Homeland Security

Written Testimony before a hearing of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs United States Senate on “The Security of America’s Chemical Facilities" Chairman Collins, Senator Lieberman, and distinguished members of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, I am the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. I am honored to appear before you this morning to discuss the vitally important issue of assessing the security of America’s chemical facilities and to provide recommendations for moving beyond the tepid federal government effort since 9/11 to reduce the vulnerability of this critical sector to terrorism. There is no more important work this Committee can undertake than holding hearings such as this one. With the passage of time, it has become tempting for many in Washington to become self-congratulatory about the efforts that have been made to date to deal with the catastrophic terrorist threat. Some would like to believe that our post-9/11 military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have dissuaded terrorists from doing their worse on U.S. soil or at least distracted them from attacking the U.S. homeland. Others would like to assign a deterrent value to the very modest measures that have been taken to date to bolster security at home. On the other end of the spectrum, as Americans become aware of just how “target-rich” we are as a nation, many simply become fatalistic. One view holds that a determined terrorist will succeed no matter what measures we put in place so any effort is hardly worth the effort. Some go so far as to argue that the expense of safeguarding what is valuable and vulnerable in our midst is itself a concession to terrorism; i.e., “the terrorists have won” if we have to make post-9/11 adjustments to the way we conduct business or go about our daily lives. When the optimists who believe America is winning the war on terror by way of its overseas exertions are combined with the pessimists who believe efforts to protect the U.S. homeland are futile, what is left is a very small constituency who support tackling the complex issue of critical infrastructure protection. This is why it so important that this committee continues to exercise leadership on these issues. It is my conviction that al Qaeda or one of its many radical jihadist imitators will attempt to carry out a major terrorist attack on the United States within the next five years. At the top of the list of likely targets is the chemical industry. I also believe that there are practical steps that can be taken right now at a reasonable cost that can reduce the risk that the next terrorist attack will be catastrophic. We must necessarily begin with a far more active role by the federal government in advancing security within an industry that has long been accustomed to managing its own affairs. The case for purposeful federal leadership to bolster security in the chemical industry rests on two legs. First, is the attractiveness of the industry as a potential terrorist target? Second, are the inherent limits of the marketplace— left on its own— to advance security within this sector? THE THREAT One of the questions that is asked with growing frequency today is why there has not been another attack since 9/11? If America is indeed vulnerable, why have the terrorists not struck again? Implicit in this question are both: (1) a critique that perhaps observers like me are overstating the threat and underestimating what the U.S. government has accomplished since 9/11 to reduce the risk, and (2) a concern that new investments in added security may end up being wasteful. There is a compelling explanation for a lengthy interval between the 9/11 attacks and the next attack that should serve as an antidote for the quickening slide back towards national complacency. Al Qaeda has made clear that they want to carry out a more devastating attack then those on New York and Washington. Launching such an attack requires developing a plan and mobilizing the capacity to carry out that plan. This includes setting up a logistics cell, surveillance cell, and attack cell to scope out the target, conduct dry runs, and ultimately to execute the attack. Establishing this organizational capacity takes time, particularly within the United States, where al Qaeda must work from a much smaller organizational footprint than it has in Western Europe or countries like Indonesia. Going after lesser targets puts that organization at risk because any attack exposes terrorist cells to enforcement action. This is because it is impossible to carry out an attack without leaving a forensic trail that can put a carefully built organization at risk. In short, while it is true that there are many easy targets within the United States that terrorists could have struck since 9/11, carrying out a truly catastrophic terrorists attack requires more time. Of the carefully selected potential targets that al Qaeda or its imitators might seek to attack, the chemical industry should be at the top of the list. There are hundreds of chemical facilities within the United States that represent the military equivalent of a poorly guarded arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Terrorists do not need to produce or procure chemical weapons and smuggle them into the United States. Just as on 9/11 they converted domestic airliners into missiles that destroyed the twin towers, they can target facilities that manufacture or conveyances that transport such lethal chemicals as chlorine, anhydrous ammonia, boron tri-flouride, cyanide, and nitrates. These facilities are found around the country in industrial parks, in seaports, and near the major population centers. Dangerous chemicals routinely travel along our highways, inland waterways, and on railcars that pass through the heart of major cities including Washington, DC just a short distance from Capitol Hill. Terrorist attacks on the U.S. chemical industry have the potential to kill tens of thousands of Americans and seriously injure many more. In many instances, these attacks hold the potential for having a cascading effect across other infrastructures, particularly in the energy and transportation sectors. This is both because of the damage that can be caused by the attack, and the enormous expense and effort associated with the clean-up to an affected area in its aftermath. The four metropolitan areas that deserve the most federal attention and support are Newark, New Orleans, Houston, and Los Angeles. THE LIMITS OF THE MARKET The White House National Strategy for Homeland Security, released on July 16, 2002, assigns most of the responsibility for funding the protection of potential targets within U.S. borders to the private sector. In Chapter Six, “The Costs of Homeland Security,” the strategy lays out “the broad principles that should guide the allocation of funding for homeland security [and] help determine who should bear the financial burdens.” It declares: "The government should only address those activities that the market does not adequately provide— for example, national defense or border security…. For other aspects of homeland security, sufficient incentives exist in the private market to supply protection. In these cases we should rely on the private sector." Unfortunately, this expression of faith in the market has not been borne out by security investments within the private sector. According to a survey commissioned by the Washington-based Council on Competitiveness just one year after September 11, 92 percent of executives did not believe that terrorists would target their companies, and only 53 percent of the respondents indicated that their companies had increased security spending between 2001 and 2002. With the passing of each month without a new attack, the reluctance of companies to invest in security has only grown. If there were indeed “sufficient incentives in the private market to supply protection,” there would be no need for the hearing we are having today. 3 ½ years after the September 11 attacks we should be seeing the chemical industry making substantial investments in addressing longstanding security weaknesses. But, there are two barriers to this kind of investment taking place. First, executives in this increasingly competitive industry worry that such investments will place them at a competitive disadvantage. Second, there are unique liability issues associated with industry-led efforts to define and implement adequate security. Security is not free. A company incurs costs when it invests in measures to protect the portion of a vital sector it controls. If a company does not believe other companies are willing or able to make a similar investment, then it faces the likelihood of losing market share while simply shifting the sector’s vulnerability elsewhere. If terrorists strike, the company will still suffer the disruptive consequences of an attack right alongside those who did nothing to prevent it. Those consequences are likely to include the cost of implementing new government requirements. Therefore, infrastructure security suffers from a dilemma commonly referred to as the "tragedy of the commons." The “tragedy of the commons” applies to the chemical industry in this way: By and large, chemical manufacturers have had an impressive safety record. They routinely work with and transport some of the most dangerous substances known to man, but accidents that result in serious loss of life and damage to the environment are rare. However, the post-9/11 security imperative poses a special challenge for them. Operating on thin profit margins and faced with growing overseas competition, most companies have been reluctant to incur the additional costs associated with improving their security. Consider the case of a hypothetical manager of a chemical plant who decides to spend a day looking around his facility to access its security and discovers many serious lapses. After a fitful night of sleep, he wakes up and decides to invest in protective measures that raise the cost to his customers by $50 per shipment. A competitor who does not make that investment will be able to attract business away from the security-conscious plant because his handling costs will be lower. Capable terrorists and criminals will target this lower-cost operation since it is an easier target. The