9/11 Commission Hearing:First hearing transcript:The Attackers

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CHAIRMAN KEAN: Thank you all very, very much for coming. I'd like to start by introducing Dr. Sofaer, from Hoover Institution. Institute, right?

DR. SOFAER: Institution.

CHAIRMAN KEAN: Institution. It's Institution, all right. Thank you very much, sir, for coming here today.

DR. SOFAER: Delighted to be here, Mr. Chairman. It's a privilege, Mr. Chairman and members of this Commission, to testify concerning the prevention of terrorist acts against the United States. My experience in this field is based on service as a federal prosecutor with one of the Commissioners here, Mr. Ben-Veniste, as a federal judge, as legal advisor to the Department of State and another Commissioner participated in making me legal advisor, Fred Fielding, and as a scholar in the area of national security.

And I am honored to say, Mr. Chairman, that I serve with many in the federal government, with many of the people who are sitting here as Commissioners and I am privileged to be with you again.

This Commission has the formidable task of explaining the terrorist acts of September 11th and providing recommendations help to prevent such attacks in the future. The cost of those attacks is staggering, as you know: 2,819 lives at the World Trade Center, including 343 firefighters and paramedics, 23 New York City policemen, 124 killed at the Pentagon, 271 people who died in the crashes of the airplanes involved and the economic consequences of it are tremendous and still haven't been figured out. We know that New York City, this great city, lost 146,000 jobs.

Those who were murdered on September 11th remain in our minds and hearts. We owe it to them to ask ourselves, what are the lessons of their terrible deaths, have we made the changes to permit us to say they did not die in vain.

The long process of introspection began immediately after the attacks and continues. This Commission will find no shortage of ideas as to how America can defend itself more effectively, including better intelligence, reorganization of agencies, enhanced technologies, better diplomacy and accountability. These are all important subjects which the Commission must address.

My testimony, Mr. Chairman, though, will focus on what I regard as most significant, the failure to use force to prevent the terrorist acts of 9/11 from happening. It is now the strategic policy of the United States to use force preemptively to prevent terrorists and their states' supporters from attacking this country.

Until 9/11, however, the use of force was not seriously pursued. When President Clinton promised to bring terrorists to justice, he meant that he would investigate them, try to capture them, and when that was possible, see that they were tried, convicted and sent to prison.

Preventing terrorist attacks became a game in which national-security experts, the FBI, prosecutors and intelligence personnel attempted to learn where and when attacks were to occur before they actually happened so they could do their best to prevent it.

For many years prior to 9/11, I spoke out as forcefully as I could against this approach to fighting terrorism. My position was not original, Mr. Chairman. It reflected the views of Secretary of State George Shultz, and the views of his boss, Ronald Reagan.

He proposed in 1983 that the United States should adopt a policy of active defense against terror. "Fighting terrorism will not be a clean or pleasant contest," he said, "but we have no choice. We must reach a consensus in this country that our responses should go beyond passive measures, passive defense, to consider means of active prevention, preemption and retaliation. Our goal must be to prevent and deter future terrorist attacks."

By the end of the Reagan administration, the Shultz Doctrine had become national policy as reflected by the bombing of Libya in 1987 for arranging terrorist attacks on America.

Mr. Chairman, you know, and certainly Co-Chairman Hamilton knows, that nothing stays the same in Washington D.C. After the first President Bush took over, the bombing of Pan Am 103 was treated as a criminal matter and eventually resolved after years of legal and diplomatic maneuvering with the conviction of a single Libyan intelligence operative.

Osama bin Laden fashioned his strategy on the basis of this passive policy. He became convinced the U.S. could be forced to leave Muslim countries and abandon Israel if he launched attacks that shed American blood. Nothing that happened prior to September 11th gave bin Laden reason to doubt his assumptions.

Al Qaeda was responsible for several successful attacks on U.S. targets prior to September 11th, as the Commission knows. And throughout this onslaught, we responded precisely as bin Laden anticipated.

In early 1993, al Qaeda operatives began training Somali fighters to attack UN forces, and in October that year, they participated in attacks that killed 18 marines. We had boisterously arranged to have the UN Security Council issue a warrant for the arrest of Mohamed Aidid, but after suffering these 18 deaths, we withdrew from Somalia.

On February 26, 1993, a car bomb exploded under the World Trade Center, killing eight people and injuring over a thousand. We convicted most of the perpetrators, but we left the organization from which they came unscathed.

On June 26, 1996, car bombs killed 19 Americans in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and injured another 200. The U.S. suspected bin Laden and al Qaeda. All we did, however, was open a criminal investigation. Bin Laden was not intimidated. On October 12th that year, he issued a declaration of war against the U.S., calling on Muslims to "fight jihad and cleanse the land from these Crusader occupiers."

In November of 1996, bombings in Riyadh and at the Khobar Towers barracks killed another 19 American servicemen and injured 109. Bin Laden called those attacks "praiseworthy terrorism," and he promised more would follow. Once again, we sent in the FBI.

In February 1998, bin Laden put his war into the form of a religious order, declaring the "killing of Americans and their civilian and military allies is a religious duty for each and every Muslim."

And then August that same year, al Qaeda terrorists car-bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people and injuring about 5,000. The U.S. launched a single ineffectual missile strike on an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, on one of those big old mountains, and on a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.

When it came to legal action, though, we pulled out the stops; we indicted bin Laden on 224 counts of murder. Characteristically, he failed to show up for his trial. We settled for prosecuting four al Qaeda operatives, after which prosecutors triumphantly declared that they would continue to investigate al Qaeda until bin Laden and his cohorts were all brought to justice.

This so terrified bin Laden that he told Time Magazine, "The U.S. knows that I have attacked it, by the grace of God, for more than 10 years now," in other words, why are they making such a big deal out of this?

On October 12, 2000, a suicide boat bombing of the USS Cole in Aden harbor killed 17 American sailors and injured 40, in addition to causing over $100 million of damage. We knew it, it was al Qaeda's work, but the Clinton administration did not bother to engage even in a symbolic use of force, not even that one salvo of missiles this time. Instead, it launched once again a massive invasion of aggressive FBI agents, incidentally, none of whom could speak Arabic.

At the turn of the millennium, we had some very good luck. An attack plan for the Los Angeles Airport was aborted when the perpetrator panicked on his way into the U.S. from Canada.

U.S. officials knew that bin Laden would strike again. They worried intensively, not about whether an attack was coming, over where and when. As the attack began on September 11th, the President's advisors were sitting around a table in the White House, worrying. They knew immediately that the attack for which they were waiting was underway.

