Clark Kent Ervin

Thank you very much Fred and thanks to each and every one of you. Profuse and extravagant apologies to each of you for my tardiness, if you knew me well you would know that I regard tardiness as a cardinal sin. I'm one of these people, in fact I write about it in the book, who showed up at airports two hours early before terrorists forced the rest of the country to do so, so i apologize again to you, thank you very much for staying. I always thought that the length of any speaker remarks should be commiserate with his or her stature, and as you see I'm a very short fellow so I'll keep my formal remarks fairly short so as to leave maximum times for questions. Thank you very much for having me here. As you just heard I was the Inspector General of the State Department at the very beginning of the Bush administration, so that is how I found myself on the bright sunny morning of Friday, September 7, 2001 in the ornate eighth floor of the Ben Franklin room of the State Department. Secretary Powell presided a swearing in ceremony for me and my friends. Of course four days later terrorists struck the homeland and our country and I think its fair to say the world, was never the same again. As I watched the events of September 11 unfold that day and subsequent developments in the country, I did not know, know of course, that I would ultimately and in not too long a fashion be called upon myself to play some role with regard to counter terrorism efforts. As efforts began in the Congress to consider the question of whether there ought to be one department focused if not exclusively than primarily on counter terrorism efforts, I must say I was of two minds about the whole idea. On the one hand it seemed to me logical to think that putting all of the players with regard to homeland security in one department, might make them more likely to play together as one team as opposed to playing against each other, which we all know now was part of the problem before 9/11. On the other hand i wondered whether, paradoxically, attempting even to create a new bureaucracy might wind up making the whole problem of homeland security even worse. Be that as it may, it was not my decision to make as whether there would be a due department, ultimately of course the decision was made to create such a department and I found myself in the fall of 2002 in my office in the State Department receiving a call from the White House personnel office asking me to consider being the first Inspector General of the soon to be created department of Homeland Security. I was very conflicted about whether to accept that challenge. On the one hand, of course I wanted to pally a role with regard to counter terrorism events, but I essentially just started at the State Department. Ultimately I decided to answer the call, so that's how I began my job as the nation's first Inspector General, as you heard, of the Department of Homeland Security on January 24, 2003. Serving in that capacity for nearly two years, exiting in December 2004. During the course of my nearly two years of the Department of Homeland Security as Inspector General, it was my job to check my politics at the door and objectively evaluate the degree to which, in my judgment and that of my team of inspectors and auditors and investigators, the leaders of Homeland Security were living up to the promise of the name of the Department of Homeland Security. I'm now on the outside of the Department of Homeland Security looking in, but i still do the same thing, evaluating the performance of the department with regard to what I considered to be the number one priority in this country today, protecting us against the, I think, near certainty of another attempted attack. I'm often asked, as I travel around the country and talk about my book Open Target, whether I think America is safer today than we were on 9/11, the old Ronald Regan question as it were from the 1989 campaign. And my answer to that question, surprisingly perhaps, is yes. Certainly in the area of aviation somethings have been done. We've spent somewhere between 18 to 20 billion dollars since 9/11 to secure the aviation sector and we have something to show for it as we all know. Cockpit doors are hardened, some pilots are armed, the number of air marshals was minuscule on 9/11, the number is classified but its significantly higher than it was nearly five years ago. And for all the problems with screeners, they're far better trained today than they were then and they are far more sensitized to the critical role that they play as the last line of defense before another set of what would be terrorists board airplanes. But the question of whether we're safer today than we were then seems to me is not the only question. And indeed, in the scheme of things, it seems to me, its not the most important question. The most important questions are, are we as safe as we can be? Are we as safe as we need to be? Are we as safe as we think we are? And sadly for the country, I think that the answer to all those questions is no. Let me return to aviation security for a second. Even in the aviation sector, where I purposely began, where I said we've done more than any other sector, we remain still far more vulnerable to a terrorist attack than we should be all these many years after 9/11. A couple of quick examples, immediately after the terror attacks, the President, to his credit, asked the Inspector General of the Transportation Department, in whose jurisdiction aviation security lay at the time, to undertake a series of undercover investigations at airports around the country to test the ability of screeners after 9/11 to spot deadly weapons concealed on passenger's bodies and in their luggage. The very first thing that I did when I became the Inspector General of the Homeland Security in January of '03 was to meet with the transportation inspector general to learn the results of his study a few years earlier. The