FPRI Wire

America After 9/11

Remarks at the FPRI Annual Dinner, November 9, 2004

Volume 12, Number 3
December 2004

by Hon. John F. Lehman

Dr. Lehman was a member of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the 9/11 Commission). He also served as Secretary of the Navy, staff member to Henry Kissinger on the National Security Council, and delegate to the Force Reductions Negotiations in Vienna, Deputy Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. His books include On Seas of Glory (2001), Command of the Seas (1989), Making War (1994), and, with Harvey Sicherman, America the Vulnerable: Our Military Problems and How To Fix Them (FPRI, 2002). A trustee of FPRI (and former staff member), he is chairman of J. F. Lehman & Company, a private equity investment firm. This document is an edited transcript of his remarks to FPRI’s Annual Dinner in his honor at the Four Seasons Hotel. The 2004 Dinner Booklet/Annual Report is available for download at this website

Tonight I shall address the good news and the bad news coming out of our 9/11 Commission investigations. Just to give a quick summary, this investigation started almost exactly two years ago. We interviewed 1250 people, from Presidents Clinton and Bush down to desk officers, CIA operatives, and everyone in between, in sworn testimony, thousands upon thousands of hours of interviews and discussions and interrogations. We had access to all the interrogations from Guantanamo and elsewhere, all of the people including the top Al Qaeda leaders, such as Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who had been captured. We obtained 2.5 million top-secret and above documents, we had access to virtually every single piece of information and every person we knew who had bearing on 9-11.

When we were down in Washington this last summer, Harvey [Sicherman] asked me what were the most shocking things to emerge from this investigation. Of course, one of the criticisms leveled against our commission was that we were not elder statesmen above the fray, that we were partisan Republicans and Democrats. We had all spent time inside the Beltway. We’d been around the track a number of times. Frankly, it’s a little hard to shock people like us who have spent time in the belly of the beast. Yet we were shocked.

The things that shocked me the most may not be the things you might expect. After being out of the government since 1987, the greatest shock was the tremendous growth of legalism and lawyers at every level of the policy process. This was a new thing. There were plenty of lawyers back in the Reagan administration, but the dominance of the legalistic approach to every policy issue was totally new and, frankly, debilitating to the policy process.

The second most shocking thing to me was the utter failure of the government, our media, and our academicians to grasp the nature of our enemy. Everyone was throwing off terms and talking about terrorism and the threat of terrorism and so forth, but they utterly missed what was going on. They utterly failed to understand the nature of this Islamist terrorist movement. This is not a war against terror, that would be like FDR saying this is a war against kamikazes. Terrorism is a weapon, it’s a method that the Islamist extremists have learned works against free democracies. We’ve utterly failed to grasp the breadth, spread, and depth of the enemy that we allowed to develop around the globe over some 30 years. And it wasn’t because there weren’t warnings. Any traveler, many of you, going out to Southeast Asia or traveling through Egypt or in Pakistan could see, and perceptive people wrote about, twenty or twenty-five years ago, the phenomenon of the puritanical, missionary zeal that was taking over the Salafist religious establishment in much of the Islamic world and preaching an aberrant and extremist-form interpretation of Islam that was built on hatred, that was calling on all Muslims to rise up and to join the war against the infidels, led by the United States. And for 30 years we ignored it.

We ignored also the growth of terrorism in the hands of these Islamists. In 1983 we lost 241 Marines. Our president, who was—obviously as a devotee of President Reagan I believe he’s—one of the greatest presidents we’ve ever had. Yet his reaction was “We will bring these terrorists to justice.” Let the police handle it. And while he wanted to retaliate, his government did not. So we did nothing. And Osama bin Laden later wrote a fatwa saying: Look at this, the Americans lose 241 of their sons and what do they do? They pack up and run home and leave defeated. They do not retaliate, they turn over Lebanon to the Syrians. Time after time, as the Islamists learned that terrorism worked, that if you killed Americans abroad, whether diplomats in Lebanon or soldiers in Saudi barracks or diplomats in African embassies, you could count on one thing. The Americans would say “We will bring these terrorists to justice” and then do nothing.

As we studied these documents, the internal papers, the recommendations of the top advisers to presidents, we were shocked at the failure to grasp the extent of evil that was stalking us. So that was the second-most shocking thing. The third most shocking thing was a culture that had evolved in our government of total non-accountability. Nobody’s responsible. After the greatest failure, the greatest disaster in American history of civilians being targeted and successfully attacked, the enemy, defeating every single defense that we had arrayed against them with confidence, with brazenness, so sure that they didn’t even bother to have a back-up plan.