result is that the terrorist threat is only displaced, not deterred. Even if the chemical industry could agree amongst itself to a common set of security measures and felt confident that good faith efforts would be made across the sector to abide by them, it still faces the unique uncertainties associated with liability when it comes to deciding, “How much security is enough.” Since all security measures follow the rule of diminishing returns; i.e., higher investments buy incrementally less additional security; at some point a decision about the cost-benefit trade-off must be made. When executives make decisions about safety or other business issues, they can refer to empirical data from reliable open or proprietary sources. But decisions about adequate security require information about the threat. Typically, that information/intelligence is carefully controlled by the public sector and often lacks specificity. So the private sector is left essentially making their best guess about how much security they should invest in. However, a successful attack on their sector in the wake of new investments to protect it, will inevitably lead to a public judgment that the bar was set too low. The only way to prevent the tragedy of the commons and to address the liability issue is for the public sector: (1) to be intimately involved in the decision about what security measures should be taken, (2) to have a credible enforcement role in assuring industry compliance with these measures, and (3) to provide a reasonable level of indemnification should agreed upon security measures be found wanting following a terrorist attack; i.e., to provide the industry with a measure of “Good Samaritan” protection as long as they abide by agreed upon standards . In short, security of critical infrastructures such as the chemical industry requires an effective performance-based regulatory regime developed at the federal level. To this end, I recommend this committee consider holding hearings and drafting legislation that incorporates the following: (1) Provides the necessary resources for the Department of Homeland Security to work with (a) the Local Planning Emergency Committees created under the Emergency Response and Community Right to Know Act (EPCRA) and (b) the FBI’s district-based INFRAGARD program to identify minimal standards for the industry to: Establish physical security, communications capabilities, and access control at chemical facilities based on the quantity and lethality of the chemicals produced and stored within a facility, its proximity to major population centers, and its proximity to other critical infrastructure such as energy and transportation. Conduct regular exercises to test the adequacy of security measures to prevent intrusions. To conduct community outreach on incidence management with neighbors to the facilities who would be directly affected in the aftermath of a successful attack. To set minimal intervals for emergency response training involving local firefighters, police, and emergency healthcare based on the likelihood of large-scale casualties in the aftermath of a successful attack. (2) To authorize the creation of bonded, third-party inspectors to audit compliance with these minimal standards at intervals appropriate to the risk posed by a successful attack on the chemical facility. (3) To create within the Department of Homeland a chemical security compliance office that conducts periodic inspections of facilities to determine both the adequacy of their compliance and the care at which third-party inspectors have conducted their compliance audits. In carrying out this “auditing-the-auditors” program, DHS must possess the authority to swiftly sanction third-party inspectors who it finds to be providing substandard audits. (4) To sponsor research and development and to provide tax incentives which reward the adoption of less dangerous processes for making, handling, and storing the most lethal chemicals. (5) To sponsor research and development of new technologies to mitigate the risk of chemical releases beyond a chemical facility. (6) To sponsor research and development of lower-cost, more user-friendly protective equipment for emergency responders. (7) To create a task force that recommends a new protocol for resolving the conflict associated with the pre-9/11 community outreach requirements of EPCRA and the post-9/11 trend towards restricting public access to information deemed to be sensitive by DHS. The need for advanced information to be available for communities to take necessary life-saving measures in the aftermath of an attack should be assigned as much of a priority as DHS’s tendency to treat public disclosure of details associated with high-risk/high-consequence facilities as sensitive information. This is especially the case in the near term to medium term, given the low-probability that DHS will have actionable intelligence to prevent a terrorist attack. (8) To require security risk assessments that are reviewed by the senior homeland security official at the state level before new non-industrial development is allowed in the vicinity of existing chemical facilities. This is designed to provide the means for an appropriate evaluation of decisions such as the one made this year by the Los Angeles Community College District to build a campus to accommodate up to 12,000 students in the southeast Los Angeles community of South Gate, next to one of southern California’s largest chemical plants. CONCLUSIONS: While this hearing has focused on the issue of chemical facilities, it is important that the issue of transportation of chemicals receive equal attention by this committee and by the federal government. At the end of the day, precursor chemicals must be shipped to manufacturing facilities to produce their final products, and those products need to reach consumers for them to have commercial value. This means that virtually all of the chemicals that we should be concerned with at industrial facilities are concurrently moving about on railcars, barges, and trucks, often in close proximity to major population centers. There are even some chemicals that are so hazardous that they become unstable if they do not reach their destination within prescribed timeframes; i.e., they will explode. The limited progress there has been made to date within the chemical industry has primarily involved efforts to improve physical security. While these “gates, guards, and guns” issues warrant the attention they have been receiving, they represent only a small part of the overall security agenda. At the end of the day, determined terrorist organizations will be able to compromise any existing industrial security regime. This does not mean these measures are futile because the harder a target becomes to compromise, the more expertise, money, planning, and dry-runs a terrorist organization requires to compromise it. This translates into improved odds that they will do things that will allow them to be detected by vigilant law enforcement. However, the best way to protect both the American people and an industry as critical to the U.S. economy and our modern way of life as the chemical sector is to reduce the probability that targeting chemical facilities or the transport of hazardous chemicals is the equivalent of constructing and deploying a weapon of mass destruction. We can accomplish this by adding a new security lens to the safety lens that is already well entrenched within the industry. The safety lens which has evolved from training, professional protocols, regulation, and liability law, requires that the industry automatically anticipate the possibilities and potential consequences of an act of God, human error, or mechanical error and devise means to mitigate those risks. In our post-9/11 age, the new requirement must be that the industry also automatically asks: “What is the possibility and what are the potential consequences that we could be targeted by someone with malicious intent?” Based on the answer to that question, they must incorporate appropriate safeguards to lower the risk. In the end, given that it will be several years before the recent reforms to our intelligence community will bear fruit, we must accept that while a “threat-based” approach to homeland security may be desirable, it will be elusive for some time to come. The only prudent alternative to dealing with our intelligence shortcomings is to look at the sectors where the consequences of an attack would be greatest and assume that our adversaries are interested in attacking those targets. This means that we must put in place, as quickly as possible, reasonable safeguards to both protect those targets and to reduce the consequences should our prevention efforts fail. One of the central conclusions of the 9/11 Commission noted the pervasive lack of imagination across the U.S. government in anticipating that organizations like al Qaeda would use aircraft as instruments of terror. What should be guiding our efforts on homeland security today is not whether there is explicit evidence that demonstrates that our adversaries are thinking how and when to harm us, but whether there are in place credible measures that would prevent an attack from happening. As I look at the chemical industry today, I do not see credible barriers to a determined and resourceful terrorist organization. This is clearly an unsatisfactory state of affairs in our post-9/11 world. Stephen Flynn is the author of America the Vulnerable, published by HarperCollins in July 2004. He is the inaugural occupant of the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Chair in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Dr. Flynn served as Director and principal author for the task force report “America: Still Unprepared— Still in Danger,” co-chaired by former Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman. He spent twenty years as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Coast Guard including two commands at sea, served in the White House Military Office during the George H.W. Bush administration, and was director for Global Issue on the National Security Council staff during the Clinton administration. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A.L.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a B.S. from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy.

