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Release Date: February 6, 2008
Boston, Ma.
Harvard University
Secretary Chertoff: Thank you, Dean, for that very kind introduction, and thank you all for the warm welcome. I am honored to speak at this forum tonight to follow in the footsteps of a lot of very distinguished people. I saw some of the names of the people on autographed fliers that are out in the anteroom, and it is really a great company to be privileged to follow.
Before I start with what I am going to talk about, let me tell you what I'm not going to talk about. I'm not going to talk about the Super Bowl, because I am in Boston, but I will say that I'm sometimes asked a question, as we come to the fourth year of the President's second term, whether there is anything left that the administration can do. So I want to remind those who ask the question that we recently learned on Sunday that there's an awful lot you can do in the fourth quarter of a game. (Laughter.)
Second thing I'm not going to – this joke went over much better in New York than this has gone over here – (laughter) – I'm not going to comment on the results of Super Tuesday; I'm sure there's a lot of discussion about that here. But what I do want to talk about tonight does have bearing on future Presidents and future administrations, because it is natural in the fourth year of a term to be looking to the future and asking what do we need to do to institutionalize the lessons that we've learned over the period of time that we've been privileged to serve.
And I'm going to say that – in maybe a somewhat reflective mode – as I've looked back on the last three years, and as I look ahead, one cardinal piece of advice I'd give my successors not only immediately but in the next generation is to pay attention to what I call the "structural obstacles" to achieving success in Washington.
You know, people often ask the question, "Well, why doesn't Washington work?" And when I came to Washington in this job, after public service that was largely as a prosecutor – so I was in the courtroom, and there's a verdict, and at the end of the verdict, either someone walks out or they get locked up; so there's a clear result – I entered into a world in which the impediments to actually getting closure on something are much, much greater than I had experienced in the courtroom.
And so, in thinking about the obstacles to getting things done, I've tried to lay out, both based on my experiences and based on some of what I've read and what I've learned from talking to other people, what are the structural obstacles that do prevent well-meaning people from actually accomplishing things, or make it very hard to accomplish things when you're working at a high policy-making job in Washington.
Now, one thing I'm going to say is not a structural obstacle is partisanship. There's a little bit of a tendency to say, "Well, you know, we just have hyper-partisanship, and that stops things from getting done." But my experience in the last three years is that while partisanship is a real part of Washington, it is actually a fairly minor obstacle to getting things done. It is often possible to put together coalitions of people who are interested, notwithstanding party affiliation. And the things that tend to blot real action are much more fundamental, in my view, than simply party affiliation.
In fact, I'm going to make the case that structural obstacles really run deeper than partisanship. They apply no matter who's in office. They apply whether the party that controls the White House controls Congress, or whether there are different parties. But what they have in common is the ability to frustrate the pursuit of the common good.
This is a vast topic. The Dean could probably talk about a lot of instances in which structural obstacles are seen and have an impact. I'm going to draw on my own experience dealing with the issue of managing risk in the context of homeland security. And I want to take a historical look first by asking some questions about the situation that people concerned about terrorism faced before September 11th, back in the 1990s.
One of the questions that was asked by the 9/11 Commission was, "Why didn't people in Washington do more in the 1990s before September 11th to secure the homeland, to prevent what happened on September 11th?" And inevitably, when there were hearings and public commentary about the work of the Commission, the focus was who were the people to blame that missed the boat, that didn't identify the individual hijackers, that didn't connect that dot, that didn't launch this attack on bin Laden.
But I'm going to make the case that the problem was much deeper than individual blame, much deeper than an individual missed opportunity – and reflect it as a systemic, a societal problem in dealing with a risk that anybody who thought about it was very real, but that had not yet matured in an immediate way into public consciousness.
Let's take a look at what we knew in the 1990s. As early as July 1995, a National Intelligence Estimate predicted future terrorist attacks in the United States, and specifically warned that this danger would increase in the very near future.
Three years later in 1998, there was a crystal clear warning delivered by Osama bin Laden: He publicly declared war on America; he called on his supporters to attack not only our military but our civilians wherever they could be found. And, of course, he backed up the threat with the bombings that occurred in the two embassies in East Africa, and ultimately with the bombing of the USS Cole.
In 1999, Phase I of the report of the Hart-Rudman Task Force on Homeland Security warned, and I quote, "America will become increasingly vulnerable to hostile attack on our homeland." And the report further went on to say, "Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers."
Now some people might say, "Well, okay, that was a lot of warning and it was a lot of words, but that wasn't really enough to spur action, because we hadn't actually been attacked by terrorists." But actually, that's not accurate either. Only a month after President Clinton was inaugurated, and more than eight and a half years before 9/11, the World Trade Center was bombed. Two years later, in 1995, the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was destroyed by a homegrown radical named Timothy McVeigh. And during the 1990s, in a case that was somewhat publicized – although not very well publicized – we prevented a planned attack on the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels by adherents to the Blind Sheikh, who, had he successfully executed the plan, would have actually caused enormous loss of life and property, and mayhem for the city of New York. And at the dawn of the new millennium, we narrowly averted a serious attack on the West Coast, thanks to the quick thinking of an alert Border Patrol agent who intercepted Ahmed Hassan.
So in short, not only did we have a lot of academic warning about the possibility of an attack, not only did we have the Hart-Rudman Commission, the Bremer Commission, the Gilmore Commission, and a host of people who wrote about the topic, but we had actually suffered two attacks – although they were not high-impact attacks, except, obviously, for those who lost loved ones – and we had barely averted two other attacks of greater magnitude.
And so the question remains: Given all that threat, why didn't we move more comprehensively against it?
Well, actually, there was some movement. The government did make movement in the 1990s to try to buy down or drive down that risk of a terrorist attack. But – and here's where the structural obstacles arise – each of these efforts was stopped in their tracks.
