Full transcript
Dhruva Jaishankar: Hello, I'm Dhruva Jaishankar, Executive Director of the Observer Research Foundation America. We're approaching the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, which witnessed the deaths of some 3,000 people in New York, in Washington, DC and in Pennsylvania. The repercussions of course, went far beyond that and changed our conceptions and our vocabulary when it came to notions of national security. One major change was the creation in the United States with the Department of Homeland Security or DHS, which subsumed several other agencies. To discuss this in the aftermath of 9/11, and the implications for Homeland Security in the United States and elsewhere, it's a great privilege to have Michael Chertoff, Secretary of Department of Homeland Security during a pivotal time, from 2005 to 2009 - during the Bush administration. A lawyer and a judge, he is now head of the Chertoff Group. Thank you, Secretary Chertoff, for joining us.
Michael Chertoff: Happy to be on.
Jaishankar: Many of us were affected quite personally by the events of 9/11. and its aftermath. A lot of us, myself included, can remember exactly where we were when we heard or saw the news about the Twin Towers. What are your recollections of 9/11 itself?
Chertoff: So on September 11, I was the head of the Criminal Division at the US Department of Justice in Washington. And the US Department of Justice in those days had responsibility for dealing with all terrorist incidents. I was driving into my office, and I was on that cell phone or carphone, and talking to my deputy, and he said a plane just hit the World Trade Center. And like many people, I assumed it was some small plane where the pilot got confused, and we continued to talk and he had the television on and then he said a second plane hit. And we both realized this was not an accident. So I got into the office at the Department of Justice a few minutes later and the two of us walked across the street to the FBI, where they had the command center, which in those days was used to manage all terrorist incidents in the US. And there Bob (Robert) Mueller, who was the newly appointed director of the FBI, met me. We immediately began to review all the evidence to see who had done it and more importantly, how do we stop more things from happening? As I went into the building, I heard about the Pentagon being hit by a plane. And then as we were meeting, we heard, of course, about the fourth plane having been hijacked. And, you know, relatively quickly that day, due to the courageous decision by a number of the passengers to use their cell phones to call home and report on what they saw, we were able to determine where some of the hijackers were sitting. And from that we were able to look at the manifest and begin the process of tracking all their connections, so that we can see if there was anybody else out there who was going to attack. And within a matter of a day, we knew it was al Qaeda and then we began the investigation to pull together a picture of the entire network.
Jaishankar: So, very much a sort of hands on - from Day One - experience in your case. You know, you were also involved subsequently in the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, one of the major administrative changes in the US government after 9/11. What were some of the biggest challenges, as you recall, with the establishment of DHS?
Chertoff: Well, of course, DHS was established in 2003, I became secretary in 2005 and the department was established while we were very much engaged in countering terrorist activity. There were also other threats and challenges that were going on. So someone described it as building an airplane while you're in flight, we didn't have the opportunity to retreat, and contemplate all the dimensions of what we had to do. We had to literally put it together, as we were engaged in the process of defending the country. You know, the challenge was to take a number of security related agencies that had been housed in other departments, and pull them together and bring a unified effort to the entire group. And that takes a little bit of time. There are cultural differences. There are practical differences, mechanically, in terms of the way the agencies work, we had to build from scratch, a central headquarters infrastructure that could manage these things. And we also had to begin the process of developing a culture. So all of these things meant that in the first few years, maturing the department was a very big challenge.
Jaishankar: And, you know, amongst other things, you had Customs, Immigration and Naturalization Services, TSA, FEMA, where do you see some of the greatest challenges here in terms of...amongst these agencies?
Chertoff: Well, the theory was to look at all of the areas that one has to defend in the homeland, and to pull them together in a single department. So, you have the borders, you have your land borders, your air and your ship. So we need customs and border protection. We needed ICE for interior enforcement, we needed what became CIS - Citizenship and Immigration Services, to deal with people who are applying to become citizens. We also needed the Coast Guard, and all those had to be brought together. Likewise, TSA was responsible for aviation security, the Coast Guard had responsibility for maritime security. And TSA also had responsibility for land based transportation. And then you had Secret Service, and other parts of the department that were focused on critical infrastructure, including what became a very big part of the responsibility, which was cyber security. So all of these things have to be synchronized, so that the leadership of a department could have a holistic look at where all the threats might be, whether they be air, land, sea, physical or virtual, and to be able to take a comprehensive approach without having seams or gaps in the total defense posture.
Jaishankar: What were some of the major improvements, in your view, to Homeland Security that you oversaw during your tenure?
Chertoff: Well, I think one of the things we had to do was we had to rebuild FEMA, because Hurricane Katrina revealed that FEMA was not really fit for an emergency that overwhelmed a state. The original model of FEMA relied upon the idea that state authorities would be the first responders. And what FEMA would do would be to support them with resources, money, and ultimately come into an afflicted area and help rebuild it by providing money for claims and for the process of reconstruction. But it was not meant to be an operational agency that actually got into the field and did rescues. It relied upon other parts of the federal government but mainly the state government to do that. Well, we discovered with Hurricane Katrina was we had basically a dysfunctional state and city government in New Orleans. And they did not have the ability to respond effectively. And they never planned for the kind of flooding that they encountered in 2005. So that caused us to rethink FEMA as having some operational capability in reserve in case the state or local government fail. And so rebuilding that was a major part of what we did. And again, in 2008, when we had hurricanes in the Gulf, things worked much better. All the parts of the disaster management mechanism came together. So we made a lasting improvement.
