Before I start, I want to note that this morning, President Bush announced the nomination of Judge Michael Chertoff to be the next Secretary of Homeland Security.

I have worked with Mike Chertoff over the years, both when he was the U.S. Attorney across the river in New Jersey, and more recently, when he served as the Assistant Attorney General in the Department of Justice.

Mike headed the Criminal Division right after 9/11, and was a key person in the trenches changing the direction of DOJ, the FBI, and the U.S. government to a terrorist prevention mission.

Mike Chertoff is uniquely qualified to be the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

He will be a strong and effective leader because Mike Chertoff is someone who knows what needs to be done to protect our country against global terrorism.

I look forward to working with him.

Last September, we marked the third anniversary of 9/11—a somber reminder that our lives and our nation will never be the same.

Like all Americans, 9/11 is etched in my memory.

I was nominated by the President to be Commissioner of Customs in May 2001, had my Senate confirmation hearing at the end of July, and reported for duty in Washington on September 10, 2001. I was confirmed by the Senate the following week.

On the morning of 9/11, I was in a temporary office at the Treasury Department, next door to the White House, when the sirens went off to evacuate the building at about 9:35 a.m.

Just before exiting the fourth floor at Treasury, I glanced out the window and saw an enormous plume of black smoke rising from the Mall, to the right of the Washington Monument. Shortly thereafter, I realized that that plume was emanating from the Pentagon, which had just been hit.

Outside of Treasury, on 15th Street, the Acting Treasury Secretary, Ken Dam, waved for me to get into his car, and we proceeded to the command center at Secret Service Headquarters, a few blocks away.

I immediately established contact with U.S. Customs Headquarters, and began my duties as Commissioner in earnest. At about 10:05 a.m., I directed that U.S. Customs should go to Alert Level 1, the highest level security alert short of actually shutting down our borders.

U.S. Customs itself was struck directly by the attacks of September 11. Our Customs House at 6 World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan was destroyed on 9/11 when the North Tower fell upon it. Fortunately, none of our 800 Customs employees who worked there was killed.

The day after I was sworn in as Commissioner, I came to New York, to Ground Zero, where I visited the World Trade Center site, and I spoke with our stunned and somber Customs employees.

The image of the Customs House—what was left of it—and of Ground Zero—will stay with me forever. For, in that pile of smoldering rubble several stories high, I knew—we all knew—several thousand innocent people were entombed.

On the morning of 9/11, I also realized that my agency’s mission had been dramatically altered. It was clear to me that the priority mission of U.S. Customs had changed from the interdiction of illegal drugs and regulation of trade to a national security mission—preventing terrorists and terrorist weapons from getting into the United States.

As you know, the effects of 9/11 still reverberate in America, with the release of the 9/11 Commission’s Report last summer evaluating what went wrong, as if every terrorist attack, no matter how well conceived and how audacious, is preventable, if only we reorganize our government some more, if only we “connect the dots” better.

Even now, though, it's hard for some to imagine a plot so treacherous and evil that turned commercial passenger airplanes into missiles that brought huge skyscrapers to the ground.

In terms of loss of life, 9/11 was the largest terrorist attack in the history of the world. 2,933 innocent people were slaughtered that morning.

9/11 changed not only the U.S., but it changed the world, forever. It also changed the way we need to view national security.

As Steve Flynn points out, the United States had been lulled into a false sense of security with respect to global terrorism, perhaps under the illusion that we were somehow protected by oceans to our east and west, and by peaceful neighbors to our north and south.

9/11 utterly shattered that illusion!

By 10:30 a.m., U.S. Customs had identified the probable hijackers—all nineteen of them, through analysis of airline passenger data. As we now know, the nineteen terrorist hijackers were trained by al Qaeda, an extremist Islamic group led by Osama bin Laden and his sidekick, al Zawahiri.

Al Qaeda’s brand of terrorism is global in scope, and goes beyond anything we’ve seen before.