Let me give you two examples. One of the concerns that was raised by people who were thinking about the risk of terrorism was the possibility that foreign students could get into the United States using student visas, and then have a platform from which to launch an attack. And so in 1996, Congress responded by requiring the creation of a system to track students from countries designated as state sponsors of terrorism.
I'm mindful of the fact that I'm talking in an academic institution, so I don't want to ruffle anybody's feathers, but the fact of the matter is that after this requirement by Congress to track students was imposed, there was an immediate negative reaction by the higher educational establishment of the time. That establishment was concerned that it would drive down enrollment by foreign students, it would hurt, in a sense, the business of higher education, and it would be unpopular. And so because of that opposition, and because in the 1990s the threat of a student taking a terrorist action against the United States had not actually materialized, Congress actually never provided the funding to move the program forward. And, of course, without the money, there's no action.
And so when some of the September 11 hijackers began entering our country in 2000 to attend flight school, we didn't have a national student tracking system. Had there been such a system, we could've discovered that Mohammed Atta had made false statements about his student status, and then we could have denied him entry.
I'll give you another example. There was an initiative proposed in 1996 having to do with fingerprinting visitors to the United States. This is called US-VISIT; we currently have it. The law that Congress passed in 1996 required the Attorney General to develop an automated entry-exit program to collect records on every arriving and departing visitor.
The system was immediately opposed by leaders of border communities near Canada and Mexico. They were concerned that if we stopped people and took fingerprints from them, this would adversely affect the flow of commerce – people wouldn't want to come to the United States; it would hurt their business. Key members of Congress agreed that there was going to be a business – potential business inconvenience if we had this fingerprinting initiative in place. And therefore only the entry process became automated, and that process was slowed really to a crawl.
As a consequence of this, immigration authorities had no way of knowing whether any of the 9/11 hijackers had overstayed their visas, or how often they traveled in or outside the countries. And the lack of an entry-exit system was especially significant for a couple of the hijackers, who we might have identified and connected the dots with had we had that information.
So these are two examples of proposals that would have increased our systemic defenses, but, in fact, were never implemented because there were powerful interests that quite reasonably saw a potential negative impact on their business, and marshaled the effort to either slow or kill these initiatives before they fully developed. And in the absence of a high-consequence attack that dramatized the risk, there was simply not the public will to move forward on implementing these initiatives.
And that's why I'm the first person to be very hesitant to cast blame on those who, prior to September 11th, had the responsibility for protecting us against terror, because I recognize how difficult it would have been in the environment in which we lived before September 11th to really drive dramatic, expensive and inconvenient change in our security, given the fact that there would have been a lot of powerful interests that would have been – had their toes stepped on.
I mean, let's perform a thought experiment. Let's presume that in early 2000, after the attacks in East Africa, after the declaration of war by bin Laden, after all of these reports, after all the histories of hijackings we've had, let's suppose that the then-existing administration had said, "We want to set up a transportation security administration that's going to require the kinds of measures that we now experience in the airport: taking off your shoes; everybody has to go through a fairly rigorous search; we're going to watchlist people; they're going to have secure identification." I think it's quite obvious that that proposal never would have gotten off the ground, and would have frankly been laughed at in the court of public opinion. And so I would argue that the structural obstacles that faced policymakers in the 1990s are truly to blame for where we found ourselves on September 11th.
Now, of course, September 11th, as people say, changed everything because we moved out of the arena of having to imagine a high-consequence terrorist attack into the arena of having experienced a high-consequence terrorist attack. That was truly a gigantic wake-up call. That was truly the kind of transformative event that causes people to say, you know, we've really got to put our old model to one side; we've got to treat this as a very high priority, in terms of the survival of our own society and our own country.
And so in the immediate aftermath, we took some very vigorous and dramatic steps, which I don't think would have been accepted prior to September 11th. We attacked and destroyed al Qaeda's headquarters in Afghanistan. We deployed our intelligence assets around the globe. We fused our previously existing intelligence stovepipes to allow a real sharing of information between some of the overseas agencies and domestic agencies. And we put into effect numerous measures relating to potential threats here in the homeland, whether it's chemical plant security, a requirement of additional security on transportation, watchlists – all these measures that we currently live with. And, of course, part of what was done was the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security.
So this was an action-forcing event. And interestingly, in the wake of September 11th, we have built a robust student-tracking system, we do have a fully deployed fingerprint system for people who enter the United States, and we're now moving into getting 10 fingerprints instead of just two. We have built defenses for air transportation and other kinds of transportation that never would have been accepted prior to September 11th.
But here is where the structural obstacles begin to rear their head again, because although a couple of years after 9/11 it would not have seemed conceivable that a business-as-usual mentality could creep back into our public mindset, it has begun to return. And in some ways, because we have not had an attack on this country that was successful since 9/11 – although I would remind you that in August 2006 there was a serious effort made to launch such an attack on aviation bound for the U.S. in London, and there had been successful attacks on our partners overseas – but because we haven't had an attack here, I am concerned that we're beginning to backslide by allowing those same structural obstacles to get back in our way. And let me give you some examples of what I mean.
One of the public concerns expressed after 9/11 was the need to secure our borders. Whatever your view of comprehensive immigration reform – and I'm up front in saying I fought for it on behalf of the President early last year, and I still believe it's necessary – but whatever one says about comprehensive reform, almost everybody agrees you've got to secure the borders. Unrestricted flow across the borders is a bad thing. It's bad not only because of illegal migration, it's bad because drugs come in through an unrestricted border, criminals come in through an unrestricted border, and potentially terrorists come in through an unrestricted border.
And so Congress mandated that we take a number of steps to secure the border. One of those is building fencing where fencing is appropriate. And so we've begun that process. But what's happened as we've started to actually build that fence? Increasingly, landowners have objected because they don't want to have the fence on their property. The fence may spoil the view; they may view the fence as an unfriendly signal to their trading partners on the other side of the border; maybe they're concerned that the fence is going to inhibit the ability of their cattle to get to the river.