Given these events, it is small surprise that after the attacks of September 11th, bin Laden was triumphant. He was a hero. His strategy had worked. The U.S. had not stopped him.

Now we have heard many claims by former and present officials in an attempt to explain why they could not have prevented the 9/11 attacks. The accumulating evidence undermines these claims. But these excuses are, in any event, beside the point. And that is the fundamental point of my testimony to this Commission. They are beside the point.

The fact is that well before September 11th, the FBI, the intelligence community, the Terrorism Czar, and everyone to whom they reported all knew that additional attacks by al Qaeda were being planned and would certainly be attempted. They simply failed to do before September 11th what was done immediately thereafter.

The horrors of that day finally galvanized the nation into action. Now President Bush has adopted three principles to guide U.S. policy: First, that serious terrorist attacks should be treated as acts of war, not merely as crimes; second, that states are responsible for terrorism from within their borders; and third, that we must preempt attacks where possible.

These principles are strategically necessary, morally sound, and legally defensible. This Commission should confirm the need to adopt active measures of defense. Where grave threats are present, state responsibility exists and the need for the use of preemptive force is demonstrable, even if not imminent.

The notion that criminal prosecution could bring a terrorist group like al Qaeda to justice is absurd. And the UN Security Council has now authoritatively established the responsibilities of states in this regard in its Resolution 1373.

As for preemption, the Commission should consider carefully the implications of a position that would preclude the U.S. from acting in its self defense merely because a real, terrible, and certain threat was not also imminent. The Commission should reject any standard of law that would unreasonably restrict the President from performing his or her obligation to protect the United States.

The need for preemptive actions stems ultimately from the conditions in modern life. We are a target-rich country, huge, virtually impossible to defend effectively. Every potential type of weapon can be used against us, from the most conventional to the most modern and unconventional. We are vulnerable. Our entire infrastructure is vulnerable and will be for many years to come.

The area of intelligence is no less subject to this reality. Many improvements should be made to enhance capacities, but it is illusory to believe that intelligence, even combined with all presently conceivable advances in technology, will enable us to know in advance of all the attacks we will have to foil through passive measures to achieve an adequate level of security.

We must, therefore, be able, when necessary, to resort to active measures, and necessity must be determined on the basis of all relevant factors, not just imminence.

No national-security policy against terrorism can be regarded as sound if it fails to include preemptive actions as an essential element. Nor should the Commission underestimate the importance of preemption.

The historical record indicates that many terrorist acts, attacks on the U.S., can be anticipated. The most recent attacks were by al Qaeda, a single organization responsible for most of the attacks I have listed for you, led by a man who announced his intentions to kill Americans, in advance, and who demonstrated his capacity to do so over and over again before he was finally stopped.

Other groups likely to attack us are also well known, indeed, this panel has on it some of the world's experts on those groups. It is true that any war carries risks and the war on terrorism is no exception. But the risks of using force must always be weighed against the risk of inaction.

The Commission should keep in mind the utterly helpless posture into which our national security officials placed themselves and the damage to which they exposed the nation by failing to treat, as a proper part of their authority and indeed of their responsibility, the use of force against so well-established and determined an enemy as al Qaeda.

Ultimately, we owe the dead, the living, and the unborn a world of freedom and tolerance. When all else fails, we must fight to preserve and, in due course, extend those values. Freedom and tolerance are not merely Western or American ideals. They are enshrined in the UN Charter, freely subscribed to by all Member States. To allow their subordination to any ideology or religion, however deeply felt, would undo the principles upon which the future of this nation and of humanity rests. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

CHAIRMAN KEAN: Thank you very much. Professor Dan Byman, who's got a class to teach, somebody who works for a university who understands very, very clearly is a top priority. He's from Georgetown University. Thank you, sir, for coming. And when you have to leave, we will certainly understand that.

PROFESSOR BYMAN: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Governor Kean, Vice Chairman Hamilton, Commissioners and Commission staff, representatives of the victims and survivors of the attack. I am very grateful and honored to be here today speaking to you.

In my testimony today I am going to concentrate, in the interests of brevity, on key intelligence and policy issues that proved a problem before September 11th. The CIA has been roundly criticized, as have other intelligence agencies, for their performance in counterterrorism. They particularly have been faulted for not stopping the attacks of September 11th.

A closer scrutiny of the factual background, however, suggests there was no single action, no simple step, that, had it been taken, would have stopped the attack. More broadly, the intelligence community, and I would say particularly the CIA, did well in providing strategic warning of the al Qaeda threat.

Policymakers from both parties have confirmed that the intelligence community informed them of the identity of the foe, the scale of its ambitions and its lethality before September 11th. Nevertheless, it is clear that the intelligence community could have done much better.

In my judgment, many of the problems the intelligence community faced in meeting the challenge al Qaeda stemmed from broader structural issues, and I will discuss three today.

One issue was a large gap that existed between the gathering of intelligence domestically by the FBI and the overseas focus of the rest of the intelligence community. As a result of this gap, there was lack of sharing of information between those tracking radicals at home and those tracking radicals abroad.

There was little attempt to marry up this privileged information that only the FBI held with broader CIA information and vice versa. And the working-level analysts and operatives often did not know information was available, let alone its content.

Because of these problems, it is unfortunate but reasonable to conclude that the threat to the U.S. homeland received less attention than the coverage of al Qaeda's activities overseas.

A second structural problem was that there was no firm control of the intelligence community, and as a result, prioritization was exceptionally difficult. The CIA had responsibilities for supporting more fighting in Iraq and the Balkans, monitoring China and other rivals and so on. For the FBI, dead-beat dads, drug money, infrastructure protection, all competed for resources with counterterrorism. There was no single plan that everyone followed and because everything was declared to be a priority, nothing really was.

A third structural problem was that before September 11th, the FBI was not properly oriented for counterterrorism. The Bureau often failed to collect relevant information and the information collected often was not disseminated outside of the FBI and many times within the FBI. Few people in the FBI with counterterrorism responsibilities knew about al Qaeda. What knowledge that existed was primarily confined to the New York field office. The FBI culture fostered these problems.

Before September 11th, the FBI was primarily a law-enforcement agency and it was probably the world's best. But law enforcement focuses on prosecuting cases, not on understanding a broader network. Law enforcement emphasizes gathering specific evidence, not collecting and sharing all possibly relevant information.

As a result of these problems, the FBI not only was not conscious of al Qaeda activities in the United States but also didn't know the depth of its own ignorance; it didn't know what it didn't know. But concentrating attention solely on the intelligence community misses the broader context of counterterrorism.