results are still classified all these many years later, but to suffice it to say, that it was far easier than it should have been immediately after the attacks for government investigators to sneak those weapons through. And my fear of course was, was if it was easy for government investigators to do that with all due regard for government investigators, it was easier than it should have been for al-Qaeda to do so too. So the first subsequent project that I tasked my team of inspectors to do once I became the inspector general after that meeting was to send the very same teams of investigators out to the very same airports two years later in 2003 after the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, after the transfer of the newly created transportation security administration from the Department of Transportation to the Department of Homeland Security and after the federalization of the then privatized screener workforce to see if any of those changes had made any difference in screener ability to spot these deadly weapons. The results came in at the end of '03, beginning of '04, they're still classified too these many years later, but suffice it to say that when the results came in they were exactly the same to the decimal point, as were those obtained two years earlier. The very last thing that I did during my aborted tenure inspector general at the beginning of '04, knowing that my tenure was about to end, was to send the same team of investigators back out to the very same airport two years later to see whether the recommendations that my team and I had made to make aviation security more secure had in fact been implemented. The results came in after I left the department, they came in in April 2005, I happened to be in Manhattan, the city most affected by 9/11 in April of 2005 when I noticed a blinking light on my Blackberry, looked down to read the message and the message was the latest breaking news story from AP reporting that the Inspectors General's office was reporting that the results obtained in the latest undercover investigation of aviation security were exactly the same as those in '03, which of course were exactly the same as those in '01. So no change whatsoever in four years. Can I report to you today in June of 2006 that we are safer than we were in April of 2005? The answer to that sadly is no. You'll recall last fall TSA relaxed the rules on carrying small knifes and small scissors onto airplanes. The rationale was twofold for that. On the one hand the rationale was that well, particularly after the heroism of the passengers in flight United 93 the average passenger is not gonna let a couple people with small knifes and small scissors bring down an aircraft anymore. That was part of the rationale. The second part of the rationale was that we can't focus on everything and so giving screener fewer things to worry about might make them more likely to focus o n things that are most worthy of attention, namely explosives today. In yet, just three weeks ago Congressional investigators working for the GEO reported that they were able to sneak bomb parts, bomb components through 21 airports in our country undetected even though on occasion they went out of their way to attract attention of the screener workforce. So giving screeners fewer things to worry about does not make them likelier to focus on what we all agree now is the biggest threat in the air, namely explosives. Which very nicely leads to the second and final point I want to make about aviation security. You know, I'm 47 years old, I grew up in rather working class circumstances in Houston so for me I think its fair to say for a lot of people in the early sixties, air travel was something of a luxury, it wasn't until I was thirteen years old that I took my first plane ride. Well now days, of course, the nature of air travel is such that every American, probably on a weekly, monthly basis takes a commercial airplane for one purpose or another. So what that means is unbeknownst to most of them, I would wager, at one time or another, every American has been on a passenger aircraft in the cargo hold of which is some cargo, not luggage, but cargo. About 20% of the cargo that travels by air in our country, travels on passenger aircraft, unlike luggage which after 9/11 is at least supposed to be inspected 100% of the time and usually is, but that's a story in itself. Cargo is almost never inspected beforehand. What's supposed to happen is if there is specific intelligence indicating that a particular cargo container should be open that container is supposedly open and there is supposed to be random inspections. But whether that's actually done, we don't know because believe it or not, your government in the person of the TSA does not do the inspections. Any inspections that are done are done by airlines even though the whole point of creating TSA after 9/11 was the recognition that before 9/11, left to their own devices the airlines would put profit in speed at the expense of security. Now quickly let me talk briefly about port security. I watched, like all of you political cognoscenti like I the 2004 presidential campaign intensely. You'll recall that President Bush and Senator Kerry disagreed about every single thing except one. And that is the number one threat facing this country is nuclear terrorism, a nuc in a box. And all the experts, from the Brookings Institute on the left or the Heritage Foundation on the right all agree that the likeliest way for terrorists to sneak a weapon of mass destruction into our country would be through 1 of the 26,000 cargo containers that come through our 361 seaports in this country. In yet, were inspecting only 6% of those incoming cargo containers. Which means of course that we have no idea of the contents of the 94%. The targeting system that the Customs Bureau uses to determine what six percent to inspect is dangerously flawed according to investigation