We were shocked at the gross negligence in our State Department’s granting visas in a sloppy and negligent way. In our Immigration and Naturalization Service’s paying no attention to people coming in with grossly forged passports, visa applications that were not even filled out, stories that were ridiculous. The terrorists when they came in, when asked by the immigration officers, “Where are you going to school?” “Somewhere in the west.” “How are you going to support yourself?” “I’ll find some way.” “OK, go ahead.”

We were shocked at an FAA so grossly incompetent that, if you will recall, if you read the Report, that your blood boiled at reading the incompetence, the negligence, the lackadaisical attitude that some in our FAA had in carrying out the simple security procedures like air marshals, locking cockpit doors, that had been learned as lessons after the 1988 Lockerbie disaster. These measures were quietly dropped because the airlines didn’t want them, they were expensive, all tucked in the memory hole so that by 9/11 Al Qaeda’s planners knew, didn’t just hope, that they could cut through our air security without the slightest doubt. That they could carry 4"-knives, mace, teargas, and be so sure that they didn’t even have to have a back-up plan.

We were shocked to learn that not one person has been disciplined since that disaster. Incompetence in the FBI that would make your shoelaces dance in terror if you could read the classified material. CIA incompetence and careerism and bureaucratic narrowness that would make you grind your teeth. Not one person disciplined. Not a single person since that attack has been fired or disciplined or even had a letter put in their file. What kind of culture have we evolved in our government that says “No one is responsible”? That to me was shocking.

So there were many shocking things that sobered us greatly as we went through the process of talking to people, studying the documents. It was shocking to find the brilliance, the tactical brilliance, the judgment, the cool risk assessment, of the Al Qaeda leadership. These were not ignorant desert Arabs. These were not people who were wild-eyed fanatics. These were cold, smart, educated, calculating planners who understood how to do disciplined risk assessment, who understood how to analyze the security in Philadelphia compared to Boston and select Boston because it had a totally incompetent regime in the Boston airport. Comparing one airport to another, one airline’s set of procedures with another. Taking practice runs up and down the Hudson to calculate the best angles of attack for the WTC. Taking practice flights around the Washington area, seeing how hard it was to pick out the White House. Coldly, calmly, effectively planning. Using computer analyses to do regression analyses to see the probabilities of using 12 airplanes, which they started their plan with, and finally through analytical procedures coming down to limiting it to four as the optimum number that would likely not fall prey to the inevitable failures. These are very effective, smart people. It was shocking to find that such a broad and pervasive movement of people around the world had come to know one another, help one another, fund one another, all targeted on killing American civilians in the maximum numbers possible.

That is why we said, in our first finding, that the greatest failure of 9-11 was a failure of imagination, a failure of all of us, of American political leaders, of commentators, of media people, Congressmen, presidents, a failure to imagine the broad nature of this evil and its effectiveness and its concentrated targeting on the United States and its people. So there were many shocking things.

There were other things that, frankly, did not surprise us. The total incompetence of our intelligence establishment. Those of us who had been in government knew that we had evolved an intelligence community—and community is the very wrong word to use—that had developed so many stovepipes and so many horizontal layers of bureaucracy, that it was impossible for common sense and good intelligence to exist. And the reason was that Congress did not want an intelligence establishment that was effective. After Watergate, after Iran contra, Congress passed layer upon layer of restrictions and legislation building these stovepipes, so that you would have FBI agents in Phoenix with top-secret clearances writing memos saying “Hey, there are all these young Arab males learning to fly, shouldn’t we start investigating them?” and simultaneously analysts at Langley with top-secret clearances writing memos saying “We’ve been analyzing the communications among Al Qaeda people and they keep talking about using aircraft as missiles,” and these analysts were not allowed, would have been fired, if they had talked to the agents. Because Congress prohibited it. They did not have a need to know, you can’t have people sharing that kind of information, it could lead to abuse. And so the dots were never connected because Congress did not want them connected. They were much more concerned with looking through the rearview mirror, looking at the abuses of people’s rights to privacy twenty years ago, and absolutizing that at the expense of any competence in our intelligence capability.

That did not shock us. Those of us who had served in the government knew that you could pretty well count on our intelligence community to be wrong in assessing many potential threats. But, nevertheless, we felt that was a fundamental problem which had to be fixed. We could no longer live in a world in which the rights of aliens to privacy and freedom from search, such as Mr. Moussaoui, could override the right to have good intelligence about what our enemies were seeking to do to attack us. So there are a large number of things that were very bad, very disturbing, shocking to the uninitiated, not so shocking to us, and many things that shocked even us. You’ll read them all in the report.

