When I was the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, I spoke at Chatham House. My remarks then—in 1992—dealt with the geo-political realities of the fall of communism and the threat posed by international drug trafficking.

Today, just a little over a week past the third anniversary of 9/11, I come before you at another pivotal time in history—when the world is imperiled by a very different threat—the threat of global terrorism.

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

On September 11th, I had been nominated, but not yet confirmed as Commissioner of U.S. Customs.

On the morning of September 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. Later that morning I learned that that plume was emanating from the Pentagon, which had just been hit.

Outside, on 15th Street, Acting Treasury Secretary Kenneth Dam waved to me to join him at the command center at Secret Service Headquarters, a few blocks away. Once there, I immediately established contact with U.S. Customs Headquarters.

At about 10:05 a.m. on September 11, I agreed that U.S. Customs should go to Alert Level 1, the highest level security alert short of actually shutting down our borders.

I also approved the re-positioning of several Customs Blackhawk helicopters from the Southwest Border to the Northeast corridor to aid in the recovery efforts and to participate with the Combat Air Patrol in the protection of air space above Washington, D.C., and several other cities.

The Customs Service was also struck directly by the attacks of September 11. Our Customs House at 6 World Trade Center, which served as Customs' headquarters for much of our northeast operations, was destroyed when the twin towers fell. Fortunately, none of our 800 Customs employees was killed.

I was confirmed by the Senate as Commissioner of Customs three years ago yesterday, on September 19, 2001, and the day after I was sworn in as Commissioner, I went to New York, to Ground Zero, where I visited the World Trade Center site and spoke with our stunned and somber Customs employees in New York City.

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

The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington challenged Customs in ways as never before.

Before 9/11, U.S. Customs had primary responsibility for safeguarding the nation’s land, sea and air ports of entry and for preventing drugs and contraband from entering the U.S.

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

9/11: Its Meaning and Aftermath
The effects of 9/11 still reverberate in America, with the recent release of the 9/11 Commission’s Report evaluating what went wrong, as if every terrorist attack, no matter how well conceived and how audacious, is preventable, if only we reorganized our government, if only we “connected the dots” better.

And, needless to say, the issue of what has—and should—be done to protect America against further terrorist attacks is a pivotal issue in our Presidential election campaign.

Even now, it’s hard for some to imagine a plot that turned commercial passenger airplanes into missiles that brought huge skyscrapers to the ground.

To those who have suggested that the United States has overreacted, let me point out that 9/11 was the largest terrorist attack, in terms of loss of life, in the history of the world. Two thousand nine hundred and thirty-three (2,933) people were slaughtered in less than two hours on that September morning three years ago. And among the victims were 67 British citizens. That was the largest number of British citizens killed in a single terrorist incident ever.

9/11 was the largest attack on U.S. soil ever in American history. Indeed, it exceeded the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

Like Pearl Harbor 60 years earlier, 9/11 woke America up to a danger—the danger—of doing nothing.

9/11 changed not only the U.S., but the world, forever.

It also changed the way we need to view national security.

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!

In addition to loss of life, the economic costs of 9/11 were—and are—staggering. The New York Comptroller’s Office assessed the costs to New York City alone at over $83 billion. This does not include enormous losses to the airlines and the travel industry, nor the tens of billions spent on public and private security in the U.S. and in other countries.

On the morning of 9/11, every knowledgeable person in Washington knew that Bin Laden was behind these attacks. By 10:30 a.m., U.S. Customs had identified the probable hijackers—all nineteen of them, through analysis of airline data.

They were nineteen radical Muslims associated with a fanatical Islamic group called al Qaeda, led by radical fundamentalists named Osama bin Laden and his sidekick, al Zawahiri.

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

“Global terrorism” is, I submit, 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—will dominate in the first half of the 21st Century. This “ism” is fundamentalist, extremist Islamic Jihadism, to be a bit more precise.

At the beginning of the Cold War, Winston Churchill warned of an “Iron Curtain,” an ideological 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. Indeed, the war on global terrorism could last as long as the Cold War.

But unlike Communism, which at least offered the promise—a false promise, to be sure—of a secure future for workers, radical Islam is backward looking, yearning to return to the world of the seventh and eighth century, and a pan-Islamic fundamentalist state.

They want to return to an idealized version of Arab and Islamic ascendancy that existed over a millennium ago. Al Qaeda wants to exclude all Western influence and globalization from the Arab world, and more broadly, the Muslim world. It wants to restore the Arab-dominated caliphate of ten centuries ago, and it is using asymmetrical warfare to achieve their goal.