  Written Testimony before a hearing of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate on “U.S.-Mexico: Immigration Policy & The Bilateral Relationship” Stephen E. Flynn, Ph.D. Commander, U.S. Coast Guard (ret.) Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies March 23, 2004   Chairman Lugar, Senator Biden, and distinguished members of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. I am the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations where I recently directed the Independent Task Force on Homeland Security, co-chaired by former Senators Warren Rudman and Gary Hart. In June 2002, I retired as a Commander in the U.S. Coast Guard after 20 years of active duty service. I am honored to be appearing before you this morning to discuss the issue of border control as an element of the bilateral relationship between the United States and Mexico. North America finds itself in paradoxical times. On the one hand, the hemisphere’s economic prosperity depends on an open continental system that facilitates the free movement of people and goods. On the other, worries over America’s exposure to catastrophic terrorist attacks have transformed homeland security into one of Washington’s leading preoccupations. The result is that while the NAFTA imperative of a more open border was gathering steam prior to 9/11, since that fateful day, controlling the southwest border in an effort to prevent illegal immigration and smuggling has been advanced as essential to combating the terrorist threat against the United States. Security has trumped cross-border facilitation as our abiding interest. This is a mistake since it wrongly presumes that there is an automatic tradeoff between advancing greater degrees of openness to support the movement of legitimate people and goods and the need for more rigorous border controls. The experience over the past decade of stepped-up enforcement along the Mexican border suggests that U.S. efforts aimed at hardening its borders can have the unintended consequence of creating precisely the kind of an environment that is conducive to terrorists and criminals. Draconian measures to police the border invariably provide incentives for informal arrangements and criminal conspiracies to overcome cross-border barriers to commerce and labor movements. In addition, unilateral measures pursued on one side of the border create political impediments for enforcement cooperation on the other. The result is that the border region becomes more chaotic which makes it ideal for exploitation by criminals and terrorists. Terrorists and the tools of terrorism do not spring up at the border. Instead, they arrive via hemispheric and international trade and travel networks. Advancing a continental approach to deterring, detecting, and intercepting illicit actors seeking to exploit those networks would accomplish two things. First, it would provide some strategic depth for responding to a threat before it arrived at a critical and congested border crossing. Second, it would allow the ability to segment risk so that the cross-border movements of people and cargo deemed to present a low-risk could be facilitated. Then limited enforcement resources could be targeted more effectively at those that present a high risk. The shared risks of loss of life and massive economic disruption presented by the catastrophic terrorist threat should provide the basis for greater levels of bilateral cooperation that can remove many longstanding barriers to continental commerce precisely because those barriers themselves can elevate security risks. For example, the longstanding neglect of the border in terms of limited infrastructure investment and tepid efforts at customs and immigration modernization and harmonization made no sense in purely economic terms. But the resultant inefficiencies that carry substantial commercial costs also create opportunities that thugs and terrorists can exploit. Thus, there is a national security rationale to redress those inefficiencies. The agendas for both promoting security and greater continental commerce can be and must be mutual reinforcing. The Hardened Border Paradox Great powers have been building great walls throughout history. The Great Wall of China, the Maginot Line, and the Berlin Wall went up at considerable expense in sweat and treasure and all ultimately failed to block or contain the forces that prompted their construction. The recent efforts by the United States to “protect” the southwest border including installing a 26-mile long fence between San Diego and Tijuana, has had a similar fate. Take the case of illegal migration. Stepped-up patrolling and policing of the border may raise the costs of getting to the United States, but it also creates a demand for those who are in the business of arranging the illegal crossings. Migrants who once simply strolled across the border to seek work on the other side, now need “professional” help. That help is provided by guides known as “coyotes” who take migrants to remote border locations or put together increasingly sophisticated smuggling operations at the land border entries. As the coyote business becomes more lucrative, criminal gangs are better positioned to invest in pay-offs of front-line agents.[1] The prevalence of corruption, in turn, undermines information sharing and operational coordination between U.S. authorities and their Mexican counterparts. Enforcement driven-delays at the border also ironically contribute to creating opportunities for smuggling narcotics as well. In Laredo, Texas for instance, truck crossings were at 2.8 million in 1999, up from 1.3 million in 1993.[2] Many of these trucks operating at the border are old and poorly maintained and owned by small mom-and-pop trucking companies. The turnover-rate among drivers is extremely high. These conditions are prevalent because waiting hours at a border crossing in order to make a 20-mile round trip, with an empty trailer on the return, is not a lucrative business. Moving intercontinental freight is, so the trucks and drivers who make long-haul journeys tend to be of a higher quality. Since it is uneconomical to run a state-of-the-art rig near the border, trailers are usually offloaded at depots near the border. In the case of south-bound traffic, a short-haul truck is then contracted to move the freight to a customs broker who will then order another short-haul truck to transport the freight to another depot across the border. A long-haul truck will then pick up the load and carry it into the interior. The drivers of these short-haul rigs tend to be younger, less skilled, and are paid only nominal wages— as little as $7 to $10 per trip. As a result, the potential payoff for carrying contraband through a congested border crossing is all the more tempting.[3] The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy estimates that more than half of the cocaine that arrives in the United States comes via the southwest border.[4] Even with the rise in the number of inspectors and investigators assigned to the 28 border-entry points in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, given both the volume and the nature of the trucking sector that services the border, the U.S. government clearly is facing “needle-in-a-haystack” odds as it strives to detect and intercept illicit drugs. The pure cocaine to feed America’s annual coke habit could be transported in just fifteen of the more than 20 million 40-foot containers that arrived at America’s land and sea borders each year. And in addition to looking for drugs, the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection is charged with monitoring compliance with more than 400 laws and 34 international treaties, statutes, agreements, and conventions on behalf of 40 federal agencies.[5] So while the prevalence of migrant and narcotics smuggling seems to provide a compelling rationale for tightening up controls along U.S. borders, aggressive border inspections in turn, confront improbable odds while fostering the kinds of conditions that generate ample time and opportunity within a Mexican and US border city for these illicit transfers to occur. Hardened borders also transform the cost-reward structure so amateur crooks are replaced by sophisticated criminal enterprises and corruption issues become more pronounced. In short, the experience of the southwest border suggests that aggressive border security measures end up contributing to problems that inspired them in the first place. The Open Border Paradox The United States has enjoyed the remarkable good fortune of having the oft-heralded “longest undefended border in the world” with it Canadian neighbor to the north. For much of the two nation’s history, to the extent that there was a government presence along the 49th parallel, it was only to collect customs duties. As a result, the 5,525 mile border can be summed up as a national boundary with no fences and a few toll gates. In recent years, those toll gates have come under increasing pressure as cross border trade has flourished. Take the automotive industry, for example. General Motors, Ford, and DaimlerChrysler manufacture many of the parts to build their cars and trucks from plants in the Canadian province of Ontario. Several times each day these parts are delivered to the assembly plants in the United States. Delivery trucks are loaded so that parts meant for specific vehicles can be unloaded and placed directly on the appropriate chassis as it moves down the assembly line. This “just-in-time” delivery system has given the Big Three a more cost-effective and efficient production process. It has also generated a great deal of truck traffic. For example, up to 9000 trucks a day transit the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario. At these rates, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials must clear one truck every 18 seconds. If they fall behind, the parking lot can accommodate only 90 tractor-trailers at a time. Once the parking lot fills, trucks back up onto the bridge. The resulting pileup virtually closes the border, generating roadway chaos throughout metropolitan Windsor and Detroit, and costs the average automotive assembly plant an average of $1 million per hour in lost production. Over the past two decades, the episodic attention directed at the northern border was primarily centered around efforts to minimize any source of administrative friction that added to cost and delay of legitimate commerce. The notion of the 49th parallel as a security issue is a recent phenomenon that burst into the limelight just prior to the millennium. The catalyst was the December 1999 arrest of an Algerian terrorist with ties to Osama bin Laden in Port Angeles, Washington. Ahmed Ressam had arrived onboard a ferry from Vancouver in a passenger car with a trunk full of bomb-making materials. Only a U.S. Customs Service official’s unease with the way Ressam answered her questions prevented him from driving onto American soil. The jitters surrounding the Ressam arrest turned into near panic immediately following the September 11 attacks. Worries about the possibility of additional attacks led to the effective sealing of the border as every truck, car, driver, and passenger came under close examination. Within a day there was a 16-hour queue at the major border crossings in Michigan and New York.