But I come away from this experience as an optimist. I think there is an awful lot of good news, and I want to talk about it. First, I think there is the good news of the example we set in the Commission itself. We were five Republicans appointed by partisan Republican leadership, appointed because we were Republicans, we were known to have strong views and to have a certain element of combativeness. Five Democrats who were picked by the Democratic leadership in Congress for the same reason. Richard Ben-Veniste, who was the prosecutor in Watergate and President Clinton’s impeachment proceedings. Jamie Gorelick, Tim Roemer, Jim Thompson, yours truly — people who were well known as partisan combatants.

So the auguries were not so good when we started that we would ever reach agreement on what really happened, as the law required us to do; what lessons to draw, as the law required us to do; and most important of all, what we should do about it, to fix our vulnerability. And when we had our first meetings we were very far apart. All of us on the Republican side were sure that the findings would be that President Clinton’s fecklessness in not attacking Osama and not taking more proactive measures was responsible; all of the Democrats were sure that President Bush’s fixation on Iraq and on missile defense and his total unawareness of the seriousness of the threat was really responsible. So we all in the first few meetings set about thinking about how we were going to be writing our dissenting views and how we would handle the inevitable splits and disagreements.

But as we proceeded and went through all these interviews and spent time immersed in the documents and talking to all of the players past and present, gradually a fact pattern filled out that left less and less area for disagreement and for policy arguments among us. Because the facts laid out a dramatic picture in every area. And by early June 2004 it was very clear to us that we had no disagreements on the findings. We didn’t have any dissenting views to put in brilliant dissents. We had no footnotes to add, even, to disagree with anything in the Report. We were all in agreement, and yet we had not set out to reach a consensus. None of us intended or even thought it particularly desirable that we be unanimous. But that’s where we ended up. We ended up unanimous on everything, on all of the findings, all of the lessons about what went wrong and what was really dysfunctional, and all 41 of the recommendations on what to do to fix it.

So to me the good news is that if you get people who are serious about it, who are of a certain experience level, who are serious professionals in the policy world, you can on the most important issues make bipartisan, nonpartisan policy and govern in a bipartisan way. All of us have remained totally united on trying to get the reforms through that we all agree are essential. And I think that has helped in Congress, because they kind of felt like if we could do it, they should be able to do it, as well. That is why both houses have now passed a bill—in the House and Senate, bills are somewhat different, but the House is maybe 90% of our 41 recommendations and the Senate 95%—so we will get a bill. We will have the kind of reforms that we have called for in the Report. That is bipartisan support in both houses.

That’s good news. Because a lot of people were becoming very cynical about our government process, thinking maybe it was so broken, so bitter, so partisan that it was impossible to carry out sound governance going forward with these kinds of divisions. I think we’ve shown that that’s not necessarily the case and that, indeed, in matters of national security the most partisan Republicans and Democrats can come together and make very good, not mushy consensus —sharp, biting policy recommendations — and execute them. I think we’re going to see that in intelligence reform, in the reforms of aviation safety, the reforms of our immigration and border security, and even in areas that are less exciting but for those of us that have to work in highrises, maybe more important, things like fire codes and emergency preparedness, which are some of our more important recommendations.

So I remain very optimistic after this experience of the 9/11 Commission. I find an awareness at every level of the government at the cutting edge, not necessarily at the high policy levels of the assistant secretaries and policy councils, but you go out to the frontlines, to the cutting edge, and you talk to the immigration officers that are working JFK airport and the border security people out at the crossings, you talk to the Coast Guard guys working the security problem in New York and Philadelphia harbors, you have a much more educated, much more enthused and motivated person. They get it. Even if the bureaucracy doesn’t get it in some areas, they get it.

And we have I think a growing understanding of the nature of this threat. It is Islamist terrorism that has been allowed to grow throughout the world with a huge flow of primarily Saudi and other Gulf oil money that has fueled the building of these schools and the sending of these Wahhabi clerics to man the mosques and chaplaincies in our army and many other armies around the world with us paying no attention. Now people are aware of it, now people see the problem. People are now addressing the issues, putting pressure on the Saudis to stanch this flow, to stop subsidizing the preaching of hatred and jihad with government money and with Saudi charitable money.

It’s beginning to have effect. It’s going to be a long and difficult haul, because we have allowed generations of young Muslims to be raised before they’re 7 years old to know one thing for certain: that to kill Americans is a holy and uplifting thing. That’s a terrible, terrible thing that we’ve allowed to have happen. As Don Rumsfeld has said, the madrassas, may be growing new terrorists faster than the United States can kill or capture them. That is beginning to turn around.