“Global terrorism” is, I believe, the greatest challenge of the 21st Century. As Communism was the security threat that dominated much of the last half of the 20th Century, this different “ism”—global terrorism—is likely to dominate in the first half of this century.

At the beginning of the Cold War, Winston Churchill warned of an “Iron Curtain” being drawn across Europe. Today, another curtain threatens to separate Muslim countries from the rest of the world.

That is exactly what al Qaeda wants.

Like Communism, global terrorism is a challenge that will be with the West—and the world—possibly for generations. Al Qaeda wants to exclude all Western influence and globalization from the Arab world, and more broadly, the Muslim world. They want to restore the Arab-dominated caliphate of ten centuries ago, and they are using—and will use—asymmetrical warfare—to achieve their goal. They have recruited and trained fundamentalist Muslims and will deploy this cadre of jihadists in their attempts to carry out large-scale global terrorist attacks to kill innocent civilians.

These are terrorists operations that are also designed to damage and disrupt the U.S. economy, and indeed, the global economy.

This is the enemy America finally came face-to-face with on 9/11, but the threat of further attacks is continuing—and real—and al Qaeda’s leaders have vowed to strike America again, even harder than 9/11.

There was credible intelligence that al Qaeda wanted to—and was—plotting multiple terrorist attacks in the United States to influence the Presidential election. They were unable to do so.

But, we must not underestimate al Qaeda’s patience and determination to strike America again.

We must not become complacent.

We must not let down our guard.

But, it is not just the United States that is targeted by al Qaeda. It is Europe. It is globalization. It is the global economy.

But more, it is attacking the forces of globalization that lead to economic uplift, democratization and reform.

The attacks of 9/11 weren't isolated incidents.

9/11 was only the most dramatic and brutal example of a long list of al Qaeda attacks around the world, before and since—from the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993—to the bombing of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania—to the post 9/11 attacks in Bali, in Istanbul, Morocco, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Djakarta, and Madrid on 3/11.

The list would have been longer if other al Qaeda plots had not been thwarted.

In 2000, for example, an al Qaeda terrorist named Ahmad Ressam, who became known as the Millennium Bomber, was arrested by a U.S. Customs Inspector names Diana Dean as he tried to enter the United States from Canada. His target: Los Angeles International Airport—LAX.

So, we better understand the objectives of our enemy, and we understand the threat posed by al Qaeda.

One thing that was, of course, immediately apparent after 9/11 was: a policy of containment and mutual deterrence would not be effective against this type of enemy. We needed a very different strategy to deal with this new kind of enemy. Lobbing a few cruise missiles into Afghanistan, as we did after the bombing of the two U.S. embassies in East Africa only served to embolden al Qaeda.

After 9/11, under President Bush’s leadership, the United States adopted essentially a three-pronged strategy for responding to the threat of global terrorism.

First, the Administration recognized that we must have an offense that goes after terrorists, terrorist leaders, and those who support them, and destroys the organizational infrastructure of al Qaeda, root and branch.

In less than three years, as a result of the efforts of the United States and our allies, we have deprived al Qaeda of its base in Afghanistan, and we have killed or captured approximately two-thirds of al Qaeda’s leadership, including killing its chief of operations Mohammed Atef, and capturing Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

Second, we must have a strong defense. This is where the Department of Homeland Security comes in.

Third, over the long haul, we must defuse the hatred and ignorance that motivates fundamentalist, fanatical Islamic jihadists to join the ranks of al Qaeda and its affiliated organizations. The reconstruction of Iraq and its government could do more, in time, to achieve the third objective of the strategy than anything else. Because a stable, economically vibrant and democratic Iraq will begin the collapse of al Qaeda and all it represents as surely as Solidarity in Poland was the beginning of the end for Communism and the Soviet Empire. And al Qaeda knows this. As does its commander in Iraq, Mr. Zarqawi.

The Bush Administration is moving forward on all three fronts as we must, but I will address only the second one today—the defense.