Now, of course, it's easy to understand their interest. It's their property – even though we would pay for it; obviously we would have to do that. But it's their property; they'd prefer not to be inconvenienced. They see the consequence, or the cost of putting these measures in place – they feel keenly on a personal level. And so they go and they file lawsuits, or they create political agitation against building a fence.
From my standpoint, though, I look at the cost of not building a fence. I look at the cost in terms of drugs coming into the country. Now, drugs may not be sold at the border – they may be sold in Chicago or in Washington or in New York – but the cost to the country is very real. And if driving that cost down means that it's cost-effective to build a fence, the greater good requires that.
But the impetus for doing that in the wake of the committed people who don't want to have it built on their land – that impetus is not very strong. The beneficiaries of a fence are widely distributed around the country, and their personal stake, and the personal benefit to them of security, may not be very powerfully present in their mind. And so we have a structural obstacle to getting the fence done. It's not a physical obstacle, but it's part of the structure of our system.
Let me give you another example. One of the major lessons that the 9/11 Commission taught, as a consequence of their extensive investigation, was that in the hands of a terrorist, documents that can be forged are a weapon. They relied upon the fact that the terrorists had used phony identification to board airplanes and to maintain themselves in the United States. And I can tell you, since then, time and again the ability to get phony travel documents has been a critical element in the planning of terrorists who want to move into an area in order to carry out an attack.
And so not surprisingly, Congress, in the first flush after 9/11 and in the wake of the 9/11 Commission recommendations, moved to mandate that we take steps to tighten up our border with respect to the kinds of documents that are presented at the border.
It may surprise you to know that for a long time, you could present any one of 8,000 different kinds of documents to cross a land border into the United States. You could present a library card. We operated what I sometimes call an "honor system" – where when there was a lot of traffic at the border, if people said, "I'm an American citizen," they could be waved through, basically taking their word for it.
And it seemed to me that in the wake of 9/11 and in the wake of everything we've seen, simply assuming that everybody is going to tell the truth at the border is an unduly optimistic view of human nature.
So you'd think, since we had the 9/11 Commission report, we've had GAO reports, all saying we have to toughen up our border security in terms of documents that are required, it would be a no-brainer. And yet again – and I understand where they're coming from – border businesses that are concerned that people who have to carry documents may not want to cross the border on impulse to go to a football game, or to purchase something in the United States now that the dollar is a little bit cheaper, those business groups rallied an enormous public campaign to delay our ability to put into effect the full measure of what Congress mandated on secure documentation.
And again – and this goes back to what the Dean said about risk – obviously, we have not had an occasion since 9/11 where someone crossed the border from Canada or Mexico, and carried out a terrorist attack. So we have not yet had the actual experience of the risk. And yet in light of 9/11 and what the 9/11 Commission taught us, it should no longer be merely a matter of imagination to see how that vulnerability could have a tremendous cost to the country; a cost far greater than perhaps a little inconvenience that occurs as people transition to a new regime of documentation when you cross the border.
But again, the intense – understandable – but intense hostility to this measure and the inconvenience, from a small group who have an immediate cost, threatens to overwhelm the greater good, notwithstanding all the commission reports and GAO reports and experiences that the larger public brings to the question of border security.
And let me give you a third example. After a long struggle, Congress authorized DHS to set performance-based standards for the chemical industry. That means when there's a chemical plant in a populated area that uses a hazardous chemical, we want them to disclose that fact; to lay out what the risks are. We want to assess if they're a high-risk chemical plant, and if necessary, to require they put measures into effect to secure themselves against an attack. We don't want to have a chemical plant, for example, sitting somewhere in Boston, become a bomb because it's not properly secured.
And one of the things we came to understand as we examined the industry is that there are some industries and some plants where very large amounts of propane are kept on the premises. I don't mean the little propane tank you have for your cooking, but I mean a really large – you know, literally, thousands and thousands of gallons of propane – and that in some locations, that propane could become a bomb in place. And we've seen propane bombs in Iraq. This is, again, not a matter of imagination, it's a matter of simply looking at what's happening to our troops in Iraq.
And yet, notwithstanding all the outcry and demand for chemical plant regulation, when we put into effect a requirement that people with large quantities of propane examine their security, notify us about their location so we could assess whether they need to protect that propane, we were immediately sued by the propane industry because they didn't want to absorb the cost. And again, I'm not talking about the little propane you have in your tank at home, or the remote tank of propane in a chicken farm somewhere. I mean, you know, large quantities of propane in populated areas. They didn't want to bear the cost of putting security measures in effect, even though you can easily foresee what the consequences would be if that became a bomb in place. Happily, that lawsuit has not succeeded.
So that is what we now see – or, what I now see – as I try to continue to move risk down in the area of homeland security: a series of intense, strongly held resistance efforts by small groups that feel that they bear the cost, in terms of their business, and have the ability to mobilize with an intensity that the larger public is not able to bring to the struggle.
Now I want to be very clear: This kind of push-back does not cause us to back down. Sometimes we end up in court – in fact, we end up in court quite a bit. And I bet if you got on a database and looked at the number of times I've been sued, there probably is going to be a very, very long printout, because pretty much everybody who is implicated by security measures sues. But we continue to move forward. When necessary, we use eminent domain or other regulatory authorities.
But it is a reminder of the kinds of structural obstacles we face in securing our country. And let me break these obstacles, really into three categories, when I evaluate them across the board.
The first obstacle is what I call anecdotalism. And by that I mean the tendency of legislators, media, other people in Washington, to be heavily influenced by an isolated individual example of something, as opposed to looking at the total picture from a policy standpoint. It's kind of what I would call a Gresham's Law for government, where a single heart-wrenching story, that is perhaps atypical, tends to drive out a good policy idea that makes sense for the large majority of people.