A broader review of the U.S. Government's performance in both the Clinton and the Bush administrations before September 11th suggests several deep flaws and problems. As a result of these, the intelligence community's successful strategic warning of the al Qaeda threat was not met with the proper response.

One policy problem was very carefully and well discussed by my colleague here at the table, Mr. Sofaer. I will simply add my endorsement to his remarks that the use of force was not properly considered as an option before September 11th.

A second problem was that U.S. policy left the issue of terrorist sanctuary unresolved. In Afghanistan, al Qaeda was essentially allowed to build to an army of like-minded radicals outside the reach of the United States. But even more troubling, al Qaeda enjoyed a permissive environment in the West, including in the United States. It was allowed to recruit, raise money, train and plot with relatively little interference throughout much of the world.

A third policy flaw was the limited defensive measures against terrorism in the United States. Almost 20 years ago, the Inman Commission investigated the bombings of the U.S. and Marine barracks in Lebanon. And they concluded, "If determined well-trained and funded teams are seeking to do damage, they will eventually succeed."

Over 10 years later, the Cole Commission, investigating the 1998 embassy bombings, came to pretty much the same conclusion, "We cannot count on having intelligence to warn us of such attacks."

But despite the finding that intelligence is likely to be lacking, when facing a skilled adversary and the intelligence community's strategic warning of the al Qaeda threat, very few defensive measures were initiated in the United States before September 11th.

Now the problems I have briefly described are problems in a pre-9/11 world. And much has changed since September 11th. Since the attack, funding for intelligence and counterterrorism in particular has increased dramatically. Both policymakers and the intelligence community are intensely focused on terrorism and there have been numerous bureaucratic changes to fight terrorism, particularly in the FBI.

In its work, I hope the Commission not only evaluates what went wrong on September 11th but also the quality of changes that we have taken since then as a nation to prevent the recurrence of these attacks.

Mr. Chairman, the work that you and your fellow commissioners are doing is essential if we are to ensure the security of Americans and triumph over the threat of terrorism. And I am confident that the Commission's work will enable our country to better meet future challenges and prevent a recurrence of the nightmare of September 11th.

But I must conclude on a pessimistic note. Al Qaeda is simply too skilled an adversary to expect uninterrupted success. The United States and every nation should recognize that any improvements that occur will reduce the frequency of attacks, will reduce the lethality of attacks, but will not end them completely. Thank you very much.

CHAIRMAN KEAN: Thank you very much. Our next speaker we have is Mr. Brian Jenkins, from the Rand Corporation.

MR. JENKINS: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. The written remarks that I submitted to the Commission, which I believe are in your briefing books, address the nature of the current terrorist threat, the goals of our counterterrorist strategy and the role of intelligence in dealing with terrorism.

Subsequently, I was asked by members of your staff if, in my comments this afternoon, I could specifically address the topics of al Qaeda's mindset, their purpose in attacking the World Trade Center, and how this attack has profoundly affected our society.

The members of this panel were chatting just before we convened here about the necessity to change our vocabulary when it came to the description of al Qaeda. This is not some organization which we simply can depict in a chart on the wall and draw Xs through its key figures.

Al Qaeda is more than an organization, it is a global network of relationships. It is one among a galaxy of like-minded terrorist enterprises. It is a system, a process for transforming the discontents of Islam into a violent expression of jihad.

Al Qaeda also reflects a mindset, a mindset that really transcends the specific members that we may label as members of al Qaeda. Its members believe, as others, that Islam is on the defensive.

Indeed, they believe that Islam's very existence is threatened, not simply by the presence of our troops in Saudi Arabia or our support for Israel, but by the secular nature of our society, by our vast commercial and cultural power, by the destructive effects they see in globalization, by their own marginalization in the world, in their own societies, in the countries to which they and their parents have migrated.

They really operate and are instructed in a very harrowing, apocalyptic vision of death and destruction, one that is informed by an conflated history of centuries, from the Crusades, to the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongol armies, to the latest headlines on CNN. To respond to this, to battle their way to what they regard as the age of the tyrants and to achieve this utopian restoration of the Caliphate, God commands that they mount an aggressive attack and places no limits on its violence. Only violence, cataclasmic violence, can change that reality, defend Islam, and drive them into this new age.

Therefore, it is absolutely consistent that al Qaeda, as we see from the intelligence reports, is determined to acquire and use weapons of mass destruction, is determined to carry out events on the scale of a 9/11. Fortunately, for the time being, its capabilities in the area of chemical or biological weapons trail its ambitions, but it's certainly something that we have to take as a presumption going forward.

Now what did these people hope to accomplish by attacking the World Trade Center? As a consequence of its sheer size, its soaring height, its prominence on the New York skyline, the World Trade Center was an obvious terrorist target almost from the moment its construction was completed. Both terrorists and terrorism's analysts saw this.

The size also meant mass casualties. To terrorists who in the 1990s seemed increasingly intent upon large-scale violence, toppling the towers could bring fatalities in the tens of thousands, which we now know was the terrorists' intent.

Symbolically, the World Trade Center represented America's economic might, our ambition to extend our brand of free commerce throughout the world, the physical expression of globalization, even before the term was coined. Bringing down the World Trade Center, in their mind, would challenge American authority and would demonstrate the power of the attackers.

Of course having been attacked unsuccessfully in 1993, that only increased the possibility that it would be attacked again. We recognized this immediately after the '93 bombing. In contemplating all possible forms of attack, we even included among the theoretical scenarios a plane crashing into the building.

Now there wasn't a hell of a lot we could do about that with protective measures other than to recommend that there be the opportunity for swift evacuation of the towers, and fortunately, a lot of people did get out on September 11th.

Officials in charge of the property also recognized that another major terrorist attack, even if unsuccessful, would ruin its commercial future. And I want to return to this point in light of current concerns about the ruinous economic consequences of another 9/11-scale attack in the United States.

Al Qaeda's leadership also, in attacking the World Trade Center, hoped by such an attack to provoke an American retaliation. A feeble American response like that described by my colleague here, like that in 1998, would only confirm, in their eyes, our impotence. On the other hand, an indiscriminate massive response could be portrayed by them as an assault on Islam and might provoke a huge backlash that would also advantage al Qaeda.

Now destruction of the World Trade Center obviated concerns about the commercial viability of the property itself, but the 9/11 attack did have cascading effects, devastating cascading effects, on the American economy.