One of the most important steps taken by President Bush and the Congress to defend against global terrorism was to establish the Department of Homeland Security. This is the largest reorganization of our federal government in over 50 years, since the reorganization of 1947 to fight the Cold War.

The establishment of the Department of Homeland Security nearly two years ago is a reorganization on that scale, because it involves the transfer and bringing together of all—or parts—of 22 agencies of our government to protect and defend the “homeland.”

The Department of Homeland Security has three core missions:

First, to prevent further large-scale terrorist attacks in the United States;

Second, to better secure critical infrastructure; and

Third, although it assumes failure, prepare for and respond to large-scale terrorist attacks, a mission that involves organizing first responders, such as local police and fire departments and emergency medical personnel.

One of the most important ideas of the DHS reorganization, though, was the creation of one border agency of our government—one agency within the DHS to manage, control and secure our nation’s borders, all its entry points and between, for all purposes—customs, trade, immigration, agriculture protection and terrorism prevention.

That agency is United States Customs and Border Protection, which was created by merging frontline immigration and agriculture inspectors, and all of the Border Patrol, with U.S. Customs.

CBP is a merger, then, of all our border interdiction functions, authorities and personnel into one agency of our government.

Customs and Border Protection is the largest honest-to-goodness merger taking place within the Department of Homeland Security. With 42,000 employees, CBP represents one-fourth of all of the employees of the Department of Homeland Security, which is not surprising when one considers the importance of the security of our borders to the security of our homeland.

The priority mission of CBP is homeland security—that means preventing terrorists and terrorist weapons from getting into the United States. Yet, we must perform this mission without shutting off the flow of legitimate trade and travel, without shutting down our economy and our sense of openness as a country.

Needless to say, no other agency of the U.S. Government has a more important mission.

But we have not just reorganized. We have devised and implemented a strategy to achieve “twin goals”—security and facilitation—to secure our borders but facilitate the movement of legitimate trade and people across them.

Let me use our maritime security initiatives that we’ve implemented to illustrate the overall strategy.

The greatest threat to U.S. and global security in the maritime environment today is the potential for terrorists to use the international maritime system to smuggle terrorist weapons—or even terrorist operatives—into the United States.

Let’s us talk about the risk.

Every day, about 25,000 seagoing containers arrive—and are off loaded—at U.S. seaports. That’s nearly 9 million a year.

Think about the consequences if even a single one of those containers goes off.

This threat requires a security strategy to identify, detect, and deter this threat at the earliest point in the international supply chain, before arrival at our seaports.

The threat of a terrorist attack using a cargo container is not just an academic one. Last year, two suicide bombers entered the port of Ashdod, Israel, hidden inside of a cargo container. They killed dozens of innocent people.

Shortly after 9-11, Italian authorities found a suspected al Qaeda operative inside a shipping container bound for Halifax, Canada. The container originated in Port Said, Egypt, and inside the container were airport maps, and ominously, a phony airplane mechanic’s certificate.

When you think about it, the container is the potential Trojan Horse of the 21st Century.

But a container can be used to transport more than just terrorists. National security experts, like Steve Flynn, have pointed out the vulnerability of oceangoing cargo containers to terrorist exploitation.

A weapon could be concealed inside a container or a container could be made into a weapon. A 20-or 40-foot container could become a missile wafted into a seaport on a container ship and unloaded at that port.

For historical reasons, most U.S. seaports tend to be located in the middle of some of our nation’s largest urban areas—New York, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Seattle. That’s Seattle in the visual. As you can see, part of the container port is within a stone’s throw of downtown Seattle.

A 40-foot container loaded with ammonium nitrate, would create a huge blast—10 to 20 times that of the Oklahoma City bombing. But the “sum of all fears” is a “nuke-in-a-box.”

One does not wish to be an alarmist, but this much is known:

1. Bin Laden has been trying to get his hands on a nuclear device, or fissile materials to make one, for at least six years.
2. He reportedly met with Pakistani nuclear scientists some years ago.