Let's take the example of travel documents. It seems to me almost inarguable that it's important to have secure documents when you cross a border; that there's value in knowing the identity of a person who wants to visit the United States. And yet from time to time, either because of human error or other misadventure, somebody has a bad experience at the border with a document – maybe it's misread or they wind up being detained for a period of time – and that story becomes, then, the vehicle for an outcry about too much harshness at the border; the border – we're being too tough at the border; we have to scale back.
I'm not saying you shouldn't listen to complaints, but I'm suggesting that making policy based on individual anecdotes or heart-wrenching stories, attends to individual problems, but doesn't tend to look at the greater good.
Second way in which I've seen progress endangered is parochialism. There's an expression, "Not in my backyard" – and I think that that's one which I increasingly see when we try to put measures into place to protect the country, whether it's "I don't want to have cameras on my part of the border because they're unsightly and therefore, even though you need it to control the border, I don't want it in my backyard."
My favorite was a guy who sued us, not because we were going to put a fence or a camera on his property at the border, but we were putting it on someone else's property, and that was causing illegal migrants to move over and cross onto his land. And he didn't want a fence; he wanted us to tear down the fence on the other guy's property so they'd go back to bothering him. That's really a classic of "Not in my backyard."
The third and maybe the toughest obstacle is short-term-ism, the inability, the structural inability of the system to look beyond the immediate gratification, and to be willing to pay a short-term cost for a vastly greater long-term benefit.
I want to give credit to Howard Kunreuther of University of Pennsylvania for this acronym which he coined, which is NIMTOF – "Not in my term in office." (Laughter.) The idea is that legislators and people who run for office are not prepared to either pay costs or incur sacrifices if the benefit of the cost or the sacrifice may never be felt, or may not be felt until 20 years from now when someone else is going to get credit for it.
And this is where the Dean is quite right. This is actually my world, my world in homeland security. My triumph is a term in which nothing happens now, I invest a reasonable amount of resources in preventing things or mitigating risk, and yet the positive result of that investment is either never seen publicly, because we've deterred or prevented everything from happening, or, if something does happen, God forbid, my successor in the next term, or the next two or three terms, gets the benefit of all the hard work and preparation.
It is the essence of buying down risk that you have to be prepared to incur short-term costs for long-term benefits. This, by the way, is something every homeowner knows. Anybody who owns a home knows you got to look at your house and you got to make decisions to do a certain amount of roof repair, and septic repair, and gardening, every year – even if the roof is not leaking yet, or even if the septic hasn't blown up yet, because that's how you prevent risks in the long term.
That's what ownership means. Ownership means that you accept the consequences, long-term and short-term, and you adjust your risk management by having taking ownership of all those consequences. And my concern is we do not have ownership in our government of all the consequences, in the sense that I've just talked about.
Let me give you also an example of something that's not – this is not a Washington problem, this is a much broader problem. And it's not related to terrorism only; it's related to natural disasters as well. In Sacramento, California, a couple years ago, Governor Schwarzenegger invited me to take a helicopter ride to ride around – to ride over the levees in the Sacramento Basin, the Natomas Basin. If you go out there, what you'll see is, there are a series of agricultural levees built 100 years ago when it was just farmland, at a time when if a levee broke, you lost a crop. Now, literally built up against those levees are houses. And if you fly over them, even on a day with no rain, you can see puddling in the front yard of the houses, which, again, I can tell you, as a homeowner, is a sure sign you've got a high water table and a potential flooding problem. And so we've now built in a place that is inherently susceptible to flooding and risk.
Recently, FEMA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, as part of the process of risk mitigation, hazard mitigation, has basically remapped the flood plain, and what they said was, in the proposed flood plain map, that the entire basin area will not meet the requirements to withstand a 1-in-33-year flood event. And that means property owners are going to have to buy flood insurance, that insurance is going to have to reflect the risk, and any new construction has to be elevated 33 feet over sea level. Now, the developers don't like this because this makes it less attractive for development. And so the mayor of Sacramento called this effort to remap the flood plain "absolutely dumb."
I have to tell you, having lived through Hurricane Katrina, I don't know how you can say that because investments that could have been made over 30 years in the wetlands and the levees in New Orleans to buy down a risk that maybe was 30 years off – the consequences of failing to make investments over 30 years became crystal clear when, in the face of a hurricane that's, frankly, not above average in strength, a levee crumbled and the whole city flooded.
And you would think after that incident – again, we would no longer have to imagine what a flood is like – we would start to think about the need to adjust our flood maps and take steps to protect against this kind of disaster, which in the long run – in the short run – in the long run is much cheaper than avoiding that investment. And yet we're still hearing it's absolutely dumb because it's bad for development. So, again, short-term economic impact trumps long-term – not only economic interests, but the long-term interests in life and health and property.
So these structural obstacles – anecdotalism, parochialism, and short-term-ism or NIMTOF – are, I think, the three big problems and challenges we have to overcome if we're going to sensibly deal with homeland security. And by this, I mean homeland security in the broader sense – not just terrorism, but all threats to public safety, and that includes natural disasters as well.
How do we fight these things? Well, I have a couple of suggestions, but I don't have answers. And I know, from talking to the Dean, that on this last issue that the school is working on some answers, and I think it's very important that the school do this.
On the first of these obstacles, anecdotalism, the typical cure that we use is to try to cite contrary anecdotes. It appears to be the case that in the public mind that only when you crystallize a problem around an individual circumstance can people actually move to the degree of emotional commitment that they need in order to be inspired to make the necessary and prudent investments to prevent something bad from happening.
That's why talking about experiences that we've had with terrorist attacks and natural disasters isn't, in my mind, fear-mongering; it's a necessary antidote to the inertia that necessarily arises in the face of people who don't want to be bothered or inconvenienced by preventing things because there's a short-term economic impact.