Jaishankar: Thankfully there wasn’t another major terrorist attack, at least on the scale of 9/11, that affected the homeland...
Chertoff: We were able to prevent international terrorists from coming into the country, and prevented them from carrying out any kind of attack of scale or even minor attacks. We have had some terrorist attacks since I left office, but they tended to be one offs or a couple of people. They were not what we saw on 9/11. And some of that was due to the good work at patrolling the border, and securing aviation. We did not have a hijacking since 9/11. And it was also cooperation with the intelligence community, with the Department of Defense and with our allies.
Jaishankar: What were some of the decisions you think could have been made differently? I mean, what were some missed opportunities or improvements that you knew when you look back that you think could have been done better?
Chertoff: I think we were challenged, in terms of our ability to deal with and process terrorists we captured in battlefields in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world. Some of them were sent to Guantanamo, some of them were located in third countries, there was a lot of controversy, bad interrogation and the mechanism for adjudicating cases was not really put together efficiently. It's amazing to me that some of the hijackers, who are still in custody in Guantanamo, have still not been tried. Trials have been dragging, all kinds of delays and it's almost 20 years. So I think that there was perhaps too little attention paid to building a legal architecture that would allow us to adjudicate and resolve those cases.
Jaishankar: Did that have to do more with political reasons, was it differences with the CIA, you know, the foreign and domestic intelligence agencies that operate under very different circumstances? What were the key reasons?
I think you had a lot of different perspectives. As I said earlier, we were building the airplane while we flew in. So I think that caused some delay in resolving what the legal architecture should be. And then frankly, I think people got distracted by other things. And they assumed as long as people are sitting in Guantanamo, they're not going anywhere, and they’re not carrying out more attacks. There's no rush to adjudicate. But the reality suggests that we should get these cases resolved one way or the other.
Jaishankar: Eighteen years on from the formation of DHS, do you think the airplane has been built or is it still a work in progress?
Chertoff: The challenge is that the airplane is always flying through different weather. And so many of the things we tried to do didn't get done, but there are new challenges. Cyber security, for example, that the department is becoming much more heavily focused on. Now with the new administration, there’s a real push to integrate with DHS. Earlier cyber security was done by the intelligence community and the private sector. So I think that's another area that we're going to see some significant improvement. But we're also seeing domestic terrorism as a emerging major threat. And that involves all kinds of complicated legal issues, right? That's going to be the next challenge in upgrading the airplane.
Jaishankar: At a time when a cyber attack seems to occur almost every week, whether it's in the United States or elsewhere - affecting US interests. Is that one area you think is deserving of greater investments going forward?
Chertoff: No question. Cyberattacks are now probably the number one threat to Homeland Security. It is a threat in the military dimension as well. And it's moved from simply being about the criminals to being a tool being used by nations rather than terrorists to carry out attacks. And it's moved from theft of money, and theft of intellectual property into actually affecting operating systems that deal with our healthcare, our transportation, our fuel, and our food. So it's easy to see that we're now looking at a potential series of attacks that could cause not only significant property damage, but loss of life.
Jaishankar: So are there other other issues - beyond cyber - you mentioned domestic terrorism? How is the nature of that changing? You know, how is that different from the counterterrorism issues you had to tackle in the decade after 9/11?
Chertoff: In the decade after 9/11, we're dealing with international terrorists, as they were headquartered largely overseas. That meant they had to get to the US to carry out attacks, and we built a mechanism to make it very difficult for them to do. It also meant our ability to use intelligence tools, and even military tools overseas was a real asset, because you could collect intelligence, and you can even use force to eliminate threats in other parts of the world. Because of the law, those avenues are not available in the US, you can’t just bomb people in the US. And even the ability to correct intelligence in the US is very constrained by legal rules, and our American Constitution, like the First Amendment. So the question is, how do you build a mechanism to alert you to potential domestic terrorism, while adhering to the rule of law that is fundamental. And I think we're still wrestling with that. But more and more overseas extremists, particularly right wing extremists in the US, and some of them also have connections overseas, are becoming more and more bold, in carrying out physical attacks. And of course, I have to say, the number one proof of this is January 6, where we had literally an attempt to have an insurrection and overthrow our democratic election by, among other things, a significant group of extremist individuals. And of course, this was encouraged and incited by the disappointed outgoing President Donald Trump. So this is going to be a problem with us for a while. And I think we're gonna have to retool our collection and our response capabilities to operate within a domestic environment without compromising the rule of law and our free will.
Let me add two other things. One thing we have learned from the pandemic is that a nation scale, global scale, medical emergency is now going to be much more in the forefront of our mind. And climate change. Increasingly wildfires and hurricanes, and that means the DHS, and other agencies are going to have to be prepared to respond. Sure, there's going to be a very full plate of things to do. So,both the transactional threats of a different nature but also domestic challenges of the different nature. This will require global cooperation.
Jaishankar: Thank you again for putting in the time for this discussion. It's been really enriching and really wide ranging. And thank you so much for bringing your wealth of expertise to this conversation although it is obviously a sobering occasion being 20 years after the 9/11 attacks. Thank you again, Secretary Chertoff and look forward to further discussions with you on behalf of ORF America.
Chertoff: Thank you.