Our recommendations are very clear and precise on what we believe on a totally unanimous basis has to be done. First we have to go and kill them where they are. I’m talking about the trained, committed terrorists, the teams that are organized, that are operating, that are doing their best to obtain nuclear weapons and WMD from the former Soviet Union or from rogue scientists or whatever. Their top objective is to set off a nuclear weapon in Grand Central Station or somewhere like that to kill the maximum number of innocent Americans. That is their top objective. And we can’t sit by and hope we can stop them at our borders, we have got to go kill them first. We’ve got to stop them from getting those weapons. We’ve got to deny them the sanctuaries that we’ve permitted them in Sudan, in Afghanistan. We’ve got to preempt, we’ve got to be proactive, we’ve got to go get them. We can’t let them take advantage of the fact that there are so many areas of the world where no one’s writ runs.

And there are many other diplomatic initiatives. We have to work carefully with the Egyptians and with the Saudis and with the Pakistanis. It would feel good to give them an ultimatum, to say “Either you deny bin Laden sanctuary in the northwest territories or we’ll come in and get him ourselves.” But what that would do would be to bring about Mr. Musharraf’s fall and the certain raising up of a Taliban regime in Pakistan, that would be a Taliban regime with 200 nuclear weapons. So the solutions are not as simple as what we might in our frustration feel we need to do. But there are a great many of the so-called softer options that are just as important.

Militarily, we have to operate proactively, preemptively, and violently against the organized terrorists where they are today. But we also have to deal with the source. We have to spend money on working with the governments of Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, and other Muslim states to build schools. Today in most of the poor areas of the Islamic world, if parents want a better life for their children, to get them to learn to read and write, they have only one choice, to send them to the Salafist madrassas to learn to read and write and simultaneously to hate Americans. That’s the only option. A tiny bit of money could do so much in these areas, working with these governments, to build networks of schools that would teach reading, writing, and arithmetic to these kids, provide an option different than learning jihad, which is now their only option.

Yet year after year Congress cut out all the money that was requested for these kinds of educational assistance programs. Economic assistance, the whole Arab world has a GDP less than that of Portugal. How, if we don’t provide some change of direction so that there’s some beginnings of growth, so that jobs will be created, so that there are options for kids in these areas to find a job—there are no jobs. It’s a separate serious sociological issue of what went wrong in Islam that this is the case. But it doesn’t have to be the case. We can take a proactive role in providing the support that we did for instance with the Asian Tigers in setting up a regional Middle Eastern economic cooperation zone like ASEAN that created the environment that led to this explosive growth in an equally backward area. There’s no reason, there’s no inevitability why the Islamic world can’t do economic activity. We’ve got to provide the catalyst. We can’t just depend on military defenses. We have been abandoning the battle of ideas. This is a quasi-religious war, a war of ideas. A war in which ideas have consequences. And we have not fought that war. The numbers of hours that we have funded broadcasting in Pashtun, in the different Arabic dialects, in Farsi, in Urdu, is miniscule. The average Muslim takes his view of what America and American values are like from reruns of Baywatch and from Al Jazeera. We have virtually nothing going on comparatively in international broadcasting, providing a truthful—not a propagandizing, just an objective—source of reporting of facts about what’s going on in the world, in the languages of these areas. It’s criminal the amount of money, it’s so small, that it would take - one F-22 fighter would fund 3x what our whole international broadcasting budget is. We’ve got to make sure that this money is spent, we’ve got to take just as vigorous and as proactive a role in the war of ideas as we are in the military war against the Islamist terrorists.

So these are the recommendations that we’ve made. The ones that you’re all reading about, the legislation creating a national intelligence directorate etc., yes, they’re important, but they’re very secondary. The most important is to first recognize the nature of our enemy and the sources of their hatred and to recognize that there are things we can and must do to deal with it. First militarily and simultaneously to stop the source of this hatred by fighting and winning the war on ideas.

So it’s for these reasons that all of us on the Commission came away from a fairly sobering two years of immersion in these issues as optimists. There isn’t one of us who doesn’t believe confidently that we can win this war against Islamist terrorism and make a hugely different world in the years ahead. It’s not going to be easy, it’s not going to be quick, but we will win it, and I think the reactions of people to our report and the implementation of much of it, particularly out at the cutting edge, is proof positive that we are right. We are not being Panglossian. Our optimism is grounded on a confidence that the American people will inevitably do what needs to be done.

Thank you.

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