Likewise, when we get parochialism, "Not in My Background," we have to combat that by asking the following
Question: Is it fair to require that nearly 300 million Americans bear the risk of dangerous people coming into the country, or dangerous drugs coming into the country, simply because the people who happen to be at the border don't want to take certain measures on their backyard in order to protect the whole country? It's part of the cost that we have in a society that we are prepared to make some sacrifice for the greater good.
And frankly those who don't want to render the service on the border should ask themselves, what about those who are rendering personal sacrifices to go overseas and fight to defend the country? Obviously that sacrifice is not being made by people who have a "not in my backyard" mentality.
The third issue, the issue of "not in my term of office," is much harder, because it requires that we not simply counteract an anecdote with another anecdote or a "not in my backyard" story with the story of the larger, greater good. It requires us to think of the next generations' interest, a generation that may not even be present as against our own interest.
And there we have a problem which, of course, is not unique just to homeland security, but more broadly applicable. And again, let me give you a concrete example. We have spent an enormous amount of effort over the last few years categorizing infrastructure in this country to determine what has to be protected against the possibility of a terrorist attack based on vulnerability to consequence. So we at the federal level and states at the state level examine bridges and dams and public structures and electric grids so they know what security measures are the appropriate ones to put in place in order to reduce the risk to that infrastructure.
But what sense does it make to build protections and security measures for a bridge against a terrorist attack if the bridge is going to collapse because it wears out? You still don't have a bridge. And again, it was dramatized by the events up in Minnesota. And whether or not that was a design defect, it brings to mind the fact that our infrastructure needs to have disciplined investment and repair over a long period of time – not instantly and not tomorrow, but as part of a disciplined plan.
Now, how do we do that? Well, I guess I would leave you with this thought, because I don't have a perfect solution. Part of it is you've got to build – as we've done in the area of security, homeland security, where we've really looked at all the assets, we've taken the money that's been given to us and we've allocated the money on a risk basis – meaning we put the money against those critical infrastructure assets where there's the greatest risk in terms of vulnerability and consequence – we should be doing the same thing with our infrastructure money. If what we do with our infrastructure money is dole it out so that everybody gets a little piece of the pie, what's going to happen is we're never going to fix those elements of the infrastructure that are the most important and the highest priority.
I think we've done the issue of prioritization, of infrastructure protection for terrorism in the right way. And we've done it sometimes in the face of enormous criticism from towns and states who don't get a piece of the pie, because we've taken the view – and Congress has backed us up in this and I want to thank them for this – that homeland security grants are not meant to be peanut butter spread evenly across the bread; they are meant to be focused on risk in a disciplined way.
What we haven't done – and here I'm wearing my hat as the Secretary of the Department where FEMA is located – what we haven't done is applied that risk management approach to protection against natural disasters. And because we haven't done that and because we are spreading some of that like peanut butter – except it's not even as even as peanut butter – there is, frankly, a lack of public credibility for making the investments that are appropriate over the long term to get this thing fixed.
Now, there's no magic bullet, and you could begin a disciplined program of repairing your infrastructure tomorrow and it could turn out that the next day, through bad luck, a bridge you haven't gotten to falls. But the fact that it's not going to be a perfect solution or that it's not going to eliminate risk cannot be allowed to be a reason not to do anything, because one of the great arguments that I always hear is, well, your solution isn't perfect, and therefore we shouldn't do anything. And I think one of the great fallacies is the idea that using the perfect as the enemy of the good is the right way to make policy.
So now I've laid out the problem, I've laid out a few solutions. And obviously the need to solve these problems is going to persist well beyond my term of office. And so that's why I'm talking to you, because many of the people here are going to be embarking on careers in policymaking, whether in federal, state or local government or in the private sector, or in academics. And what I've tried to do is give you the benefit of my experience in three years, living through some of the toughest challenges and crises we've had in this country in my lifetime; and to give you some insight as to what I see the structural obstacles as being and to invite you to come up with your own solutions about how to deal with these obstacles.
On a personal level, I guess I would leave you with this, though: You can't win every battle; and if you try to fight every battle, you won't win any of them. So you've got to choose your battles wisely. But once you choose a battle, you must fight to win. If all of the groups and all of the interest groups that have contrary views – and I respect contrary views; I don't mean to diminish their views; people are right to feel passionate about their own self-interest – but your job when you're acting in the public interest, once you've listened and you've weighed the options and you've made a determination, is not to let the intensity of the individual self-interest overwhelm your commitment to the public interest. And that means being an active decision-maker, not a passive mediator. You will never please everybody. If you've pleased everybody it's likely because you've done nothing. And if you want to do nothing, you shouldn't go into government, you shouldn't try to pick up the task of public service.
If you look at the great leaders in the past, I think you see these traits of being willing to listen, but ultimately being committed to carrying through on an objective as an important ingredient in their success. Whether it's Lincoln or Churchill, Teddy Roosevelt or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it's easy to look back and say, wow, their decisions were right, it was sensible; Roosevelt was right to do the lend-lease and support Britain preparatory to getting into World War II; Lincoln was right not to accept secession and to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. But I tell you, going back and reading history with the benefit of having lived in history for three years, I urge you to look at how, for those who were living at the time – for Lincoln, when he was actually living in the Civil War; for Roosevelt – how much pressure they felt, how articulate the opponents were, how passionate was the opposition, how biting and bitter and personal the criticism was, and to surmount all that and triumph is truly why these were great Presidents. But to really appreciate the greatness of their leadership you have to put yourself in the time period in which they lived, when the outcome was very much in doubt, when it wasn't clear whether they would achieve victory which would vindicate the sacrifices.