It has—and is—recruiting and training fundamentalist Muslims and deploying this cadre of jihadists to carry out large-scale global terrorist attacks, often multiple attacks, to kill hundreds or thousands of innocent civilians at a time.

These are terrorists operations that are also designed to damage and disrupt the economies of the West, indeed the global economy, as well.

Confronting the Threat
This is the enemy America finally came face-to-face with, finally recognized, on 9/11, but the threat of further attacks is continuing—and real.

So, it is not just 9/11 that has led the United States to change policy.

It is the fact that the enemy has vowed to strike America again, even harder than 9/11.

There is, right now, credible intelligence that al Qaeda is planning multiple terrorist attacks in the United States to disrupt and influence the Presidential election.

But it is not just the United States that is targeted by al Qaeda.

It is the UK. It is the West. 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, and yes, probably increased secularization.

None of this appears to appeal to Bin Laden and his cohorts.

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

These attacks did not come out of the blue.

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.

And al Qaeda and its associated terrorist organization, Jemaah Islamiyah, struck in Djakarta, Indonesia, just 12 days ago.

Al Qaeda was behind the Bali attacks that killed more than 200 in October 2002.

Al Qaeda-trained terrorists also hit Madrid on 3/11, and the British Consulate in Istanbul in November 2003, that killed a top British diplomat, Consul-General Roger Short.

That’s only a partial list. The list would have been longer if other al Qaeda plots had not been thwarted.

In 2000, an al Qaeda terrorist named Ahmad Ressam, who became known as the Millennium Bomber, was arrested by a U.S. Customs Inspector named Diana Dean as he tried to enter the United States from Canada. Customs Inspector Dean became suspicious of his behavior, and her questioning of him led her to search the boot of his car, which was packed with explosives. His target: Los Angeles International Airport—LAX.

And thanks to the good work of U.K. authorities several terrorist attacks have been prevented, for example, this past March eight individuals were arrested and a half ton of ammonium nitrate was seized here in London.

And more arrests last month here in the U.K., including an al Qaeda operative known as Issa al Hindi.

And last month in the U.S., the Department of Homeland Security instituted protective measures regarding financial buildings in New York and Washington.

These actions—which may have prevented or disrupted attacks in the U.S.—were the direct result of cooperation between U.K. and U.S. law enforcement and intelligence authorities.

Our cooperative anti-terrorism efforts go beyond the sharing of intelligence. Over the past 16 months, at the Port of Felixstowe, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Her Majesty’s Customs have joined forces to implement the Container Security Initiative, which I will talk more about in a moment.

The U.S. Response to Global Terrorism
So, we understand the objectives of our enemy, and we understand the threat posed by al Qaeda and its associated terrorist organizations.

It is estimated that al Qaeda trained at least 10,000 Muslim extremists in its sanctuary in Afghanistan, in training camps in Afghanistan, between 1996 and the fall of the Taliban regime in late 2001.

Training in bomb making and hijackings. Jihadist martyrs were among those identified, recruited and trained.

One thing that was immediately apparent after 9/11 was: a policy of containment and mutual deterrence of this “ism” would not be effective.

We needed a new and a different strategy to deal with this new kind of enemy. An enemy that had no state or citizens to protect. An enemy that achieves paradise by martyrdom.

Lobbing a few cruise missiles into Afghanistan, as we did after the bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, was, to al Qaeda, laughable, and quite frankly, weak.

Like the scampering out of Somalia in 1993, it emboldened al Qaeda.

These actions certainly did not weaken the forces of global terrorism.

A Three-Pronged Strategy
After 9/11, the United States adopted essentially a three-pronged strategy for responding to the threat of global terrorism.

In America, we have an expression that applies to American football,

“To win the game, you need both a good offense and a good defense.”

So, a key part of our strategy is hitting them, but at the same time making it more difficult for them to hit us.

First, we 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.

We have allies—one of the most important of which is the U.K.

You know that the United States was offered Bin Laden in 1996, by the Sudanese government.

And the Clinton Administration declined!

Because, according to President Clinton’s Attorney General, Janet Reno, we did not have enough evidence to obtain a criminal conviction!

Well, let me tell you, we’re not tracking global terrorists as criminals for extradition, we’re tracking them as terrorists.

In less than three years, as a result of the efforts of the United States and our allies, particularly the U.K., we have deprived al Qaeda of its base in Afghanistan, and we have killed or captured two-thirds of al Qaeda’s leadership, including killing its chief of operations Mohammed Atef during the campaign to topple the Taliban, and we have captured Hambali and 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, we must, as best we can—and this will take years—defuse the hatred and ignorance that motivates fundamentalist, fanatical Islamic jihadists to join the ranks of al Qaeda and its affiliated organizations, organizations that are committed to killing Americans and our allies, and willing to kill themselves in the process.

