everyone at the Citizens Crime Commission,
it is good to see you, and I thank you for coming here today.
With the
end of the year upon us, it is a good time to take an accounting
of where we are in our mission to protect our country against
terrorism. And, given the events of 9/11 and the inspirational
leadership that we have all seen from New Yorkers since that
terrible day, there is no better place for us to take stock
than here in New York City.
Someone
once said that at moments of crisis, words are hollow vessels.
I felt this again this morning flying into New York, remembering
not only 9/11, but also my visit to Ground Zero just ten days
after the attacks. Even for a Marine who thought he had seen
it all, that day remains among the saddest of my life. I will
never forget it. My heart and the hearts of all FBI employees
remain with the victims, the victims' families, and the people
of this great city.
We have
all been changed by 9/11. Nowhere is that change more apparent
than in the FBI.
Let me
start with an update on our war on terror. This truly is a war,
a global war--from Kabul to Karachi, from Bali to Mombasa, from
Sanaa, Yemen, to New York City. Preventing terrorism means identifying
cells and disrupting their operations. And it means crippling
and dismantling terrorist networks country-by-country, operative-by-operative,
dollar-by-dollar, so that they no longer pose a threat to the
United States.
2002 has
been the first full year in this war, and looking back, much
has been accomplished. We have taken the fight to Al-Qa'ida,
to where they train, recruit, plan, and live. We have taken
away their safe haven in Afghanistan. We have taken into custody
more than 3,000 Al-Qa'ida leaders and foot soldiers worldwide.
Here in the United States, we have charged nearly 200 suspected
terrorist associates with crimes. Worldwide, we have prevented
as many as a hundred terrorist attacks or plots, including a
number here in the U.S.
These successes
have come because of the singular, united focus of virtually
everyone engaged in this war--law enforcement, intelligence,
the military, and our diplomatic community. Every level--federal,
state, local, international--has contributed its unique set
of skills.
Nowhere
is that more evident than here in New York. This city has been
a leader in the war against terror since the 1920 bombing of
the old J.P. Morgan building. That tradition of leadership continues
today. Commissioner Kelly has done an outstanding job in leading
the NYPD's post 9/11 fight. The new Counterterrorism Division
led by Frank Libutti, and the newly revamped Intelligence Division
led by David Cohen, are models for the nation. Commissioner,
my thanks to you, Frank, David, and the 40,000 officers and
detectives who serve this city so well.
New York's
leadership includes the men and women of the FBI. Our Assistant
Director in Charge here--Kevin Donovan--has picked up where
the tireless Barry Mawn left off in the war on terror.
September
11 made the prevention of terrorist attacks the FBI's top priority
and overriding focus. While we remain committed to our other
important national security and law enforcement responsibilities,
the prevention of terrorism takes precedence in our thinking
and planning; in our hiring and staffing; in our training and
technologies; and, most importantly, in our investigations.
With this
shift in priorities has come a major shift in the allocation
of resources within the Bureau. We have doubled the number of
Agents devoted to terrorism. We have hired nearly 300 new counterterrorism
translators specializing in Middle Eastern languages. And, we
have completely overhauled our counterterrorism program at Headquarters,
centralizing our management and accountability, beefing up existing
units, and adding new capabilities.
Essential
to preventing future terrorist attacks is improving our intelligence
analysis and predictive capability. The FBI has always been
a collector of intelligence in pursuing its criminal cases.
But with the mandate of prevention, we are now restructuring
to provide proper analysis and dissemination of intelligence
to all our partners in the war on terror.
We have
taken a number of steps to build that capacity within the FBI.
We set up a National Joint Terrorism Task Force at FBI headquarters,
staffed by representatives from 30 different federal, state,
and local agencies. This national task force coordinates the
two-way flow of information and intelligence between Headquarters
and the JTTFs around the country. We have quadrupled the number
of strategic analysts at Headquarters. We are building a cadre
of more than 700 analysts nationwide.
As a result
of our efforts, we will now be able to produce a greater quantity
and quality of analytical product, and to share that product
more effectively with policy makers, with the intelligence community
and with our law enforcement partners.
We are
also completely upgrading our information technology capability
in the Bureau. Our longstanding problems with information technology
are well known. What is less well known is what we are doing
to fix those problems and to add a whole new set of capabilities
to FBI operations. We have brought in some of the best and brightest
from private industry to lead this effort. These individuals--along
with a range of outside experts--are bringing the Bureau into
the digital age. From the rollout of new hardware, to the upgrade
of critical networks, to the redesign of investigative applications,
we are making progress. Thanks to these new initiatives, we
will soon have a system that we can mine for data and analysis,
and that will allow Agents to manage their case files electronically
for the first time in history.
In step
with these institutional changes have come important legal and
cultural changes that are enhancing our ability to prevent terrorism.
Principal
among these is the manner in which September 11 has torn down
the legal walls between intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
For those of you who followed the 9/11 hearings in Congress
this fall, you may recall meetings between the CIA and FBI where
it was unclear what information on a hijacker could be legally
shared under the arcane set of rules and laws that was known
as "the Wall."
Since
9/11, we have breached the Wall. First, thanks to the PATRIOT
Act and the recent FISA Appeals Court decision, we no longer
have legal obstacles to coordination and information-sharing
between the law enforcement community and the intelligence agencies.
Law enforcement officers can now coordinate their approach to
terrorist targets without running afoul of the law.
In addition
to the collapse of the legal "Wall," we have also
seen the collapse of the cultural and operational wall between
the FBI and CIA. Those who focus on stories of the feuding between
the agencies back in the era of J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles
are overlooking the increased operational integration between
the two agencies since 9/11. From my daily morning briefings
with CIA officers and George Tenet to the widespread assignment
of executives, Agents, and analysts between the two agencies
since 9/11, the FBI and the CIA have become integrated at virtually
every level of our operations.
The third
wall we are tearing down is the one between us and our state
and local partners. Our 11,500 FBI Agents are a small cadre
compared to the nation's 670,000 state and local law enforcement
officers. We need every one of those officers to be fully integrated
into the war on terror. That is why we created the National
JTTF; that is why we have established JTTFs in all of our field
offices; and, that is why we are standing up regional information
sharing operations that will revolutionize the way we work together.
These efforts are opening doors to cooperation that simply did
not exist prior to 9/11.
This crumbling
of pre 9/11 walls brings us to the issue of whether America
should create a new domestic intelligence agency similar to
the British MI-5. This idea is based on a faulty understanding
of counterterrorism that sees a dichotomy between "intelligence
operations" and "law enforcement operations."
This misunderstanding of counterterrorism has led some to conclude
that we should separate these two functions and create a new
domestic intelligence agency.
We have
just discussed how important it is to break down walls to enable
the sharing of information. Building new walls is going in the
wrong direction. There is no reason to separate the two functions
of law enforcement and domestic intelligence. On the contrary,
combining law enforcement and intelligence grants us ready access
to every weapon in the government's arsenal against terrorists.
We can now make strategic and tactical choices between our law
enforcement options of arrest and incarceration and our intelligence
options of surveillance and source development.
The wisdom
of this approach has been clearly borne out. Over the last year,
the FBI has identified, disrupted, and neutralized a number
of terrorist threats and cells. We have done so in ways an intelligence-only
agency like MI-5 cannot. Why is that? Because the FBI is uniquely
situated for the counterterrorism mission.