Abe correctly points out, calculating the costs of 9/11 is tricky business, but in addition to the lives lost, the damage to property, the insured business-interruption losses amount to perhaps $50 billion, total losses in revenue into the hundreds of billions, increased security costs at the federal level, tens of billions.

State and local governments are being crushed by the incremental security costs. Corporate security costs have increased by an average of 40 to 50 percent, insurance premiums up by 30 percent. Borders and ports slowed down just- in-time deliveries, inventories increased at a cost. We have spent the last three decades exploiting new technology and new management techniques to remove friction from the economy. We have spent the last 18-and-a-half months putting friction back in.

Now all of this imposes a cost, making terrorism an effective mode of economic warfare. Now I doubt that the terrorists were aware of this on September 11th, but they cannot help but to have observed these effects in the 18-and-a-half months since. And that poses a challenge to us.

We cannot rely in our strategy of homeland security on a gates-and-guards approach. We must design security that is effective and efficient. We must build critical infrastructure that is strong and resilient, able to suffer damage and continue to function. Above all, we must abandon unrealistic expectations of total security and instead adopt a more realistic acceptance of risk. We must not allow terrorist attacks or fears of terrorist attack to shut us down.

Now building a more effective defense is going to require intelligence. And let me just make a final comment on intelligence. There has been a great deal of debate in the federal government about how we should reorganize to improve our intelligence collection and analysis here in the United States. We've talked about restructuring the FBI, we've talked about creating a domestic intelligence-collection service, patterned after the British MI-5.

In my own view, we can do a lot more by taking advantage of local-level intelligence collection, and I think that might even be better than creating another federal entity.

There's great potential at the local level. Local police departments know their territory, they are recruited locally, they often have a composition that better reflects the local ethnic mix, they have often more native fluency, foreign-language capabilities. Unlike federal officers, they don't rotate from city to city every three or four years.

To take as an example, you heard from the New York Police Department this morning. The NYPD is one of the most effective departments in the country. They have devoted a thousand of their officers to intelligence collection, about two-and-a-half percent of their total strength. If police departments across the country were to dedicate a similar portion of their strength to intelligence collection, we would have a national intelligence capability of 15,000 to 18,000 officers.

Now in order to make it work on a national basis, they would need better training, they would need a common curriculum, they would need some better technology, and, above all, they would have to be linked so that the results of their investigations could be shared across jurisdictional lines.

They're ready to go. We don't have to wait several years to create another entity in Washington. We don't even have to build a new building. So I think that in looking at intelligence solutions, we might want to look to our local capabilities before we look to another Washington solution. Thank you.

CHAIRMAN KEAN: Dr. Ranstorp is from the University of St. Andrews.

DR. RANSTORP: Thank you much, honored members of this panel, this Commission, members of the Senate, members of Congress, ladies and gentlemen and honored guests. I am honored to be here.

I am not going to go into the introspective of what happened on 9/11, but hopefully, I can contribute to some future prescription, looking at it from the outside, looking at U.S. terrorism policy in a global perspective.

I applaud the introspective and noble purpose of this Commission. We must understand our historic shortcomings to better order our future steps in security. To no one is this quest more important or heartfelt than the families and friends of those fallen on September the 11th, some of whom are assembled here today.

Now while nothing will compensate them for their loss, the search for some semblance of justice lies not only in assessing the intelligence and policy failures. And let me say that it's not just in the context of the United States, but also there were not only intelligence failures but also intelligence failures in terms of policy failures that contributed even on the outside of the United States and that contributed to this over the past.

But we also must look towards the future to ensure that September the 11th will never again be repeated. Let me emphasize something that has been echoed here before. There is no plan that is absolutely watertight. There is no one overarching solution that will defeat terrorism. We can say with certainty that what Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda set in motion on September the 11th is likely to reoccur in different places under different circumstances in the future.

Much of our future success lies in knowing our adversary. Let me echo what Brian Jenkins said, in our conception of al Qaeda -- and that's something I spent a lot of time on in my written contribution to this Commission -- how it adapts, and in prescribing countermeasures which would stand the rigors of an ever-changing global context.

Now we have deconstructed in myriad ways our intelligence failures and have offered some potential solutions in addressing these and in breaking down the bureaucratic barriers. Today, unlike before September the 11th, there is an unprecedented U.S.-led coalition, including -- and me emphasize this -- including over 90 countries overtly and covertly that have degraded the capabilities of al Qaeda.

For instance, a number of those responsible for the planning of September the 11th attacks and other terrorist operations are in U.S. custody, including the mastermind of al Qaeda's planning, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

Now the response of the United States to al Qaeda has been focused and highly successful, both visibly and otherwise. And I laude President Bush's 4D approach to fighting terror, to defeat, to deny, to diminish and to defend, and I believe this strategy strikes the requisite balance of offence and defense. And let me stress the necessity of offence to counter terrorism with a global reach.

Further, the recent establishment of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center is a powerful testament to the progressive strategy of the administration and sends a commanding signal to terrorists and their supporters that the United States will continue to bring to bear the full measure of its intelligence capabilities to thwart future plans.

Now my expertise as a foreign scholar of Islam, militant Islamic movements and terrorism lies not in assessing or critiquing the structures or responses of the U.S. intelligence community, the counterterrorism bodies, or other institutional bureaucracies, or in pinpointing the precise shortcomings that led to September the 11th, 2001. There are those better equipped to address the panel.

What I can do is possibly think about this in more of a global perspective in highlighting not only challenges but also possibly a roadmap toward the future, in order to preempt, to prevent another attack upon the interests of the United States, at home or abroad.

Now it is essential that the United States in this global war on terrorism continues to craft and to evolve comprehensive new strategies and tactics that balance a changing adversary with a rapidly changing global environment. It is absolutely necessary not just to take a defensive approach but also think globally. And the United States is doing that at this moment.

Counterterrorism policy has never been, will never be in the future, divorced from other strands of foreign policy, regional initiatives, or fail to take into account, for example, the nuances and the significance of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.

Yet, as Vice Admiral Thomas R. Wilson indicated, even the resolution of this Israeli-Palestinian conflict will not bring an end 1 to the systemic problems inherent to the global landscape that foment terrorism and enable organizations such as al Qaeda to thrive and to flourish.

Countering al Qaeda depends upon understanding its true character, as well as the environment in which violent jihadism operates. Only then can prescriptive solutions be applied and the flow of capabilities and the threat-based intelligence be translated into building effective countermeasures within a strategic framework.