after investigation. Its largely based on information about the root that the cargo container takes and the contents of the cargo even though, of course, its very easy to lie about the contents of the cargo and indeed, believe it or not, the cargo manifest can be amended for up to sixty days after cargo arrives in the United States. Those who say that cargo cannot be, that we can't do 100% inspection of cargo in this country before the number one threat radiation nuclear weapons who say that we can't do it, its technologically infeasible, its economically impractical don't know what they're talking about because as we sit here tonight it is being done in the world's largest port in the port of Hong Kong and its not undoing, slowing commerce there and indeed its economically feasible. Experts estimate that for a fee of only $20 per container, which i consider to be rather reasonable, a program of 100% cargo inspection for radiation could be funded throughout our country and indeed throughout the world. A quick world about mass transit security. We have had two wake up calls in this country since 9/11 as to the vulnerability of our own mass transit systems to a terror attack. The Madrid bombings in spring of 2004 of course and the London bombings last summer. The good news is that after each of those incidences, our government, the Department of Homeland Security has done all the right things, increased police presence, more bomb sniffing dogs, greater use of bomb and radiation sensors, surveillance cameras and in New York, New Jersey and Salt Lake City for some reason, also random bag searches. The problem is all of those measures were either ratcheted back or done away with all together as soon as those events faded from the headlines without recognizing that terrorists could simply and will simply wait until these measures are no longer in force before they actually begin to launch in the attack of our master system. A word about intelligence which Fred mentioned. If you find yourself having difficulty sleeping one night, then I suggest that you turn to the Homeland Security Act and read it. If you do that you will see, I think, that there were two tasks that were intelligence related. That the drafters of the Homeland Security Act intended for the Department of Homeland Security to perform. One was to serve as the central clearing house in the federal government for all information collected from all of our fifteen or sixteen intelligence agencies concerning threats against the homeland because we know now after 9/11 that part of the problem was that we really had too much information. A number of agencies had information pointing to a terrorist attack, but there was no agency whose responsibility it was to put it all together and see the big picture. The second task was to serve as the consolidator of the dozen different terrorist watch lists that different government agencies maintained before 9/11. That too was a problem, we now know, for example, that the CIA has two of the hijackers under scrutiny, in yet they didn't share that information with the State Department in a timely fashion. Had they done so, presumably, hopefully the State Department would have denied those particular hijackers visas to get into the country. Had that information been shared with the FBI after those terrorists had come into the country, perhaps the FBI could have tracked them down and found them and foiled the plot before it unfolded. That's the importance of consolidating the information, but however, inexplicably just months after the Department of Homeland Security was created, the administration created the Terrorist Threat Integration Center now called the National Counter Terrorism Center led by the CIA to serve as the central clearing house for the central clearing house for intelligence information by passing the departments intelligence unit and then subsequently created the terrorists screening center led by the FBI to consolidate the terrorists watch lists. So the upshot is the two agencies that by default were supposedly in charge of these two key Homeland Security related intelligence tasks before 9/11 the CIA and the FBI were made in charge of those tasks today and the Department of Homeland Securities intelligence apparatus is on the outside looking in with its nose pressed against the glass. So as I say an open target, the next time there are indications in our government of a pending terrorists attack, and incidentally there are those indications today, that are apart of Homeland Security will probably be the last government agency to know about it even though it is the agency that is charged with detecting it and then god forbid if it happens, doing everything possible to help us recover from is as quickly as possible. Finally, before the conclusion, a word about emergency preparedness. The only question after 9/11 was when the next catastrophe would happen. When it would happen, whether it would be man made or natural and exactly where it would occur. Of course all of those questions were answered last fall with Katrina, the problem with Katrina is that after all, given the near mathematical precision with which meteorologist and seismologists and other practitioners of whether prognostications do their craft given that mathematical precision, we know with near certainty when pending natural disasters are going to happen. So Katrina was not just foreseeable, it was foreseen. In yet, obviously, we were manifestly unprepared for it. If we were unprepared for what was foreseeable and foreseen, how prepared could we possibly be for a terror attack when there is never any precise warning as to exactly when and exactly where and exactly how. If terrorists had targets those levies in New Orleans rather than mother nature the result would have been the same. Thousands of people without food, water, shelter, medical supplies, no evacuation plan, no clear chain of command, no