And I think that not only gives you a greater insight into history, but it gives you a real insight into what you face going forward. It's a view of history that has led me to have a greater appreciation of Teddy Roosevelt's famous statement that it's "not the critic who counts, not the man who points out ? where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man" – and I should say "woman," it's anachronistic" – who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who errs, who comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming" – and when you think about this quote, think about what it's like to be in the middle of the arena – not afterwards, when you won, but in the middle, in the dust, with the sweat – "who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at ? best knows ? the triumph of high achievement, and who at ? worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
So my message to you is this: not to shy away from public service or shy away from government, but to participate with an appreciation of the spirit and the character you must bring to the job. And then at the end, whether you succeed or fail – or, as most of us, whether you succeed in part and fail in part – you will know the value of public service and I think you'll feel it was worth doing.
Let me thank the Kennedy School for inviting me here. Let me thank you for your contributions to the dialogue and for the work you're doing on examining these very pictures. Thank you. (Applause.)
Dr. Ellwood: All right. As is our system here, we have time for questions. There are microphones located in four locations: one right here, one up there, another there, one other here. And I just remind you of the basic ground rules – many of you have heard them oftentimes, but a good question has several characteristics: first, the person identifies themselves; second, they offer one question; and third, a question ends with a question mark. And so with that, let me start right here.
Question: A factor which is occasionally mentioned, cited for why Washington doesn't work, is lack of confidence in the government. About 10 years ago the Kennedy School held a major conference on this issue of drop in confidence. And as I recall, the conclusion was that the public was losing confidence in all branches of government, except in the military, which was increasing quite sharply. So my question is, how do you assess the U.S. public's confidence in government currently and, notably, in the national security area? And how does this affect homeland security?
Secretary Chertoff: That's a very good question. You know, there's a lot of – if you look at the polling data and all the stuff you read in the media, I would say that public confidence in every institution is quite low – whether it's government, whether it's the media, whether it's business institutions. I'm never quite sure how much to rely on the polls. My individual interactions are not quite that gloomy. But I do think we live at a time when, partly because people are more accustomed to interaction and customer service, and partly because there's a level of contentiousness that's driven into the public discourse, there's a harsher and more negative attitude. It's a problem for homeland security because we ask people to make a sacrifice – sometimes it's a small sacrifice – in order to accommodate security. And in order to do that, they have to believe the sacrifice is worthwhile. From time to time when we see that something is dumb, we try to fix it. Sometimes there's a requirement that is put into place, and when you really look at it in real life, it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. And then I take a particular joy in removing the requirement. An example of that was soon after I came on board, there was a very onerous requirement about not being able to get out of your seat if you flew to Washington until 30 minutes after you left National Airport and 30 minutes before you arrived. And when we looked at the security measures in place, we realized we didn't need it anymore and it was just a burden on people who – older men who, sometimes they'd use facilities more frequently. So we removed that. But I do think it's a problem. And rebuilding public confidence is a hard challenge and one that requires, I think, a lot of patience.
Question: I have a question about the final year of this administration and your work at DHS, especially with respect to FEMA. Even after we moved through 2005, in 2006 through the present there have been incredible problems with the management of aid to Katrina survivors, especially in terms of recoupment – which I'm sure you're well familiar with – underpayment of, actually, disaster assistance that should have been received, and the untimely eviction of people from FEMA trailers – which admittedly are flawed, but are the best that are available now. Do you have a strategy to move forward and try and fix that and try and make Washington work in this, your last year?
Secretary Chertoff: Katrina presents two separate problems, two distinct, really separate problems. One was the issue of response, how quickly you can respond. And that's a planning issue and I would say that's largely been corrected. The second issue is a deeper issue, which is reconstruction. And truthfully, reconstruction is not – I don't think we've ever had a reconstruction task like this in my lifetime. It's not an issue for which the current law is properly configured, because the current law imposes a series of bureaucratic or legal requirements about what assistance you can give, how you give it, how it flows, that are very – make it very difficult to deal with these in a comprehensive fashion. We also deal with the challenge of dividing the responsibility among three levels of government, so that's it's often necessary to get a consensus among three very different levels of government with different interests to move forward. I actually have thought about this a lot, and I think that we need to step back and look generally at the issue of reconstruction as an entirely separate task from the normal issue of response and recovery, which is FEMA's task. Whether it ought to be located in another department, whether some unique entity ought to be set up for doing mass reconstructions, is certainly one issue. When the White House issued its lessons learned, we suggested that long-term reconstruction recovery might properly be moved to an agency like HUD or HHS, precisely because it's a different set of skills. So there are a series of things that could be done structurally for the Stafford Act, institutionally to manage the process of reconstruction, that would really treat this as the unique challenge that it is; not simply a variety of the ordinary garden variety disaster, if I can use that expression. The second issue, though, is a harder issue. There are some very difficult choices to be made in order to move reconstruction forward. You know, you use the issue of the trailers. Trailers are not a good idea for housing. People should not be housed long-term in trailers. They're not meant for trailers. In the wake of Katrina, there was an overwhelming – not an outcry – a demand, an insistence, that trailers be moved into the area as quickly as possible because there was no housing available; the housing was unfit for human habitation. And I will tell you that I didn't meet many people in FEMA who wanted to put trailers in there. Everybody said it's a bad idea; people will wind up living in trailer parks. The problem is not so much with people who put a trailer in their driveway while they're rebuilding, because they're going to rebuild and they'll get back in the house. But it's when people's houses are wiped out. You could argue that the tough choice would have been to say, "You know what, we're just not going to allow trailers to be used for long-term housing. We will help you find housing elsewhere, but we will not provide trailers." We didn't make that decision. The trailers were put there. We now have people – we've drawn that number down, it's reduced by about three-quarters – but we still have an unacceptably large number of people living in trailer parks. I think it's about 7,000. I would personally like to get them all out tomorrow. Question is: Where do they go? There still isn't enough housing in the area, so people would have to move elsewhere. And that is a tough choice. You could argue that people are impairing their health by staying in trailers. How do you make that choice? Does the government make the choice? Do we make people leave? You could make the argument the government should do that. Or do we say to people, "Hey, look, it's a bad idea to live in a trailer. We think it's unhealthy – but you have to make the choice"? I think this is probably the toughest nut to crack in the whole issue because in order to force things to move quickly, we would have had to be prepared as a society to compel people to do things. And I'm not sure that that's necessarily the right answer. It's the way to get the quickest result, but it's not necessarily the happiest result. On the other hand, I will tell you that when you offer people more choice, you are going to delay the process. So this is really a topic for a whole separate speech, maybe a long one. But I hope I give you some idea of at least the kind of a high-altitude vision of what we're facing there.