Now Brian Jenkins offered, I would say, a way in which one should look at al Qaeda, not as a static phenomenon. It is not a static organization. It exists on a number of different levels. We have to think about what comes after al Qaeda, post-al Qaeda, and the systemic environment is very difficult in producing, potentially, future generations that will follow the message of bin Laden and al Qaeda.

Let me go deep down into some of the prescriptions and highlighting some of these prescriptions I think are important. The first one, not only understanding the threat, we have to continuously reevaluate the threat itself in adjusting our response not only internally but also globally.

Another issue we need to counter with great urgency is the issue of identity theft. Not only is this a problem within the United States but also has been the basic building blocks for al Qaeda to function without philanthropic donations, without official donations on a large scale. And we need to work harder on this issue because if there is one common theme that we see, it's the issue of identity theft. And we saw some of those 9/11 hijackers utilizing that in order to not only gain entry into the United States but also to garner requisite resources.

The second issue I want to highlight is countering terrorism finance. Now more resources need to be expended in a more coordinated fashion on the financial front in the war against terrorism.

Now beyond the existing goal and efforts to deny terrorist groups access to the international system, to impair their ability to fundraise in different theaters of operations and also, of course, to expose and incapacitate the financial networks used by terrorists, more focused global coordination is needed.

We need better trained, we need multilingual financial analysts, and accountants are crucial. Closer knit multi-agency coordination is vital to monitor the changing means and contours of terrorist finance and how it flows as they provide vital -- and I would take this sort of as a measure from the European perspective, if one can't follow the contours of the organization, a good way is to follow how the finance flows in, understand how it's structuring, how it's changing, how it's adapting to the security measures. However, it is a simple and true reality that terrorist finances flow far quicker in the international financial system than any one law-enforcement agency can react to.

Operationally, linking funds in one country with a terrorist crime in another is extremely difficult to prove in a court of law, let alone tracking the money in today's international financial system. We have to focus and we have to look at the nexus not only between terrorism but also between organized crime.

There are numerous black holes that we need to address, numerous areas of sustained areas of lawlessness that fuel and that feed the ability of terrorism to garner resources and operational capacity. And I can think of not only areas continuing in the Middle East, even in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, but also in America's own back yard in Latin America.

Apart from that, we also need to understand how al Qaeda works, not only as an organization but also in assessing their terrorist-attack mode, understanding the psychological makeup of the terrorist and decision-making procedures and how do they identify, how do they gather intelligence of potential targets, how do they select peculiar attack modes.

And that is urgently needed. We need to centrally collate lessons learnt from intelligence gathering, from interrogations, from military manuals and from identifying weaknesses in our own critical infrastructure.

Now instituting protection of our nuclear power stations, providing protection and security of chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons against attack and theft, while also of course overall improving our response and resilience towards the use of these weapons, is absolutely critical.

Insufficient degrees of physical protection, security of chemical and biological facilities in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere, coupled with the availability of freelance scientific expertise, increases the spectre of catastrophic terrorism.

Now even if al Qaeda may be far away, or may be close to the using or succeeding in using what I call a CBRN attack, it is very clear that the media also will play a critical role in allaying the broader psychological effects for the public, with or without major fatalities.

It is still questionable whether there are sufficient contingency plans in coordinating public information between the public contingency offices in any country and major media outlets, yet the framework for this type of coordination will be absolutely critical in mitigating the effects of such an attack, both in terms of dissemination of public advice but also in ensuring infrastructure and societal economic continuity.

Let me finish off by saying that the new terrorism represented by September the 11th presents special and new urgent challenges to the West and international community, especially not only to the United States, but to Europe. In Europe right now there is a feeling that there's a question of not if but rather when terrorism globalization and weapons of mass destruction may be fused into one, an attack will be imminent.

The fundamental first step but also critical step is building on lessons learnt, on cross-border cooperation, in looking at U.S. counterterrorism in a global arena. And we have to understand the changing nature of the threat itself. The United States has made significant inroads in readdressing weaknesses inside the United States but also outside, not only overtly but also covertly, in building a tremendous multilateral intelligence cooperation with many different countries.

But the simple lesson is that the United States, if it wants to protect itself for the long term, cannot do this alone. It needs allies. It needs multilateral cooperation. This is not a war on terrorism, it's a ceaseless struggle that goes beyond any administration that will and should remain at the heart of protecting the homeland nationally and its interests abroad.

More than ever it is critically necessary to prevent, coming back to what my fellow panel members had mentioned before, not only to prevent but also to preempt, beyond U.S. borders, terrorist cells, otherwise, September the 11th may repeat itself with potentially higher levels of lethality.

Now as a testimony of the great strength of New York City and the American people to overcome but never to forget, we owe it to the victims, their families and the country to be ever vigilant in the face of evil, not only from the U.S. perspective but also with those allies that responded to the tragic events of September the 11th. Thank you very much.

CHAIRMAN KEAN: Thank you very much, Dr. Ranstorp. Are there any questions from the Commission? Senator Lehman?

COMMISSIONER LEHMAN: I would like to ask Professor Sofaer, the first part of your testimony I found very compelling with regard to the vision that stretched over a number of administrations where prosecution and bringing the terrorists to justice, and I believe Reagan used that term numerous times as well, superseded and dominated the sharing of information at the expense of that prosecution, as I think you pointed out or in some of the previous testimony, the Joint Investigation, the CIA, sometimes DIA, sometimes learned important intelligence only by reading the trial transcripts of some of the 93 perpetrators.

As a former prosecutor and distinguished legal advisor, could you get a little more specific of how could we establish a procedure or a process within the government to bring that a little more back into balance so if it was necessary to perhaps sacrifice a conviction in order to prevent a disaster that that balance can be made on a common-sense basis.

DR. SOFAER: With pleasure. I think what the present government and the present Department of Homeland Security has been trying to do, Congress is trying to do right now, is overcome those barriers. Once you adopt the criminal-law model as your primary model, of course it has to be part of any effort to prosecute criminals, but once you adopt it as your primary model, a number of very complicated things happen. Evidence that a national-security strategist might think is very important is treated as unimportant by someone who wants to make a case. He's always thinking about whether the evidence is admissible in a courtroom.

I mean, there are so many points like this that support what you have just said, Secretary Lehman. In general, what you have to do is subordinate the interests in criminal prosecution to the interests in protecting the country. And I would think that that's a no-brainer.

We subordinate the interests of criminal prosecution to Congressional investigations because our public needs to know things and our legislators need to know things. I would think that it would follow from that premise that we would subordinate the interests of criminal prosecution to the interests of protecting the country.

