Is the Government Capable of Tracking Terror?

Friday, August 11, 2006

Melissa Block, NPR's All Things Considered

August 10, 2006

Transcript:

MELISSA BLOCK, host: Tim Roemer is a former member of the 9/11 Commission and a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. Welcome to the program.

Mr. TIM ROEMER (9/11 Commission): Thank you, Melissa.

BLOCK: In your work on the commission, based on what you're learning about this alleged plot in Britain, was this the kind of thing that you were concerned about?

Mr. ROEMER: This is absolutely what the 9/11 Commission was concerned about. We know that al-Qaida, other terrorist organizations, militant Jihadist groups are extremely tenacious and very innovative. They are very good at going after the same targets, like airplanes, whether it be a shoe-bomber, whether it be trying to get a suicide pilot in a cockpit, or whether it be, in this instance, something modeled on the Bojinka plot of 1995, trying to get liquid explosives onboard, but then innovating, then trying to find a new way to trigger that particular explosive with new technology.

BLOCK: You mentioned the Bojinka plot. This was a plot to blow up about a dozen airliners over the Pacific, stowing devices onboard, getting off the plane at an intermediate stop.

Mr. ROEMER: It's the first thing that came to mind first thing this morning. We had good intelligence sharing between the two governments. That's a success story. We didn't share information real well prior to 9/11. But Bojinka, front and center, came to mind, as well as how these terrorist groups can innovate off of what they've done in the past.

BLOCK: Does this expose, do you think, a particular vulnerability in the security systems in place right now?

Mr. ROEMER: It does expose a vulnerability, and screening, integrated watch lists of potential terrorists, making sure that when somebody is walking on with checked baggage that we have red teams that are anticipating what the next threat is that an al-Qaida or Jihadist militant group might use.

Look, this Bojinka plot was sitting out there for the last 11 years. We need people in our intelligence system at Homeland Security and other places who can anticipate their next iteration of these kinds of developments. They go after soft targets like trains. They did that consistently. They've been consistent with planes, going back to 1994 and 1995. And the 9/11 Commission said the biggest failure on 9/11 was a failure of imagination.

We have to have a government that is nimble and dynamic and proactive. And is the Department of Homeland Security, a huge bureaucracy with layers of organizations and people lashed together, is that the kind of organization in a 21st-century world, where the threat is coming more and more from groups of four and five and six people? They are changing every day as groups, and we can't afford to build institutions and organizations that are slow to not only respond, but anticipate what these groups are going to do next.

BLOCK: President Bush today, though, said the country is safer today than it was before 9/11, and the reality is that there hasn't been an attack on U.S. soil since 9/11. You could look at that and say, it's working. We're doing the right thing.

Mr. ROEMER: I respectfully disagree with the president. I think the president is saying we're safer. We're not safe enough, especially given the recent events of today. We know al-Qaida is going to continue to be tenacious and innovative. We know Osama Bin Laden, who has released five tapes this year, since 2006, his lieutenant, Zawahiri, seven.

They are now putting state of the art tapes out that are on worldwide radio and television, communicating with hundreds of millions of people about their message. That's not a scared person right now. It's a rather confident person.

And I also would respectfully disagree with the president on how to measure success. This is a global war or terrorism. It's not just measured with a metric saying we haven't been attacked in the United States. It's the number of terrorist attacks that are occurring around the world. And are more Jihadists signing up to train to hit America ten years from now? And I very much worry that our political system is not dealing with some of those problems.

BLOCK: Tim Roemer, thanks for coming in.

Mr. ROEMER: Thank you, Melissa.

BLOCK: Tim Roemer is a former member of the 9/11 Commission and a former Democratic congressman from Indiana.

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