[6] By September 13, Damiler-Chrysler announced they would have to close an assembling plant on the following day because their supplies were stuck on the north side of the border.[7] On September 14, Ford announced they would be closing 5 plants the following week.[8] Washington quickly reconsidered its initial response and within a week, the border inspection wait times returned close to normal. On its face, the open and very limited controls exercised at the U.S.-Canada border would suggest that it was ripe for exploitation by criminals and terrorists. The reality is that the imperative to manage cross-border threats without disrupting trade that amounts to more than $1 billion a day and the travel of 220 million people each year, has led to an extraordinary degree of cross-border cooperation. On the Vermont-Quebec border, for instance, Canadian and U.S. law enforcement officers at the federal, state, provincial, and local levels have been meeting for 18 years to discuss their criminal cases without any formal charter. The relationships are such that participants sit together and share information in much the same way they might at a roll call if they all belonged to the same police precinct.[9] The resultant collegiality spills over into their daily police work. In fact, local agents in Vermont or New Hampshire who are frustrated on occasion by bureaucratic obstacles to getting information or assistance from U.S. federal agencies have found a successful end-run to be to seek out their Canadian counterparts and ask them to serve as intermediaries for their requests! In Washington state and British Colombia, U.S. and Canadian police, immigration and customs officials, stood up a bi-national team in 1996 to work on cross-border crimes with local, state, and provincial enforcement agencies. The team was called the “Integrated Border Enforcement Team (IBET)” and initially focused on drug smuggling, but the portfolio later expanded to include terrorism. Following the September 11 attacks, Washington and Ottawa agreed to establish a total of 8 of these IBETs along the border.[10] The movement towards emphasizing a broader framework of bi-national cooperation versus focusing on the physical borderline gained impetus in 1999 when Prime Minister Jean Chretien and President Bill Clinton formed a process of consultation labeled the “Canada-U.S. Partnership (CUSP).” The process had as its objective the reinvention of border management to support the seamless passage of legitimate flows of people and goods between the two countries.[11] Progress towards this end was somewhat halting until after September 11. With 40 percent of its GDP tied to trade with the United States[12] , the post-9-11 closing of the border transformed the CUSP agenda into Ottawa’s top priority. The then Canadian foreign minister, John Manley, was dispatched to Washington to meet with the new White House Director of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge. Manley found a sympathetic audience in Ridge who had just stepped down as Governor of Pennsylvania (Canada was that state’s number 1 trade partner.) Together they hammered out a 30 point “Smart Border Action Plan” which they announced on December 10, 2001. The preamble of the declaration declared:   Public Security and economic security are mutually reinforcing. By working together to develop a zone of confidence against terrorist activity, we create a unique opportunity to build a smart border for the 21st century; a border that securely facilitates the free flow of people and commerce; a border that reflects the largest trading relationship in the world.[13]   In short, in dramatic contrast to the approach the United States had pursued on its southern border throughout the 1990s, with respect to its northern border Washington has concluded that its security is optimized by striving to keep the border as open as possible, while working to improve cooperative bi-national arrangements. Indeed, efforts to harden the border along the 49th parallel have been assessed to be self-defeating not just in economic terms, but in security terms. Closing the border in the wake of a terrorist attack only reinforces the military value of engaging in such attacks. This is because it means the U.S. government ends up doing something to itself that no other world power could aspire to accomplish— it imposes a blockade on its own economy. The result is to convert a small investment in terror into massive disruption of daily life that has a clear and adverse effect on the U.S. and overall global economy. America’s adversaries would undoubtedly take solace in this and recognize that the potential benefits of this kind of warfare warrants consideration. Beyond Border Control Embracing openness and advancing homeland security need not be an "either-or" proposition if Washington is willing to apply the lessons it has drawn from its northern border to Mexico and the broader global community. The end game must not be about defending a line on a map, but advancing greater bilateral integration while managing important safety, security, and other public policy interests. This balancing act can be accomplished by: (1) developing the means to validate in advance the overwhelming majority of the people and goods that cross the border as law abiding and low risk; and (2) enhancing the means of federal agents to target and intercept inbound high risk people and goods. Accomplishing the first is key to succeeding at the second since there will always be limits on the time and resources available for agents to conduct investigations and inspections. The goal must be to limit the size of the haystack in which there are most likely to be illicit needles. Verifying legitimate cross border flows as truly legitimate is not as fearsome task as it might first appear. This is because aggregate border crossing numbers are somewhat misleading since so many of the vehicles, drivers, and people are regular customers. For instance, while there were 4.2 million recorded southwest border truck crossings in 1999, these crossings were made by roughly 80,000 trucks.[14] If we are willing to make the investment, the technologies are certainly available to identify frequent travelers as such. After undergoing a pre-screening application and inspection process, vehicles can be equipped with an electronic transponder and the driver can be provided with a NAFTA transportation identity card with encoded biometric information to confirm that they are in fact who they profess to be. Quickly clearing these vehicles and their drivers allows inspectors to focus more of their time and energy on examining unfamiliar or suspicious traffic. Similarly, the vast majority of the daily pedestrian border crossings are made by day laborers who return to their homes south of the border each evening. These individuals can be recognized as such by inspectors who are assigned to the border. Well-designed border crossings that are adequately staffed with inspectors who are well-trained in behavior pattern recognition can be more effective than reliance on high-technology when dealing with this foot traffic. An inspector does not need a machine to tell her if she is looking at a face she has never seen before. And a biometric devise is useless in detecting behaviors such as excessive anxiety that should arouse suspicion. There is no substitute for human judgment when making these kinds of calls. Manufacturers, carriers, shippers, importers or exporters could be encouraged to adopt stringent internal security practices that reduce their exposure to internal criminal conspiracies and which deter criminal elements from targeting their vehicles and goods once they leave a factory, warehouse, or transshipment facility. They should also be encouraged to invest in information and tracking technologies to maintain near real-time accountability of their drivers, vehicles, and cargo from the point of origin through the final destination. Finally, they should transmit in advance, the electronic information border agents need to assess their compliance with the applicable laws and regulations. Theft-resistant transportation networks are more difficult for criminals and terrorists to compromise. Should there be advance intelligence of such a compromise, these information systems will make it easier to locate and interdict shipments that might contain illegal migrants or contraband before it enters a crowded port or land border inspection facility; alternatively, authorities can put together a “controlled-delivery” sting operation, where the contraband is allowed to reach the intended recipient so that the appropriate arrests can be made. Given the value this has for security, the U.S. government should work to create every incentive for expanding participation in these frequent-traveler programs including providing adequate staff to quickly process applications and eliminating or substantially reducing or waiving of the fees for receiving these biometric cards and transponders. Since these programs advance our national security, making an appropriate investment in federal resources to them is appropriate. Still, bringing about the kind of transformation that makes the private sector a willing and able partner in supporting a reinvented border control mission requires strong market incentives. Happily such incentives exists if the U.S. government is thoughtful about how new investments in transportation infrastructure are made at and near the border. Specifically, the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century has targeted substantial funding for major roadway improvements under the Coordinated Border Infrastructure Program.