And that needs to be done institutionally. You need to have a body of some kind in Washington, a counterterrorism center of some sort, that's capable of doing that. And I must say, I don't think that the combination of the CIA and the FBI is that body. Frankly, it's the first evidence I've ever seen of them cooperating effectively, and that is in precluding the development of an independent intelligence operation that would in fact lead to the protection of the American people.

I have the highest regard for both agencies, but to think that that is going to solve the problem is a terrible mistake. And I think the President was sold a bill of goods. I hope he changes his mind and reconsiders and helps to give the Department of Homeland Security this authority to create a real counter-balance to the interests of two agencies that have utterly failed to cooperate and will continue to fail to cooperate because they have radically different agendas, and the underlying issues, as you pointed out, aren't changing.

So you need to have, as you said, a different institutional structure that puts in place this notion of the nation's security as preeminent. I do want to say that I think Attorney General Ashcroft has made the protection of America his chief priority but that still the agencies under him are still geared to achieving predominantly other things.

COMMISSIONER LEHMAN: And it's not just the federal. I think we would very much appreciate on the Commission your giving further thought, in your career combining policy with the prosecutorial, to perhaps give us some recommendations down the road for specific ways to do this.

This is not just a federal problem. If a New York cop who speaks Farsi picks up a piece of intelligence and is involved in a case, the district attorney can put it under seal and it's gone into the mole hole until that case is resolved.

And saying we're going to put national security ahead of prosecutions. It's all fine, it's motherhood, but if we don't have specific procedures and changes to recommend, then it's just so much hot air.

DR. SOFAER: Can I get a little help from the Rand Institution? I mean, I'd like an office there and a little bit of an opportunity to consult with some of the experts. That's a wonderful subject and I'm very serious in suggesting that it will take some, several talented people to put together a detailed plan of the kind you're talking about.

COMMISSIONER LEHMAN: That leads right into another theme that all three of you have touched on, and that is the sharing of intelligence. And all through the post-9/11 period, some people have pointed to MI-5 as a better way of dealing with this contradiction between law enforcement and intelligence.

I would be interested if each of you could tell the Commission, either now or later, after further reflection, what other examples, in your experience, in Europe and elsewhere in the world, where they're getting it right and we're getting it wrong in the handling of counterterrorism, not just intelligence, but across the board.

DR. RANSTORP: Could I comment on this?

COMMISSIONER LEHMAN: Yes.

DR. RANSTORP: I think there's a great sort of reflection of what went wrong in 9/11 from the U.S. perspective, but let's make one thing very clear. This was not just a U.S. problem, this was a problem that we had in Germany. I mean, the German intelligence had these cells under investigation, dating back to 1998.

However, the legislation was not up to speed in what kind of adversary we were facing. The same with Britain. I mean, the only country that I can think of that has had it right is a country, France, which have had very much less-restricted laws in terms of dealing with the problem of Islamic radicalism, but that is of course at the expense of civil liberties.

So when we look at this issue, we cannot just look at it from the U.S. perspective, we have to look at it from a global perspective, particularly with our European allies who constituted part of this coalition, but also front-line defense.

It's no accident, first of all, that 15 of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, given al Qaeda and bin Laden's desire to create the response, vis-a-vis United States and Saudi, nor is it an accident that they stationed themselves in Germany having analyzed, having probed, having known exactly where the weakness is.

We know that from the interrogations. We know that from having the benefit of the doubt of the interrogations, the evidence that we had in the past that we're dealing with an exceptionally savvy adversary who would know and understand our weaknesses.

And therefore, I would be hesitant to sort of try to import a model like MI-5 into the United States. Rather, we have to rely, and we're doing that now, we're getting things right in terms of counterterrorism cooperation not only between the United States and European allies, but more importantly, with friendly Arab allies who have provided invaluable information and assistance in not only understanding al Qaeda but also what may come after al Qaeda.

And therefore, I think that my recommendation, as a foreigner to this country, and having looked at this problem for a long time, is that we have to not only look at this problem from a U.S. perspective in trying to get the modalities right in terms of the structure, but also looking at how can we overcome the intelligence-sharing issues that, despite September the 11th, still plagues some of the cooperation, even among our most valued allies, in other words, the prioritization of intelligence.

MR. JENKINS: Mr. Secretary, I'd like to take you up on your offer to have an opportunity to reflect on that more, but let me just make a couple of comments which are perhaps sobering comments.

First of all, if you ask people, you know, should we have something like an MI-5, a lot of people will say, yes, and then you ask what is it, and they haven't the vaguest idea. So there's some mystique about this notion. The fact is, most of the Western European nations, many of the nations around the world, do have more than one intelligence service. They do divide their responsibilities.

The British have MI-5 and MI-6. The Germans have their intelligence service, the Bundes Criminal Amt, the Bundesamt fur Verfassungsschutz, to deal with different aspects of intelligence. The French divide it. The Italians divide it. That is a common feature for very, very good, good reason.

The problem of intelligence, of sharing among intelligence agencies, is chronic. Creating another entity may be a solution, but it doesn't automatically mean that intelligence will be shared. Instead of having two rival agencies, we can create three and four rival agencies. Simply sharing information, to most intelligence services, is an unnatural act.

The third point I'd like to make is that I am willing to concede that we can learn a great deal from the intelligence services of the European countries, many of whom have dealt with terrorist threats on their turf longer than we have dealt with it here. At the same time, we have to keep in mind again the realities.

It took the British 15, 20 years to effectively penetrate the IRA. There were still surprises. Large bombs went off in the heart of London. That's dealing with an adversary that speaks roughly the same language, and not something headquartered in distant Afghanistan. So we want to be careful about that.

Final point, and it relates to something that Magnus had said which I think is important. We do have to figure out how to create capability at an international level. We have achieved since September 11th an unprecedented degree of cooperation among intelligence services of a number of countries in going after al Qaeda.

What we have to figure out how to do now is how to institutionalize that and to create permanent machinery and procedures that will allow us to orchestrate -- and I use the word orchestrate here -- traditional law enforcement, intelligence collection, responses, whether in the form of arrest, special operations, or application of military force, and to do that across the globe in a very, very effective way, since this is the type of adversary we're going to be dealing with.

DR. SOFAER: Could I just add one thing, Mr. Secretary, and that is that I hope you did pay a little bit of attention to what I said, where we can drive ourselves nuts trying to come up with different ways to figure out everything about everybody that might attack us, when and where they're going to do it.

The fact of the matter is that we have excellent strategic intelligence. And Dan Byman is absolutely right about that. We knew who was going to attack us, we knew where he was, we knew he could do it. And we knew he wanted to do it and was determined to do it. And how much more do you need to know before you actually do something to stop an enemy?