Question: I wanted to ask you about what some would term "unreasonable powers" afforded to law enforcement in the post-9/11 era – specifically torture or aggressive interrogation, kidnapping or extraordinary rendition, or indefinite imprisonment. And even if you presume that these powers that run counter to inalienable rights were reasonable or acceptable, I want to ask you about the false positives, especially in light of a time when we have perhaps 800,000 people on a no-fly list. What happens when you have false positives?
And I'll ask you about one case in particular, but you could answer generally, and that is of Maher Arar of Canada, a man of Syrian origin who, while coming back from vacation to North Africa via JFK airport, was taken out, detained by Homeland Security, deported to Jordan, taken across the border to Syria, and tortured for a year before he was allowed to be repatriated. Thus far, the United States government has not apologized, even though he has been absolved of any terrorist things, and the Canadian government has done so.
Secretary Chertoff: Well, I can't speak about an individual case, first of all, because I might disagree with your characterization of the facts. And in any event, I'd have to get into matters, some of which are non-public. But let me deal with the issues of false positives.
Question: Could you at least try a little bit?
Secretary Chertoff: Pardon?
Question: Could you try a little bit?
Secretary Chertoff: I'm not going to speak about an individual's particular case. I'll observe, just by the way, that the Department of Homeland Security didn't exist when Arar was detained. So I can correct that right away.
But, more generally, for me to start to characterize what I know or don't know about a particular individual is a bad idea for a whole host of reasons. Also, I'm happy to say that the no-fly list isn't 800,000 people.
But there's no question you deal with the issue of false positives. So let's talk about how I think this has to work. I think the greater the restraint you put on somebody, generally speaking, the greater the responsibility to make sure you're not making a mistake. This is a kind of a general principle in the law. If you, for example, stop and detain somebody briefly, usually all you need is an articulable suspicion. If you want to hold them for a longer period of time, you need probable cause. If you want to imprison them to punish them, you need to convict them beyond a reasonable doubt.
So, in general, if we, for example – much of what people think is a no-fly list doesn't actually prevent people from flying, it subjects people to a little bit more of an intrusive search or a little more questioning. I think that's a comparatively low-level intrusion, and therefore the cost of a false positive is less. I think we all agree that if you're going to incapacitate somebody for a period of time, you have to have a higher confidence level that you're being accurate.
Now, this is not the law school, so I won't get into a deeply technical legal argument about what your rights are in the U.S. versus your rights overseas, but I think I – the general principle, I think, is right: The greater the restraint, the greater the requirement of being correct.
Question: With the 2012 requirement to scan a hundred percent of U.S.-bound containerized cargo at overseas seaports, some 600 last port of loading – while it's worthwhile to notice that the U.S. does not have a proactive export standing policy, what does DHS have in place to recognize this compliance through speedy clearance, information exchange or scanning reciprocity?
Secretary Chertoff: Well, that's a great question, so let me – for those of you who are not deeply into the weeds on this issue, right now, for containers that come into the United States by sea, we basically put close to a hundred percent through radiation scanning devices. We have operated a pilot program with a number of countries. We've got three – Pakistan, Honduras and Southampton, London – Southampton, England – where we are currently scanning containers before they're boarded, and we've got agreements with four other countries.
The mandate, which I have to be – in the interest of full disclosure, indicate that the administration and I opposed as being impractical because when you tell other countries that we're going to scan containers in their ports, they have to agree; you can't make them do it, and we certainly don't propose to invade them to make them do it. So there's a question about how practical this is.
What I think we'd like to do is see how – what the technology is. In an ideal world we would have a system with a mix. In ports where other countries agreed and we thought there was a high risk of nuclear radioactive material, we would scan overseas. In ports where we think there's a low risk, we wouldn't scan overseas, we would use information that we get about shippers – what the freight is, what the carrier is – to determine where, on an intelligence basis, we think the higher-risk containers are, and those are ones we would either examine before they're boarded manually or we would examine them at sea while they're still off-shore. So that would be a risk management based on intelligence.
The bill Congress passed doesn't mandate this by 2012, but it does give the Secretary, whoever that – he or she may be at that time, the option to extend the deadline in increments of two years. And I suspect between now and then – I know the Europeans are very concerned about this – there may be attempts to revisit this.
Question: First of all, I'd like to thank you for your lucid articulation of the structural problems in Washington. I notice you approach it from a very realist approach, analyzing it in terms of self-interest. However, many view it less in these terms and more in terms of civil liberty, and that such structural problems are actually positive protection against government abuse and error. So how do you propose finding that proper balance, and although we want robust government action to protect ourselves, still providing for the protection –
Secretary Chertoff: That's a great question. I'm glad you asked it because I actually don't view concern about civil liberties as a structural obstacle. I think that's appropriate. I think it's appropriate to weigh what we do in civil liberties because that's also part of the greater good.
So – now, we may disagree about whether something invades civil liberties or not, but I would completely agree with the proposition that weighing the civil liberties or overall kind of prosperity impact of any measure is not a structural obstacle, it's part of good decision making.
To me, a structural obstacle is one that subordinates the greater good to a narrower self-interest. And there, again, I'm not criticizing people who exert their personal self-interest, I'm just observing that the intensity of the small minority tends to overwhelm what is, perhaps, a larger interest, but where no one is that passionate because the benefit is either distributed among a lot of people or, worse yet, it's distributed in favor of people who haven't been born yet or are kids, and so no one really feels their passion.