But it’s not just a nuclear device that we need to worry about and prevent.

Some of you may have seen the screening of the HBO movie titled "Dirty Bomb" last night. A terrorist attack using a container to conceal a so-called RDD or “dirty bomb” could potentially stop global trade in its tracks, unless we have a maritime security system that can detect and deter such an attack.

The good news is that we have developed and implemented such a strategy, and we have done this through four interrelated, interlocking initiatives: the 24-Hour Rule; the National Targeting Center, housing our Automated Targeting System; the Container Security Initiative (CSI); and the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C-TPAT).

Under these initiatives:

• We obtain advance electronic information on all cargo shipped to the U.S., 24 hours before the cargo is loaded at foreign seaports. This is the 24-Hour Rule.
• We developed the Automated Targeting System and evaluate, at our National Targeting Center, each and every one of these containers for terrorist risk before they are loaded and shipped to U.S. seaports.
• By partnering with other countries, our trading partners, we have implemented the Container Security Initiative—CSI—to be able to inspect high-risk containers before they are loaded on board vessels to the U.S.

  As you can see on the left-side of that visual, CSI is already operational in 34 ports outside the United States—34 of the largest ports in the world. Ports like Rotterdam, Singapore and Hong Kong.

• And, the fourth initiative is Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism, our partnership with the private sector, with major importers and ocean carriers.

  Under C-TPAT, we have increased security of the supply chains, from the foreign loading docks to the U.S. ports of arrival, in exchange for CBP giving the goods shipped by C-TPAT companies faster processing through U.S. ports on arrival.

  The Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism began with just seven partners in November 2001. Today, more than 8,000 companies participate in the program. C-TPAT is, by far, the largest and, I believe, the most successful government-private sector partnership to arise from 9/11.

Technology
In addition to these four initiatives, we are also moving forward with the “Smart Box”, which we began piloting last year with some of our C-TPAT partners.

The Smart Box involves securing cargo containers with an imbedded, electronic Container Security Device that allows us to readily determine whether a container has been opened or tampered with at any point along its journey, from a foreign manufacturer to the United States.

Since 9/11, we have also added technology and equipment at our ports of entry to better detect nuclear and radiological weapons, including deploying highly sensitive radiation portal monitors (RPMs). We're not done by any means, but we've made a good start. These radiation detection systems complement the large-scale, whole-container x-ray and gamma ray imaging machines that can detect even heavily shielded fissile material.

Every one of the initiatives I’ve described is designed to make our borders smarter—and to extend our borders by pushing our zone of security out beyond our physical borders. Every one of these initiatives is designed to meet the “Twin Goals” of vastly increasing security, but doing so without choking off the flow of legitimate trade.

And not one of these initiatives existed before 9/11!

After 9/11, we knew we had to act—and act quickly to protect our country, our citizens, and our economy. And, act, we did. We reorganized a huge portion of our federal government. We ratcheted up our border security. And, we implemented sweeping initiatives to protect global trade and travel—and the global economy.

We 're not done yet, but combating terrorism is the number one priority of our country—now—and for the foreseeable future. Yet, it is critical that we maintain the sense of urgency and action that galvanized us—and the world—against terrorism after 9/11.

Will we succeed in defeating global terrorism?

Yes, but it will take a strong and abiding commitment, not just by the United States, but by other nations in partnership with us, and with the international community.

But I am reminded of another time in American history. A time of great peril. A time when the very existence of the United States was threatened. It was our Civil War.

After four years of war, Abraham Lincoln had gone to see General Grant after a turning point battle and the defeat of the South was certain.

While Lincoln and Grant sat around a campfire that night, General Grant asked Lincoln, “Mr. President, did you ever doubt the ultimate success of our cause?”

The light of the campfire flickering against his face, Lincoln leaned forward and replied without hesitation, “No, never for a moment.”

And, I am confident that, together, we will succeed against the evil forces of global terrorism. Together, we can do this. I do not doubt it. Never for a moment.