I hope that you won't be offended that I repeat that. I just think that there is a tendency among us all, we're all civilized people, we all sort of tend to get drawn into this game of trying to manipulate things around so somehow we can make the world safe without raising a hand in violence or anger, but ultimately -- and that's the right attitude -- but ultimately, when it's pretty clear you're not going to talk someone out of wanting to kill you that you have to do something about him.

And when I hear stuff about the Middle East and Israel and stuff, I just, obviously I have always been, I've worked hard on Israel peace issues. When I was in the department, Chairman Hamilton, you remember that we worked together on many things involving Iran and we showed our good will in many ways to these countries, but can you imagine that a peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians would be anything but anathema to these people, these people who hate us?

The last thing they want is a peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians. They would be determined to destroy it, to tear it down. Go read what Islamic jihad says. They're our next enemy, Islamic jihad. And I'm telling you, they have told us they want to kill us. They have already started doing it.

And we have to pay attention to these few organizations that are around the world who are determined to attack us for the reasons that these gentlemen have so brilliantly articulated.

COMMISSIONER LEHMAN: That leads into another question, Professor Ranstorp. You're a well-known expert on Hizbollah, for instance, and other groups. As Mr. Jenkins has so well elucidated, this, what we call al Qaeda, is really a set of or an archipelago of groups, some that will last a short time, some a long time. Hizbollah has lasted a very long time.

How would you describe the relationship today between Hizbollah, Hamas, the group that just got hit up in northern Iraq, and these other parts of the archipelago and how much should we focus on them, as well as the core of al Qaeda?

DR. RANSTORP: Mr. Secretary, a very good question. It's a very broad question. I think we have to understand that al Qaeda is one of three things, first of all, before I address the issue of Hizbollah.

First of all, at the higher level, we're talking about an organization that have command and control structure. It's very organized. We have made major dents into the organization. We understand it.

The second level, which is probably the largest level, we have those working in the service of al Qaeda, those concerted groups who are operating on a national level, trying to confront not just the United States but also their own regimes and trying to effect regime changes.

Thirdly, we have those that are inspired or are sympathetic to the means and modes of al Qaeda. In terms of the cooperation between the two groups, there's very little corporation, there has been some.

In terms of Hizbollah itself, I would recommend to divorce Hizbollah as a movement and those individuals who have been part of Hizbollah's past, who I would more characterize as half Iranian intelligence agents and half Hizbollah operatives, who are standing with one foot in Iran and one foot in Hizbollah, who the United States is pursuing with extraordinary vigor.

The movement itself knows it may be on the sort of third phase on the war against terrorism. It's exceptionally sensitive to that issue. It is of course bounded up into the U.S.-Iranian dynamic in terms of its relationship, but it is of course an organization with global reach.

I mean, it's an organization just like al Qaeda, if one disturbs the bee hive, they may come back at us. We have to treat this issue with extraordinary care. Otherwise, we may be in for possibly retaliation from the organization.

In terms of other organizations, of course there are other ones in Lebanon, not just Hizbollah elements but also we have an organization called Asbat al-Ansar. And certainly there were connections between Asbat al-Ansar in Ein-el-Helweh, a refugee camp, with Ansa al-Islam, and connections also to the assassination of Lawrence Foley in Jordan. So there were these loose connections that are more based on logistical aspects than any common ideology. So we have to treat this on a case-by-case basis.

I wouldn't say that there is a full-fledged cooperation between Hizbollah and al Qaeda. They have different goals. They may focus in on the Israeli-Palestinian issue as a mobilizing tool, but certainly we should treat them as separate. And Hizbollah certainly knows that they may be the next face in the U.S. war on terrorism. And they are very sensitive to that issue.

COMMISSIONER LEHMAN: Do they have any current plans or operations that you're aware of targeted in the United States?

DR. RANSTORP: I would say this, that there are, there have been, according to my assessment, according to my contacts and support, that should there be a confrontation between the United States and Iran, they could cause some damage inside the U.S. mainland.

COMMISSIONER LEHMAN: That raises a very interesting dimension also that Mr. Jenkins had raised, the fact that this is a kind of a missionary organization and that it depends on interrelationships and sponsors and sanctuaries.

What would your judgment be if we were truly effective in draining the financial swamp, I mean cutting off principally the Saudi money that flows through various channels and through the various foundation networks, if we were successful in doing what Mr. Push had recommended so eloquently earlier and really putting the heat on those sources that like to have it both ways, would that dry up al Qaeda and other groups, related groups?

MR. JENKINS: Going after finances is useful, to the extent that it can reduce some of the resources that are available to these organizations, that is of benefit. It is also, quite separate from how much money you can dry up, it is a source of useful intelligence itself, that is, it tells us a great deal about connections between various entities, so it has a separate utility.

In terms of being able, however, to dry it up enough to halt terrorist activities, that, I must say, I'm somewhat skeptical of. To be sure, the cash flow of organizations like al Qaeda was significant, but a lot of that money was used to support the Taliban, a lot of it was used to support the training camps and infrastructure in Afghanistan itself, which they no longer have.

Can we squeeze it down enough to reduce money to support actual terrorist operations? That I'm less certain about because that, you know, we're talking about estimates of the cost of September 11th on the terrorists' side, we're probably something in the area of a half a million. A terrorist operation, major large-scale terrorist operation, we're talking about something in the hundreds of thousands.

Given the volume of money sloshing around the world in legitimate and illegitimate channels, through formal and informal structures, the notion that we can squeeze it down into the hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars level, I'm not so sure we can do that.

So we can put a dent in these organizations, we can make the support that they provide for some of these more radical movements, proselytization activities, support for some of these madrassas, we can do that. Can we deny the money necessary to buy the bombs, to recruit the people to carry out these attacks? I'm a lot less certain about that.

DR. SOFAER: I'm not sure we can close the madrassas down. I mean, do you think about how we would ever have the ability to close madrassas down in western Pakistan?

COMMISSIONER LEHMAN: Money talks.

DR. SOFAER: Money talks, yeah, but I don't know how this country could go along and convince the government of Pakistan to do that when the people of Pakistan want those madrassas.

COMMISSIONER LEHMAN: But are they not supported by the Saudis financially?

DR. SOFAER: I'm sure. I'm sure they are. I'm sure they are.

COMMISSIONER LEHMAN: Is there nothing we can do there?

DR. SOFAER: Oh, we can do plenty, I just think there's a limit.