interpretable conditions and indeed those conditions continue to exist to this day. Now a final word, in conclusion, to sum it all up. Why is it that the State of Homeland Security is where it is today all these many years after 9/11? Its as if it seems to me the administration thinks that all it takes to secure the homeland is a Department of Homeland Security and as I say in the book, a false and dangerous syllogism is about and you will often hear this explicitly stated by the administration and its defenders on this issue of homeland security- we have not been attacked in nearly five years and there is a Department of Homeland Security, therefore the Department of Homeland Security has prevented an attack. It is a false syllogism because as I think I've demonstrated just briefly in this talk and as I describe in considerable detail in the book that the Department of Homeland Security has had little to with making our country more secure in the last five years. Its a dangerous syllogism because to think that we're more prepared than we are leads us to under prepare and leads us to underestimate the threat that we are under. If you follow national news developments as I know all of you do, just yesterday in fact CBS news and the Baltimore Sun both had reports to the effect that a terror attack is coming. That was the common theme of both of those reports. Now the reports differed in details, one set of details said that the next attack is going to be a large scale one dwarfing 9/11 the other report's experts said that the next attack is going to be a small one just soft targets. My bet is that both sets of experts are right. They're gonna have a large scale attack and a small scale attack, but the point is all the experts agree that the signs are coming in yet we are manifestly unprepared for it. Why? And I'll close with this and leave time for questions. Three things: money. I began by saying that I'm a Republican, I'm a conservative, I want to underscore that here because you don't typically, I think its fair to say, hear conservatives and Republicans calling for greater government spending, but part of the problem with the Department of Homeland Security is that it has been underfunded from the start. And there are some things, arguably, you can do on the cheap. But homeland security, indisputably, is not one of them. I said in a hearing last year that was otherwise uneventful until experts from the left and right were both arguing for more money for the Department of Homeland Security whereupon a senator, who shall remain nameless out of decorum, stopped them to say, we're not gonna give significantly more money to the Department of Homeland Security because if we're not careful we're gonna wind up spending more money on this than we are the defense of the nation. And when he said that it was as if a light bulb went over my head and I said, "ah ha, that's it in a nutshell, that's why we're in this state we're in." There is this bifurcation, this disconnect on the part of the thinking on one end of Pennsylvania and the other end of Pennsylvania avenue that there is a difference between homeland security and national security where as to my mind, homeland security should be like charity, beginning at home and spreading abroad. We are in a lot of peril, needless to say,in Iraq and increasingly in Afghanistan as well, but at least, for all the difficulty there, We've got the mightiest war machine in the history of warfare defending our interests. By way of contrast, here at home we are far more vulnerable to attack than we are there. The second point, leadership. After Katrina, Secretary Chertoff said one of the lessons that we need to take away from that is we need expert leaders at FEMA. We need people leading at FEMA that know what they're doing. Exactly. But not just at FEMA, Mr. Secretary, but at the top of the department, the middle of the department and all throughout the department all 22 components and part of the problem is from the beginning the department has lacked the kind of leadership that has experience and expertise with as I say, the most serious issue facing this country, counter terrorism, and not just that but the largest and most complex bureaucratic organization of our government in our history. The third and final point, culture. There is a sand, a head in the sand culture in the Department of Homeland Security. A refusal to acknowledge the peril that we're in and unless and until these problems are acknowledged we can not be about the work of solving them. One quick anecdote to illustrate that point and I'll close. I began by talking about the results of what we call the "penetration testing", when we went to those airports, sneaked the guns and knives and explosives through. When I went to the then head of the TSA, Jim Loy, who ultimately, by the way, was promoted to become the Deputy Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security went to him in '03 to report my findings as to how easy it was to penetrate airport defenses and I said hypothetically, without getting into classified details, at airport X we found a failure rate of 40%. He stopped me at that point to say,"Clark why are you calling that a failure rate of 40% at that airport? Why not call it a success rate of 60%?" And then I said Jim it doesn't matter if screener are catching weapons six times out of ten if they're failing to catch them four times out of ten. In the age of terror when one mistake can mean catastrophe, four times out of ten is four times too many. So as I say in the book, rather than making bad results better the leaders of the Department of Homeland Security were focused on making bad results sound better. And as long as that kind of mindset prevails and pervades the Department of Homeland Security as it does,as I document in the book, to this day America will remain an open target for another terror attack. Thank you very much and I look forward to your questions.