The removal of Saddam Hussein was part of the offense. But ironically for some, the reconstruction of Iraq and its government could do more, in time, to achieve objective number three 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, Zarqawi.

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

DHS—and the Creation of CBP
One of the most important steps taken by President Bush and Congress to defend against global terrorism was to establish the Department of Homeland Security—DHS.

This is the largest reorganization of our federal government in over 50 years, since the reorganization of 1947 to fight the Cold War, a reorganization that led to the creation of the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Council.

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

The Department of Homeland Security has two core missions:

First, to prevent further large-scale terrorist attacks in the United States, and second, 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.

One of the most important ideas of the DHS reorganization 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, immigration, agriculture protection, and anti-terrorism.

That agency is the agency I head—United States Customs and Border Protection, or “CBP.” Customs and Border Protection was created by merging frontline immigration officers, and all of the Border Patrol, with U.S. Customs.

Customs and Border Protection has 42,000 employees, and as Secretary Tom Ridge knows, it is the largest, most complex merger of people and functions taking place within the Department of Homeland Security.

With 42,000 employees working under me, CBP constitutes 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 the homeland.

The priority mission of CBP is homeland security.

For the unified border agency of our country, that means the priority mission is preventing terrorists and terrorist weapons from getting into the United States. And we must perform this mission, to the maximum extent possible, without shutting off the flow of legitimate trade, travel and our economy and that of our trading partners.

I have called these our Twin Goals: security and facilitation.

Needless to say, no other agency of the U.S. Government has a more important mission today. Because the best way to prevent an attack by foreign terrorist operatives is to prevent them from entering the United States in the first instance, and to prevent them from being able to get terrorist weapons, including weapons of mass destruction, into the United States.

How the U.S. Dealt with Threat to Global Trade
But we have not just reorganized. We have devised and implemented a strategy to secure and facilitate the movement of legitimate trade and people; and to improve security against global terrorism, and yet do so with improved efficiency.

Let me use our maritime security initiatives 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 a targeted country, such as the United States.

Let me 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.

These containers come in two sizes. The 20-footers and the 40-footers.

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 the seaports of the targeted country.

This threat of a terrorist attack using a cargo container is not academic.

Just a few months ago, two suicide bombers entered the port of Ashdod in Israel hidden in a cargo container. They killed dozens of innocent people.

Shortly after 9-11, in October 2001, Italian authorities found a suspected al Qaeda operative locked inside a shipping container bound for Halifax, Canada.

The container originated in Port Said, Egypt. This was no ordinary shipping container. Inside the container were a bed and bathroom, as well as airport maps, airport security passes, 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, such as Stephen Flynn, have repeatedly pointed out the vulnerability of oceangoing cargo containers to terrorist exploitation.

These warnings arise precisely because it is easy to conceal a weapon inside a container.

It’s easy to make a container into a weapon.

A container could be made into a 20-or 40-foot long boxy missile, not launched by a ballistic missile, but a missile wafted into a seaport on a container ship and unloaded at that port.

For historical reasons, all U.S. seaports tend to be located in the middle of our nation’s largest urban areas.

A 40-foot container loaded with ammonium nitrate, the material seized by U.K. authorities a few months back, would create a large blast.

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 has met with Pakistani nuclear scientists some years ago, and
3. We now know A. Q. Khan had a price.

The reality is: even if al Qaeda doesn’t have one now, we must build a security system to prevent such an attack.

The consequences are such that, even if the risk is small, we cannot afford to do anything but our utmost to develop the kind of security strategy to prevent such an attack.

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

Any terrorist attack using a container to conceal a conventional improvised explosive, such as ammonium nitrate, or one laced with radioactive material—a so-called “dirty bomb”—could stop global trade in its tracks, unless we have a maritime security system that can detect and deter such an attack.

We have implemented such a strategy.

U.S. Strategy to Secure and Facilitate Trade
So, you can see, we had to figure out a strategy to secure the primary system of global trade—containerized shipping—without grinding global trade to a halt. And we have.

I saw the effects right after 9/11 of increasing inspections and scrutiny at our borders. We virtually shut down our land border with Canada when the wait times skyrocketed from 20 minutes on 9/10—to over 12 hours by 9/12.

So, in late 2001, we developed and implemented a strategy to increase security against the terrorist threat, but at the same time, actually facilitate the movement of trade.

We did this through four interrelated initiatives: the 24-Hour Rule, the Container Security Initiative (CSI), The Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C-TPAT), and the National Targeting Center, housing our Automated Targeting System.