[15] As development and management plans for such projects as the “Ports-to-Plain” Corridor and the I-69 NAFTA highway are drawn-up, the development of a “dedicated trade lane” should be incorporated. That is, like commuter “High Occupancy Vehicle” (HOV) lanes found around many metropolitan areas, access to a dedicated trade lane would be restricted to only those vehicles and drivers and that cargo that participates in the new border management regime. An additional incentive could come by moving many of the border entry inspection processes away from the physical border itself and instead consolidate them into a single trilateral “NAFTA inspection facility” and locate it on a dedicated traffic lane that leads to the border. For instance there is an 18-mile new toll road leading from I-39 to the Mexican state of Nueva Leon via the recently constructed Colombia Bridge on the outskirts of Laredo, Texas. Why not have the United States, Mexico, and Canada agree to grant extraterritorial legal authority within a NAFTA inspection facility placed at the start of that toll road where trucks, drivers, and cargo could be examined by inspectors from all three countries and where each agency is allowed to enforce their respective national laws and regulations for goods and conveyances bound for their jurisdiction. Statutes governing the development of border crossing facilities and infrastructure should be examined to identify legal barriers which prevent or slow the investment of federal monies in these projects. Specifically, there should be a fast track for completing environmental impact studies that can delay border infrastructure projects up to ten years. The Bureau of Customs and Border Protection has already embraced this approach in sea ports under a program Commissioner Robert Bonner has called the “Container Security Initiative.” An important element of that initiative is stationing U.S. Customs inspectors overseas in loading and transshipment ports to inspect suspicious cargo before it is even loaded on a ship. Nations who agree to participate are given reciprocal privileges in U.S. ports.[16] In the North American context, the end-state, ideally, should be to develop a single zone conducting “one-stop” arrival and departure inspections. In the case of northbound trucks from Mexico City and Monterey and southbound trucks bound for the Mexican interior, operators would have to stop just once at a location where there is plenty of space to conduct inspections so there is no risk of hours-long backups that now routinely plague the bridges. Once the trucks are cleared, the flow of traffic could be closely monitored by use of “intelligent transportation systems” (ITS) radio frequency or GPS technologies. But simply relocating where inspections take place is not enough. Border control agencies need to fundamentally change the way they are doing business as well. The days of random, tedious, administrative and labor-intensive border inspection systems— the bane of every legitimate international traveler and business— must be numbered. The manpower constraints inherent in traditional border-control practices guarantee their continuing inability to adequately police the surge in continental and global commerce. What is the alternative? The answer lies in placing greater emphasis on developing the means to enhance “domain awareness” and the capacity to perform “anomaly detection.” In the computer industry, “anomaly detection” represents the most promising means for detecting hackers intent on stealing data or transmitting computer viruses.[17] The process involves monitoring the cascading flows of computer traffic with an eye towards discerning what is “normal” traffic; i.e., that which moves by way of the most technologically rational route. Once this baseline is established, software is written to detect that which is aberrant. A good computer hacker will try to look as close as possible to a legitimate user. But, since he is not, he inevitably must do some things differently and good cyber-security software will detect that variation, and deny access. For those hackers who manage to get through, their breach is identified and shared so that this abnormal behavior can be removed from the guidance of what is “normal” and acceptable. In much the same way, the overwhelming majority of the vehicles, people, and cargo that move across the U.S. borders move in predictable patterns. If inspectors have the means to analyze and keep track of these flows, they will have the means to detect “aberrant” behavior. In short, “anomaly detection” of cross-border flows is possible, if the regulatory and enforcement agencies whose daily tasks is to police those flows: (1) are given access to intelligence about real or suspected threats, and (2) are provided the means to gather, share, and mine private sector data that provides a comprehensive picture of “normal” cross border traffic so as to enhance their odds of detecting threats when they materialize. If the public sector undertakes these changes, the private-sector must also change its attitude about engaging in self-policing and sharing anything but the minimum amounts of relevant data with government agencies. Border control agencies have important and legitimate jobs to perform. The general public wants restrictions on the flows of contraband such as weapons, drugs, and child pornography. Immigration policies require that who enters and who leaves their jurisdictions be monitored and controlled. Many public-health strategies aimed at managing the spread of disease require the identification and isolation of people, livestock, and agricultural products that could place the general population at risk. Safety and environmental threats connected with unsafe shipping and trucking mandate that the transportation sector be monitored. And trade rules must be enforced for trade agreements to be sustainable. Barriers to continental progress The approach to border management outlined above has started to gain some currency with respect to the U.S.-Canada border. Just prior to the first anniversary of the tragic attacks on New York and Washington, President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Jean Chrétien met on the Detroit-side of the Ambassador Bridge to launch an initiative dubbed “the Free and Secure Trade (FAST)” program whose purpose is to move pre-approved goods across the border quickly. The two leaders also announced the expansion of program designed to speed the flow of pre-screened “low-risk” travelers across the border known as NEXUS along with a number of actions they are taking in support of the Ridge-Manley Smart Border agreement.[18] Against the backdrop of the world’s busiest commercial border crossing, President Bush declared:   With these two initiatives, we'll ensure faster movement of legal, low-risk goods, and faster travel for people cross our borders, and we'll be able to better enhance security. Our inspectors will spend less time inspecting law-abiding citizens and more time inspecting those who may harm us.[19]   For his part, the former Prime Minister Chrétien asserted:   We recognized that we could create a ‘smart border’-- one that was not only more secure, but more efficient for trade, to permit our businesses to get back to business, to allow our nurses, engineers and computer technicians to provide their services, and our students to attend classes. To let our communities continue planning a shared future together, secure in the knowledge that the border welcomes legitimate trade and travelers.[20]   While ample challenges remain with regard to adequate staffing, infrastructure, data management, and intelligence issues to make this “risk management” approach more capable and credible, there is clearly a consensus that measures that would have the net effect of hardening the border between Canada and the United States would be counterproductive. Meanwhile, the situation on U.S.-Mexican border stands in marked contrast. This is not for the want of any willingness on Mexico’s part. President Vincente Fox has repeatedly offered to have a no-holds bar conversation on the future of its shared border with the United States. But, there has been little enthusiasm in the post 9-11 Washington to reciprocate. While the new homeland security imperative is cited as the rationale for change to the north, to the south it is being proffered up to explain why the U.S.