Post 9-11, U.S. still unprepared for terrorist attacks, says security expert

BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News Staff

”The U.S. is dangerously unprotected, dangerously unprepared to cope with a second catastrophic terrorist attack on our soil,” homeland security expert Stephen Flynn told Rice students, faculty, staff and other guests of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy during a keynote address Nov. 6. ”That’s where we’re at 14 months post 9-11.”

Flynn, project director of the Independent Task Force on Homeland Security Imperatives, which was sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, discussed the findings and recommendations of the task force’s recently published report.

”Our view is that what we saw on Sept. 11 largely is how warfare will be conducted against the United States for the 21st century,” Flynn said.

How Americans responded to the attacks in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11 had a profound effect on their way of life and their economy, because all aviation was grounded and all seaports and borders between Mexico and Canada were closed.

”We did what no nation could hope to do against the world’s sole superpower — we imposed an economic blockade on our own economy in order to make ourselves more secure,” Flynn said. ”The only thing we had was a kill switch. We had to stop the world to be able to sort it out.”

That switch was turned back on not because the United States was more secure or because the threat had gone away, but because the American economy was impacted.

Within days after Sept. 11, America’s top auto manufacturers began closing assembly plants because the backlog of auto-parts supply trucks trying to cross the Canadian border at Detroit was costing them $1 million an hour in lost production. ”We did the arithmetic and effectively turned it back on because the cost was so great,” Flynn said.

The example of Sept. 11 taught adversaries of the United States two critical things, Flynn said: 1) The United States is open and unprotected; and 2) ”You get a very big bang for a very small buck by investing in this form of warfare.”

The Task Force on Homeland Security Imperatives is concerned that although important measures have been taken since Sept. 11 to respond to the risk of catastrophic terrorism, ”we have not yet had much that’s going to be fruit for a while with regard to organization of the federal government in dealing with federal security,” Flynn said. This is particularly alarming in light of the prospect that the United States might go to war with Iraq and that Saddam Hussein might threaten the use of weapons of mass destruction in America.

The task force warned that if the nation does not respond more urgently to address its vulnerabilities, the next attack could result in even greater casualties and widespread disruption to the economy and people’s lives.

One of the key vulnerable areas involves transportation of merchandise from overseas, because the system of fast, efficient global shipping was designed with little regard for security at a time when malicious intent to exploit the system to create mass destruction was not much of a threat. Flynn cited a lack of security standards that govern who is allowed to load containers overseas and how those containers are transported.

The task force noted that 50,000 federal screeners are being hired at the nation’s airports to check passengers, but only the tiniest percentage of containers, ships, trucks and trains that enter the United States each day are subject to examination even though a weapon of mass destruction could well be hidden among the cargo.

Given that last year six million maritime containers arrived in the United States for distribution by 11.5 million trucks and 2.2 million rail cars, inspection of imports for risk management might seem a daunting task. But security in the transportation system is an achievable goal, Flynn said, if provisions are made for transparency and accountability.

To feel secure about the safety of cargo shipments, people need confidence that what is put inside a container is legitimate and identified accordingly, and that the workers who are loading the container are legitimate and authorized to do so. Confidence that the shipment hasn’t been intercepted or compromised once it’s on the move is needed as well, and sophisticated tracking devices can make that possible. With such safeguards in place, delays in shipping should be avoided because less time would have to be spent spot-checking containers, Flynn said.

He cited several other problems with security and enforcement.

Flynn said 650,000 local and state law-enforcement officials continue to operate in a ”virtual intelligence vacuum” because they have no access to terrorist watch lists provided by the U.S. Department of State to immigration officials.

”We have intelligence. Our problem is that we don’t have actionable intelligence,” Flynn said. As an example, he noted that ships don’t get tracked like airplanes; if agents are tipped off that white powder has been loaded onto a ship, they might not be able to find the ship.

Logic and attentiveness to detail can be addressed with proper tracking systems. ”You see things that don’t make sense,” he said, noting that a delivery that begins 60 miles from a port and arrives 13 hours later should arouse suspicion, as should high-value goods being shipped via low-value methods.

Forensics should be handled in the security world the same as it is for aircraft safety. Just as flight-data recorders, cockpit recorders and investigations by a national agency are used to determine why a plane crashed, a system needs to be put into place to determine how a terrorist attack was able to occur.

During a question-and-answer session after his talk, Flynn explained that the task force report does not reveal confidential information that could benefit terrorists. ”We’re not providing road maps,” he said. But some of the specifics in the report were needed to convince people there’s a problem that needs fixing and a sense of urgency to fix it.
With appropriate measures in place, when a terrorist incident occurs, the conclusion afterward should be that it resulted from a correctable breach in security, not the absence of security, said Flynn, the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The task force was led by former Senators Warren Rudman and Gary Hart, co-chairs of the now famous Commission on National Security that three years ago warned of a terrorist attack.

The text of the task force’s report and a list of members are available online at the Council on Foreign Relations Web site, <www.cfr.org >.