But I agree with you that civil liberties is – that's not an obstacle; that should be part of the analysis.
Question: I just have a question, and it may seem silly, but I grew up in a time just a little bit beyond where civil defense signs were all around us. And in all the money that's been poured into our police teams and the different towns, I still have seen nothing in civil defense. And I'm wondering, how come that seems to be missing? Am I missing it and it's there? Or – it always seemed to me to be a secure – somewhat of a security to have some idea that we knew where to go and how to get grounded. I've see none of that.
Secretary Chertoff: Well, you know, that's another great question. You know, of course, the original model for civil defense was the shelter if you had a nuclear attack. But the need for civil defense remains not just for terrorism but for natural disasters. I mean, people – whether it's a hurricane, an earthquake, a fire, there's a network of people involved in preparedness; a local level supported by the state, supported by the federal government. And in some communities, actually, it's quite a visible presence. If you go down to Miami, it's a well-known, well-marked evacuation shelter. They've got a very good system in place because they deal with hurricanes quite a bit. Other communities may do less of it.
One of the policies I'd like to try to drive in this Department is a culture of preparedness, which means that communities, as well as individuals, prepare themselves for disasters, natural or man-made. And this is not to get people all alarmed or have ridicule on late-night television. It's the basic fact that if you are caught in a flood or an earthquake or, God forbid, some kind of terrorist attack, having some basic supplies on hand, knowing where to go to shelter yourself, knowing where a hospital is – that's important stuff. And so I think that maybe we ought to be doing more community signage across the country along the lines of what we used to do with civil defense when I was a kid.
Question: Last year a report came out about – that looked at three ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, raids that were carried out across the country. And the finding was that for every two undocumented immigrants that were detained, there was one U.S. citizen child of those citizens that was directly affected. My question for you is that, from the perspective of these children's rights as U.S. citizens, what obligations does ICE and, on a greater level, the Department of Homeland Security have to protect the rights of these children to reside in the United States?
Secretary Chertoff: Well, let me tell you what we do. If we're going to do a work site enforcement raid, we will get in touch with the social services agency in the relevant community and state, and we will work very hard with that agency to make sure, if we apprehend somebody and they have a child that's unattended, first of all that the child is taken care of; that there's somebody available to make sure the child – if the child needs care, is a young child – is not left unattended.
The larger question you might be asking is, why do we deport people who are here illegally when they have U.S. children? Now, the child does technically have a right to stay in the country, but the practical reality is, most parents will take their children with them when they leave. And here the problem is, parents have done something wrong and the consequence is visited on the child. The parent is here illegally and has no right to stay in the country, and the fact that the child is going to leave with the parent doesn't give the parent essentially a defense against illegality.
When I was a prosecutor, it was not uncommon for me at sentences for parents who were involved in drug activities or other kinds of crimes to have somebody say to the judge, "Don't send so-and-so to jail because they have young kids." And the judge almost invariably said the person should have thought of that before they committed the crime.
Now, you may disagree with deporting people, and you may think it's inhumane. Again, I'm going to remind you, I advocated for comprehensive immigration reform, which was a way of trying to address this issue more comprehensively, but Congress chose not to enact it. So we are in the situation in which there is a clear law: The law requires people here illegally to be deported. If we were to give people an escape from that because they have young children and they want the child to live in the country, we would at a minimum be allowing them to get away with law-breaking, and we would actually be creating an incentive for people in the country illegally to have children in order to anchor themselves in this country. So it is a hard choice, but I don't see an alternative.
Question: I'd like to, again, thank you so much for speaking tonight. My question is, looking forward to the next administration, whoever the next director of Homeland Security will be, what specific advice would you give them about the policy priorities for the next four years, either areas that you feel need a lot of work or areas in which you feel a lot of progress could be made?
Secretary Chertoff: That's a great question. What we're going to try to do for the transition, we're bringing in people who are experienced career people to populate the number-two and number-three positions in the agencies, various agencies, in the Department so that when the presidential appointees leave, while they're filling the next spaces, and that often takes a while, there are experienced hands running the ship.
We're also reducing a lot of the policies and the lessons we've learned to written doctrine. And I'm hoping, actually, that once there's some new people identified as the new Secretary and some of the senior leadership, we can even bring them in to do an exercise so they get a feel for what they may be facing.
In terms of substantive policies, one of the new initiatives we're pushing forward now is cyber-security. I think that's an area where we need to make a lot of progress, and we've started to talk about that.
But I'd say, more generally, my advice would be to look at the long-term, high-consequence advice; to take my advice about investing in the short term to avoid a long-term problem.
The things that I most worry about – and I think it's probably a view shared by some people in this school – are not what I would call a routine terrorist event like we see around the world. That would be a bad thing, but I think we're pretty well equipped to deal with those and to respond to those, and I think, frankly, the country would survive those, although it would be a terrible tragedy.
What would be of a different order of magnitude would be an earth-shaking attack: a weapon of mass destruction, a dirty bomb, a biological weapon, even a nuclear weapon, or something that really struck at critical infrastructure in a way that could really rattle the country.
I don't think that threat is imminent, although we obviously are always careful to watch for it, but I think that as time passes, the threat will become greater. And what I don't want to do – and that's maybe the point of the whole talk, and so it's a good question to end on – what I don't want to do is say, "Well, we'll worry about that when it appears on the horizon," because when it appears on the horizon, it's too late. You will never build what you have to build a month before or a year before. You've got to start to build the systems and the capabilities now.
So that – if there is, God forbid, a nuclear weapon in the hand of a terrorist or a dirty bomb or biological weapon, we've built capabilities that are in place. It will still be a bad thing, but it will be a manageably bad thing instead of an unmanageably bad thing. (Applause.)
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This page was last reviewed/modified on February 6, 2008.