-Mexican border reform agenda has move from the political fast track to the breakdown lane. The persistent incidence of crime, narcotics and migrant trafficking, and corruption are rallying points for advocates of “tightening-up” border enforcement. The generally unchallenged assumption is that, now more than ever, the United States needs to be committed to vigilance along the southern border. But, the case for fundamental reform should be even more compelling. Presumably, the combination of the new high security stakes and the acknowledgement in the Ridge-Manley agreement that hardening the 49th parallel is self-defeating, should create fertile ground for a thoughtful reexamination of the prevailing approach to managing the southern border. So why hasn’t this logic been the prevailing one? The answer lies with the fact that the southern border is imprisoned in a legacy of immigration and drug enforcement efforts. Despite two decades of evidence to the contrary, Washington continues to see interdiction at the border as the key to successfully combating the northbound flow of illicit drugs and migrants. To adopt the “smart border” agenda throughout North America will require that Washington countenance an alternative approach to dealing with the issues of illicit drugs and immigration. It will require the federal agencies for whom border enforcement has been a growth business to acknowledge the unintended consequence of their collective effort has been to actually make the border region more difficult to police and secure. And it will require those within the U.S. Congress who oppose NAFTA to stop exploiting America’s newfound homeland security imperative as a means for advancing their protectionist agenda. Conclusion The most important reason to get border management right is to satisfy what is arguably the most critical homeland security imperative of our time: to reduce the risk that hemispheric and global trade lanes will be exploited to smuggle a weapons of mass destruction into the United States. Without a committed effort to advance a bilateral approach to border management, terrorists will continue to have ample opportunity to bring their battles to American streets. It is in the collective interest of the United States and Mexico to work together to mitigate that risk. But the impetus for challenging conventional notions of border control owes it source not just to a transformed post-9/11 threat environment. It is also a long overdue response to the evolution of commercial and social patterns of interaction throughout North America that have made continental relationships more dynamic, organic, and integrated. As such, the case against traditional border management practices such as those pursued along the southwest border had been already made by the close of the last century for anyone willing to look at objectively at the yawning gap between enforcement rhetoric and reality. Stepped-up efforts to harden the border are a flawed, even counterproductive, approach to advancing important security and public policy interests. By contrast, the kind of “smart border” initiatives being embraced on the northern border hold out real promise. The outline for transformed border management is clear. It requires a risk management approach to policing cross-border flows which includes the close collaboration of the major beneficiaries of an increasingly open North American continent— the United States’ neighbors to the North and the South, and the private sector. The stakes of getting this right are also clear. Transforming how the border is managed is an essential step towards assuring the long-term sustainability of hemispheric economic integration within the context of the transformed security environment of the post-9-11 world. Thank you Mr. Chairman. I look forward to responding to your questions. [1] Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the U.S.- Mexico Divide (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). [2] Keith Philips and Carlos Manzanares, “Transportation Infrastructure and the Border Economy,” in The Border Economy (Dallas: Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, June 2001), 11. [3] Field visit by the author to Laredo, Texas Aug 20-21, 2001. [4] Office of National Drug Control Policy, National Drug Control Strategy: 2001 Annual Report, Shielding U.S. Borders from the Drug Threat (Washington: USGPO, 2001). [5] U.S. Customs Service, “About U.S. Customs,” accessed on September 6, 2002 at http://www.customs.gov/about/about.htm. [6] U.S. Customs Service, Border Wait Times at major northern and southern border crossings. Current border wait-times information is available at http://www.customs.gov/travel/travel.htm. [7] Steve Erwin, Automakers forced to shut down: Parts shortage suspends production,” Edmonton Journal, September 14, 2001, F4. [8] “Parts Shortages Cause Ford Shutdown,” Associated Press, September 14, 2001. [9] The Committee is informally known as the “Leene Committee,” named for its founder, James Leene, a former policeman who serve’s in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Burlington, VT. [10] 6th Annual Canada-U.S Cross-Border Crime Forum Press Release, July 6, 2002, accessed on September 6, 2002 at http://www.sgc.gc.ca/Releases/e20020722.htm [11] George Haynal, “Interdependence, Globalization, and North American Borders,” in Governance and Public Security (Syracuse: Maxwell School, 2002), 55. [12] Authors calculations based on statistics available at Statistics Canada, www.statcan.ca [13] The Whitehouse Office of Homeland Security, “Action Plan for Creating a Secure and Smart Border,” Dec 12, 2001, accessed on September 5, 2002 at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/12/20011212-6.html [14] Office of the Inspector General, “Interim Report on Status of Implementing the North American Free Trade Agreement’s Cross Border Trucking Provisions,” Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, MH-2001-059, (May 8, 2001), 7. Also, Statement of the Honorable Kenneth M. Mead, Inspector General, USDOT, “Motor Carrier Safety at the U.S. – Mexican Border,” July 18, 2001 before the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, United States Senate. [15] TEA-21 [1119(a)] [16] Robert C. Bonner, “Pushing Borders Outwards: Rethinking Customs Border Enforcement,” A speech presented at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C., Jan 17, 2002.

STATEMENT OF JAMIE F. METZL SENIOR FELLOW AND COORDINATOR FOR HOMELAND SECURITY PROGRAMS, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS PROJECT DIRECTOR, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONSINDEPENDENT TASK FORCE ON EMERGENCY RESPONDERS BEFORE THE HOUSE SELECT COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY July 17, 2003 Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee, Thank you for inviting me to testify before you today. It is an honor for me to be here. I serve as Project Director of the Council on Foreign Relations Independent task Force on Emergency Responders, where I work with our Chairman, Senator Warren Rudman and Senior Advisor Richard Clarke. The non-partisan task force has brought together leading Americans from diverse political and professional backgrounds to examine whether or not America is sufficiently prepared for another terrorist attack. Our members include former Secretary of State George Shultz, former CIA and FBI Director William Webster, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the former Chief of Staff of the Army, three Nobel laureates, and other senior experts of a similar stature. The Task Force met with local emergency responders across the country, worked closely with emergency responder professional associations, and partnered on spending-related issues with two of the national leading budgetary analysis organizations, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment and the Concord Coalition. Based on these extensive contacts and the totality of our investigation, we came to one very simple conclusion: almost two years after 9/11, America is not sufficiently prepared for another terrorist attack. This is not to say that we are not better prepared to address some aspects of the terrorist threat or that the government has done nothing since 9/11. In our report entitled Emergency Responders: Drastically Underfunded, Dangerously Unprepared which we released on June 30, the Task Force credited the Bush administration, Congress, governors, and mayors with taking important steps since the September 11 attacks to respond to the risk of catastrophic terrorism. It is to say, however, that we are not as prepared as we must be given the magnitude of the threat we face and the tremendous repercussions of another attack. As Senator Rudman has said, the question is not if the next attack will take place, but rather when it will take place. Somewhere in the world, perhaps even here in America, terrorists are now likely planning attacks on the United States. At the same time, America’s diplomats, military officers, intelligence agents, policemen, firefighters, and others are working frantically to prevent and prepare for such an attack. These two groups of people are in a race with each other that our side cannot afford to lose. An effective homeland security strategy must therefore play both offense and defense. We must attack terrorists wherever they are, cut off their financing, and destroy their networks. We must also address global causes of instability that provide fertile soil for the recruitment of terrorists. At home, we must protect our critical infrastructure, keep our airways, ports, and highways safe, and make sure that our local policemen, firefighters, health workers and others have the equipment and the training they need to prevent and respond to terrorist attacks. Although there are many aspects of homeland security that need to be reviewed, our examination focused on the preparedness of emergency responders. What we found shocked us. We found that on average, fire departments across the country have only enough radios to equip half the firefighters on a shift, and breathing apparatuses for only one third. We found that a mere ten percent of fire departments in the United States have the personnel and equipment to respond to a building collapse. We found that police departments in cities across the country do not have the protective gear to safely secure a site following an attack with weapons of mass destruction. We found that public health labs in most states still lack basic equipment and expertise to adequately respond to a chemical or biological attack, and that 75 percent of state