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 all high risk containers before they are loaded on board vessels to the U.S.
• And, the fourth initiative, with our partnership with the private sector, major importers and ocean carriers, our 7,000 private sector partners have dramatically increased security of their supply chains, from the foreign loading docks to the U.S. ports, in exchange for CBP giving their goods faster processing through U.S. ports on arrival. The Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism is the largest U.S. Government-private sector partnership to arise out of 9/11.

Every one of these initiatives is designed to make our borders smarter—and to extend our borders by pushing our security measures out beyond our physical borders, so that our ports and our borders are not the first line of defense.

Every one of these initiatives is designed to meet the “Twin Goals” of vastly increasing maritime security, but doing so without choking off the free flow of legitimate trade.

These are the guiding lights that have informed our strategy.

They make use of technology, advance information, extended border concepts, and partnerships to achieve these goals.

None of these initiatives existed before 9/11.

Call to Internationalize the Strategy
But we must do more to secure what moves into—and through—ports of the world, not just into the ports of the United States.

I would like to see the EU join with us on the strategy to prevent, not just the U.S. from being hit, but to prevent the U.K. and Europe from being hit, as well.

That’s why I am here to discuss having the EU adopt key elements of a global security and facilitation strategy:

• the 24 Hour Rule,
• expanding of CSI to goods being shipped to the U.K. and other EU ports,
• the adoption of a Customs-Trade Partnership program, and
• the use of automated risk targeting to help identify what and who is a potential terrorist risk.

Container Security Initiative (CSI)
I proposed the Container Security Initiative in January 2002. It was a simple, yet revolutionary idea, primarily because it contemplated that foreign Customs authorities, working with the U.S., would do outbound screenings for high-risk containers in order to improve the overall security of the movement of containers from that country’s seaports.

Before 9/11, there was no Container Security Initiative, no program that permitted inspection of high-risk containers before they left the ports of embarkation or transshipment.

CSI is the only multinational program in place in the world today that is actually protecting global trade lanes—that is protecting the primary system of global trade from being exploited and disrupted by international terrorists.

CSI not only adds security to the movement of cargo containers, but because the targeting, and if necessary inspection, occurs at outbound ports, rather than at the ports of arrival, the containers move faster and more efficiently through the supply chain.

The Twin Goals: Security and facilitation.

Today, we have CSI agreements with 20 countries, and we have CBP targeting teams deployed and stationed in 26 ports outside the United States, principally Europe and Asia. That means that CSI is operational in 26 ports. These are 26 of the largest container mega ports in the world.

The first country to sign a CSI agreement with the U.S. was the Netherlands in June 2002. We implemented CSI in the Port of Rotterdam in September 2002. Not long thereafter, we signed a CSI agreement with the U.K., and CSI has been operational at Felixtowe for a year and a half.

In addition to Rotterdam and Felixtowe, CSI is in place in:

Le Havre, France
Bremerhaven and Hamburg
Antwerp
Gothenburg, Sweden
Genoa, La Spezia and Naples, Italy
Piraeus, Greece
Algeciras, Spain

In Asia at:

Singapore
Yokohama, Tokyo, Nagoya, and Kobe, Japan
Hong Kong
Busan, Korea
Port Klang and The Port of Tanjung Pelepas or “PTP,” Malaysia
Laem Chabang, Thailand, and
Port of Durban, South Africa.

We are working toward implementing CSI in 10 more ports before the end of this year, including Southhampton, Tilbury, Thamesport and Liverpool—all the other container ports of the U.K. that ship containers directly to the United States.

I believe we will reach this goal.

To better protect global trade against the threat of global terrorism, we need to promptly turn these initiatives into international standards that all nations adhere to.

Who should lead this effort?

I believe the World Customs Organization—the WCO—headquartered in Brussels, could—and should—do this. The WCO should be the vehicle to secure global trade against global terrorism.

The WCO has the participation of the customs administrations of 163 countries and represents 99 percent of global trade.

And customs administrations have important authorities that exist nowhere else in government—the authority to inspect everything—all cargo, all goods—shipped into or exported from a country.

It is imperative that the WCO work quickly to internationalize core security principles throughout the global trade system so that all ports, in all nations are secure from the physical and economic threat of global terrorism.

Conclusion
After 9/11, we in the United States Government knew we had to act—and act quickly to protect our nation, our citizens, and our economy.

The status quo was not an option. 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.

Combating terrorism is the number one priority of our country—now—and for the foreseeable future.

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?

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, “Did you, Mr. President, 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.

*Commissioner Bonner reserves the right to edit his written remarks during his oral presentation and to speak extemporaneously. Thus, his actual remarks, as given, may vary slightly from the written text.