laboratories report being overwhelmed by too many testing requests. In sum, we found that emergency responders across the country don’t have the equipment and the training they need to respond safely and effectively to a terrorist attack. In order to quantify this preparedness gap, we worked with each emergency responder community -- fire, police, emergency medical, public health, emergency management, and others -- and asked them to determine and cost out the minimum essential capabilities they required to be prepared for a terrorist attack. We were very clear that we were not asking for a wish list, and we carefully reviewed the data we collected from these sources. We were extremely conservative in our estimates. The high funding estimate provided to us by the fire community, for example, was roughly $85 billion over five years. The number that we ended up using for our calculation, however, was $37 billion. The high estimate for establishing interoperable communications was $18 billion over five years, but we used the much lower number of $6.8 billion based on the more economical funding model of the Capital Wireless Integration Network project in the greater DC area. Most significantly, because police organizations were unable to provide us with any reliable estimates of their need, we decided not to include a police figure rather than include a number we would not be able to support. Finally, we assumed that every dollar allocated for emergency responders would be used to address terrorism preparedness needs, not for more generic purposes. Based on our calculations, we found that America will fall roughly $98.4 billion short of meeting critical emergency responder needs over the next five years if current federal, state, and local funding levels are maintained. According to our estimates, combined federal, state, and local expenditures would need to be as much as tripled over the next five years to address this unmet need. As you know, states across the country are in their worst financial situation in decades, and there are many who argue that terrorism is a national security threat which, according to the constitution, is primarily a responsibility of the federal government. Covering the $98.4 billion funding shortfall using federal funds alone, therefore, would require a five-fold increase from the current level of $5.4 billion per year to an annual federal expenditure of $25.1 billion. Among other things, these additional funds are badly needed to enhance federal and local urban search and rescue capabilities; to foster interoperable communications systems for emergency responders across the country; to enhance public health preparedness by strengthening laboratories and disease tracking capabilities, and training public health professionals for biological, chemical, and radiological events; to provide basic protective gear and WMD remediation equipment to firefighters; to support an extensive series of national exercises that would allow responders to improve on response techniques; to enhance emergency agricultural and veterinary capabilities for response to a potential national food supply attack; and to help develop surge capacity in the nation’s hospitals to help them better prepare for a WMD attack. While these critical needs must be addressed immediately, our Task Force is the first to admit that our figures for meeting them are preliminary and that the Unites States must develop a more sophisticated requirements-generation process. Unless we both get the necessary resources to America’s front-line emergency responders and create a policy framework for spending these funds most efficiently, the American taxpayer will not receive the best return on our investments in homeland security and, more importantly, we will not be as safe as we must become. If we allocate the funds without getting the policy issues right, or if we get the policy issues right without allocating the funds, we will not be prepared. America must do both. The centerpiece of this policy framework must be national preparedness standards. America needs national standards that define what emergency preparedness means. Every city of a given size should have a minimum set of capabilities -- they should be able to respond to a biological event of a certain size, decontaminate a certain number of people, etc. But because America has not defined what preparedness is, we have no way of knowing systematically how prepared we are or what we need to do to get from where we are now to where we need to be. Standards should not become the basis for federal micromanaging of state and local governments, but they must establish minimum essential capabilities that every jurisdiction of a certain size should either have or have access to. Within these parameters, state and local governments should be allowed flexibility for determining priorities and allocating resources so long as national standards are met over a fixed period of time. National standards can then provide the basis for a requirements process similar to that employed by the United States military. Threats must be identified, capabilities for addressing threats determined, and requirements generated for establishing or otherwise gaining access to necessary capabilities. Effective coordination and planning between and among all levels of government and emergency responders on the ground must then transform new capabilities into a national preparedness system. A second element in getting the policy framework right is fixing the system for allocating scarce emergency responder funds. It makes no sense to distribute funds based primarily on a divide the spoils formula. As Secretary Ridge and others have correctly asserted, we need to think less about politics and more about our vulnerabilities and the hierarchy of threats facing us when making decisions about distributing funds. This must be the case on both the federal and on the state level. Otherwise, our funds will be diluted to the point of being wasted. America must smartly allocate our limited resources to address our greatest vulnerabilities. In addition, the erratic nature of federal funding has created perverse incentives for short-term thinking among cities and states, and this process must be fixed. State and local governments can’t make long-term decisions to address their needs without confidence that increased federal funding will be sustained. Multi-year funding is extremely difficult in our political system, even for military appropriations, but we must work to create confidence among states and localities that funding levels will be maintained over time in order to establish proper incentives for systematic, long-term planning. You are the experts on the issue of Congressional oversight, and I am therefore hesitant to make recommendations regarding how Congress might be organized. Nevertheless, the Task Force found that an estimated 88 committees and subcommittees of the House and Senate have a hand in the unwieldy homeland security authorization and appropriations process. For this reason, the Task Force has recommended that the authorization and appropriations processes must be focused and streamlined both to ensure necessary oversight and to better guarantee that funds will be appropriated and distributed with necessary speed. The Task Force believes that Congress should have a lead committee, or an effective joint committee, to shape overall policy in order to prevent the fragmentation of oversight and the distortion of appropriations. As I’m sure you know, the Task Force has recommended that the House of Representatives transform this committee into a standing committee and give it a formal, leading role in the authorization of all emergency responder expenditures. Finally, the federal and state grants systems are duplicative and unnecessarily complicated and serve to slow the funding process for no real benefit. The current inflexible structure of homeland security funding, along with shifting federal requirements and increased amounts of paperwork, place unnecessary burdens on state and local governments. For example, some states have been required to submit as many as five homeland security plans in order to qualify for federal assistance. While a balance should be maintained between the need for the rapid allocation of emergency preparedness funds and the maintenance of appropriate oversight to ensure that such funds are well spent, the present danger is too great to allow for business as usual. As part of an overall response to this larger structural problem, we believe that Congress should require DHS to work with other federal agencies to streamline homeland security grant programs in a way that reduces unnecessary duplication and establishes coordinated “one-stop shopping” for state and local authorities seeking grant funds. America’s local emergency responders will always be the first to confront a terrorist incident and will play the central role in managing its immediate consequences. Their efforts in the first minutes and hours following an attack will be critical to saving lives, reestablishing order, and preventing mass panic. America would not think of sending our military to fight a war overseas without proper equipment and training. It is therefore unconscionable that we are not providing those same necessities to the local emergency responders who are also on the front lines of the war on terror. One of the many things we learned from the 9/11 attacks is that our local emergency responders will rush to the scene of a terrorist incident, even if they do not have everything they will need once they get there. In New York, this led to inexcusable deaths. The United States has both a responsibility and a critical need to provide our emergency responders with the equipment, training, and other necessary resources to do their jobs safely and effectively. Otherwise, we will all be in unnecessary danger. America must do better. Thank you very much. I look forward to answering any questions you may have.

Written Testimony before a hearing of theU.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee onTechnology, Terrorism, and Government Information Stephen E. Flynn, Ph.D.Commander, U.S. Coast Guard (ret.)Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies andDirector, Council on Foreign Relations Independent Task Forceon Homeland Security Imperative Room 226Dirksen Senate Office BuildingWashington, D.C. November 14, 2002 Senator Feinstein, Senator Kyl, and distinguished members of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Technology, Terrorism, and Government Information. On behalf of the Council on Foreign Relations Independent Task Force on Homeland Security, thank you for so quickly assembling this hearing on our recently issued report, “America Still Unprepared—America Still in Danger.” I am honored to be appearing before you with one of our task force’s co-chairs and a truly great American, former Senator Warren Rudman, and my fellow task force member, Mr. Phil Odeen. Fourteen months after 9/11, America remains dangerously unprepared to prevent and respond to a catastrophic attack on U.S. soil. In all likelihood, the next attack will result in even greater casualties and widespread disruption to American lives and the economy. This is the core finding of our task force for which I was privileged to serve as director and which was led by former Senators Warren Rudman and Gary Hart—co-chairs of the now famous Commission on National Security that warned of such a terrorist attack three years ago. Our bipartisan Independent Task Force, which came to this sober conclusion and which makes recommendations for emergency action, included two former secretaries of state, three Nobel laureates, two former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a former director of the CIA and FBI, and some of the nation's most distinguished financial, legal, and medical experts. It is a finding which we believe the nation must respond to with the same level of intensity that we are investing in our overseas efforts to combat terrorism. Stated succinctly, we believe we should be operating essentially on a wartime footing here at home—and we are not. Indeed, we fear that there are worrisome signs that the nation is already slipping back into complacency. Jumping directly to the agenda of this hearing today—what should Congress be doing to make the nation safer—two immediate actions are essential. First, the pending legislation to create the Department of Homeland Security should be acted on without delay. Second, Congress needs to immediately act to approve the remaining fiscal 2003 Appropriations Bills. Quite frankly, it is a disgrace that so many important measures we should be taking to address our many serious vulnerabilities are stalled because so much of the government is operating under the budgetary restrictions associated with the spending limits imposed by the rules governing continuing resolutions. In addition, we hope that the House and Senate will take a serious look at many of the recommendations for urgent action contained in our task force report which I attach to this statement and ask that it be included as a part of the official record of this hearing’s proceedings. In my opening statement this afternoon, I would like to stress why we believe that the nation is entering a period of especially grave danger with regard to the threat of a second catastrophic terrorist attack on the United States. First, there the lessons of 9/11: (1) The homeland of the United States is largely open and unprotected, and (2) there is a vast menu of civilian targets which if exploited will lead to mass societal and economic disruption. In short, what we witnessed on September 11, 2002 is how warfare will likely be conducted against the United States for the foreseeable future. We are the world’s “Goliath,” and our adversaries must become creative “David’s” to challenge our power. Going toe-to-toe on the conventional military battlefield almost certainly would be a losing proposition. Second, there is mounting evidence that al Qaeda is returning to an operational footing. In the words of George Tenet who testified publicly before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence a month ago: "When you see the multiple attacks that you've seen occur around the world, from Bali to Kuwait, the number of failed attacks that have been attempted, the various messages that have been issued by senior al-Qaeda leaders, you must make the assumption that al-Qaeda is in an execution phase and intends to strike us both here and overseas; that's unambiguous as far as I am concerned." Directors of Central Intelligence rarely use in public the word “unambiguous” alongside their intelligence assessments—this assessment deserves to be taken extremely seriously. Third, there is the fact that we are poised to embark on a war with Iraq. Such a war will have at least two implications for the homeland security imperative. (1) It elevates the risk in the near term of an attack on the United States. We are preparing to attack a ruthless adversary who may well have access to weapons of mass destruction. Given Saddam Hussein’s past track record, prudence requires that we assume he will resort to any means to hang on to power. This could well include sponsorship of terrorist operations against the United States, at home as well as abroad. (2) A war with Iraq will likely consume virtually all the nation’s attention and command the bulk of the available resources, leaving little left over to address our many domestic vulnerabilities. Against this backdrop, where are we today with regard to advancing the security of the U.S. homeland? Our findings include the following: 650,000 local and state police officials continue to operate in a virtual intelligence vacuum, without a workable means to routinely access terrorist watch lists provided by the U.S. Department of State to immigration and consular officials. While 50,000 federal screeners are being hired at the nation's airports to check passengers, only the tiniest percentage of containers, ships, trucks, and trains that enter the United States each day are subject to examination—and a weapon of mass destruction could well be hidden among this cargo. Should the maritime or surface elements of America's global transportation system be used as a weapon delivery device, the response right now would almost certainly be to shut the system down at an enormous cost to the economies of the United States and its trade partners. First responders—police, fire, emergency medical technician personnel—are not prepared for a chemical or biological attack. Their radios cannot communicate with one another, and they lack the training and protective gear to protect themselves and the public in an emergency. The consequence of this could be the unnecessary loss of thousands of American lives. America's own ill-prepared response could hurt its people to a much greater extent than any single attack by a terrorist. America is a powerful and resilient nation, and terrorists are not supermen. But the risk of self-inflicted harm to America's liberties and way of life is greatest during and immediately following a national trauma. An adversary intent on disrupting America's reliance on energy need not target oil fields in the Middle East. The homeland infrastructure for refining and distributing energy to support the daily lives of Americans remains largely unprotected to sabotage. While the overwhelming majority of the nation's critical infrastructure is owned and operated by the private sector, significant legal barriers remain to forging effective private-public partnerships on homeland security issues. These include potential antitrust conflicts, concerns about the public release of sensitive security information by way of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and liability exposure. Domestic security measures must be pursued within an international context. The critical infrastructures that support the daily lives of Americans are linked to global networks. Efforts to protect these systems will fail unless they are pursued abroad as well as at home. The National Guard is currently equipped and trained primarily for carrying out its role in supporting conventional combat units overseas. The homeland security mission can draw on many of these capabilities but it requires added emphasis on bolstering the capacity of National Guard units to respond to biological attacks; acquiring protection, detection, and other equipment that is tailored for complex urban environments; and special training to provide civil support in the aftermath of a large-scale catastrophic attack. Our key recommendations include the following: Empower front-line agents to intercept terrorists by establishing a twenty-four-hour operations center in each state that can provide access to terrorist watch list information via real time intergovernmental links between local and federal law enforcement. Make first responders ready to respond by immediately providing federal funds to clear the backlog of requests for protective gear, training, and communications equipment. State and local budgets cannot bankroll these necessities in the near term. Recalibrate the agenda for transportation security; the vulnerabilities are greater and the stakes are higher in the sea and land modes than in commercial aviation. Systems such as those used in the aviation sector, which start from the assumption that every passenger and every bag of luggage poses an equal risk, must give way to more intelligence-driven and layered security approaches that emphasize prescreening and monitoring based on risk-criteria. Fund energy distribution vulnerability assessments to be completed in no more than six months, fund a stockpile of modular backup components to quickly restore the operation of the energy grid should it be targeted, and work with Canada to put in place adequate security measures for binational pipelines. Strengthen the capacity of local, state, and federal public heath and agricultural agencies to detect and conduct disease outbreak investigations. The key to mitigating casualties associated with a biological attack against people or the food supply is to identify the source of infection as early as possible. Enact an "Omnibus Anti-Red Tape" law with a two-year sunset clause for approved private-public homeland security task forces to include: (1) a fast-track security clearance process that permits the sharing of "secret-level" classified information with non-federal and industry leaders; (2) a FOIA exemption in instances when critical infrastructure industry leaders agree to share information about their security vulnerabilities with federal agencies; (3) an exemption of private participants in these task forces from antitrust rules; (4) homeland security appropriations to be managed under the more liberal rules governing research and development programs in the Department of Defense rather than the normal Federal Acquisition Rules; and (5) liability safeguards and limits. Fund, equip, and train National Guard units around the country to ensure they can support the new state homeland security plans under development by each governor. Also, triple the number of National Guard Weapons of Mass Destruction Support Teams from twenty-two to sixty-six. In conclusion, it is the belief our task force that quickly mobilizing the nation to prepare for the worst is an act of prudence, not fatalism. In the twenty-first century, security and liberty are inseparable. The absence of adequate security elevates the risk that laws will be passed immediately in the wake of surprise terrorist attacks that will be reactive, not deliberative. Predictably, the consequence will be to compound the initial harm incurred by a tragic event with measures that overreach in terms of imposing costly new security mandates and the assumption of new government authorities that may erode our freedoms. Accordingly, aggressively pursuing America's homeland security imperatives quickly and immediately may well be the most important thing we can do to sustain America's cherished freedoms for future generations. President Bush has declared that combating terrorism requires a war on two fronts—at home and abroad. The Task Force believes the nation should respond accordingly. Preparedness at home can play an indispensable role in combating terrorism by reducing its appeal as an effective means of warfare. Acts of catastrophic terrorism produce not only deaths and physical destruction but also societal and economic disruption. Thus, as important as it is to try and attack terrorist organizations overseas and isolate those who support them, it is equally important to eliminate the incentive for undertaking these acts in the first place. By sharply reducing, if not eliminating, the disruptive effects of terrorism, America's adversaries may be deterred from taking their battles to the streets of the American homeland. Thank you and I look forward to responding to your questions.