DR. RANSTORP: Mr. Secretary, if I may add, beyond the philanthropic aspects of this, let me say that I have looked into every single arrest in Europe and beyond. The common feature is what I outlined as the number-one issue, and that was, every time you catch an al Qaeda suspect or al Qaeda operative, you will have 15 to 20 different identities.

Through these, he can easily, with or without Saudi or other financing, be able to garner the requisite resources, the building blocks of being able to launch terrorism through credit-card fraud, bank fraud. And that's an issue what we need to tackle with great urgency if we're going to be able to find these individuals, to weed them out, and to put a stop to this preemptively.

DR. SOFAER: It isn't, Mr. Secretary, if I may say, it isn't the teaching of Islam that we should be trying to prevent or inhibit. It's the teaching of one type of Islam, the Wahhabi type brand of Islam. So if we can modify our effort and narrow it and target it to those uses of funds that threaten us as human beings and appeal to Muslims in the world and say, ‘stop teaching your children to kill us,’ that is really what we want you to do.

Teach Islam, go ahead, but that branch of Islam, if we can narrow it, then we might succeed because if the Islamic world sees this as an effort to squeeze the financing of Islamic institutions, we will never get anywhere.

COMMISSIONER LEHMAN: One last question. How close is al Qaeda to having usable weapons of mass destruction? I'd like to hear it from all of you.

DR. RANSTORP: Well, I was asked by CNN, when they found the terrorist tapes, to come and analyze them, the so-called dog tapes, it was visual representation of the fact that they were on their way to using chemical agents.

I think al Qaeda is very close to, and particularly in two spheres, number one, the ricin arrests we have had in Europe, we have had them for about a year and a half, I mean, we have known about this issue for a year and a half, over a year and a half, since 9/11.

And it's not a weapon of mass destruction, it's a weapon of mass disruption. It would have huge economic consequences, psychological contingent of fear.

Perhaps more worrying is al Qaeda and al Qaeda elements in the former Soviet Union are searching for radiological material. And you have those two elements. On the one hand, chemical agents, that there's a program, an active program to try to acquire them and to also possibly deploy them. On the other hand, you have a lot of radiological material.

And in many ways I think the prevailing view in Europe among security officials that I have spoken to is that it is not a question of if but rather when that they are deployed, perhaps not in the United States, but possibly in Europe.

MR. JENKINS: Depending on how you define weapons of mass destruction, in fact they have them, I mean, we know that they have chemical capabilities and biological capabilities. The construction of a radiological dispersal device takes nothing more than some source of radioactivity, which is readily available in society, and some explosive or other means of dispersing it.

If we're talking about using those on a scale that would create mass destruction, mass casualties, then they're probably far, far from that, but as Magnus points out, the issue here is not the body count but rather the effects. We should perhaps be talking about weapons of mass effect.

That is, if we go back to the incident in Tokyo and the attack involving nerve gas in Tokyo subways, 12 people died in that attack, 5,500 were treated at hospital as a consequence of that. Of those 5,500, 1,200 were actually exposed to the chemical. The other 4,700 were illnesses brought about by anxiety, I mean real heart attacks, real respiratory problems, asthmatic attacks, psychosomatic attacks. And that's something that we would have to expect.

Simply by mentioning the words biological or nerve gas or radioactivity in the same sentence with terrorism is going to get us some real effects here. So the issue is not whether they can carry out the terrorist equivalent of a Chernobyl or a Bhopal, but rather simply how they could use these in order to create a tremendous amount of fear, alarm, national panic, and economic disruption.

I mean, we remember from our own experience, which is not al Qaeda connected, but with the anthrax letters that we experienced in the fall of September 2001, five people were killed, but we closed down a portion of a Senate office building for months while we tried to get things down to the ‘manageable number of spores,’ I think was one of the quotes.

If we talk about a major transportation system or a major commercial property, I'm not quite sure what the public reaction would be to the manageable number of spores. It's going to have tremendous psychological consequences, not just biochemical.

DR. SOFAER: I would just add one remark, one comment to what my colleagues have said, Mr. Secretary, Mr. Chairman, and that is that you should not consider the potential of al Qaeda or terrorist groups to use these weapons on their own. You have to take into account the potential of cooperation with a state.

We have on the record, in the last year and a half or so, two statements that I consider highly significant. One is by former Prime Minister Rafsanjani where he suggests that a nuclear device in Tel Aviv would put an end to Israel, whereas a nuclear device in the Arab world would simply take some casualties and they'd get over it and move on.

And another statement and most recently made by the former Head of Intelligence of Pakistan, General al Haq, where he said essentially the same thing, we could use a nuclear device and put an end to Israel.

Most of this, both these comments were directed at Israel, but clearly the option is always there of going to a terrorist group if you are hostile to the United States or any other western country, including Israel, and having them do your dirty work and providing the terrorist with the ability to do that. Indeed, that is probably the ultimate fear that we have to confront.

MR. JENKINS: I'm going to take exception to the comments of my colleague on that point. I am not absolutely convinced that national governments, even those we may identify as rogue states, are so ready to put weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons, things that have signatures, in the hands of groups they do not absolutely control. They would bear the consequences.

And indeed, I think this is, however, the point where probably Abe and I would find common ground on this, that we can affect this by policy. We can ensure that people well understand that we will take appropriate action to deal with that, whether it's action after the fact or whether it's action before the fact, that will be treated, that the notion that this can be done with some successful degree of subterfuge through some terrorist operative and that that will necessarily fool us or deter us from going back to the source, I think in wake of the headlines we're looking at, as we speak, that becomes a fairly credible argument. So as I say, we affect that by our policy.

DR. RANSTORP: Mr. Secretary, may I sort of continue beyond the state using those types of weapons. What concerns security and policy-makers in thinking about al Qaeda for the future is possibly not so much what is happening right now -- because we have a very good handle on that, there's an unprecedented coordination among 90 countries -- it's the potential for al Qaeda or post-al Qaeda to become an incubator of specific states, I’m thinking particularly about the consequences of, for example, Pakistan.

We've got al Qaeda eventually taking over, post-Al Qaeda taking over other structures like Saudi. So al Qaeda is very patient. What represents al Qaeda is very patient, thinking about strategy over the long term.

I think we equally have to craft strategies. They are thinking about these issues over the long term. It is not going to be easy decades ahead, but I hope we will be able to prevent another catastrophe that we had like here in New York City.

CHAIRMAN KEAN: Congressman Roemer?

COMMISSIONER ROEMER: Well, in his usual fashion, Secretary Lehman has thoroughly delved into a host of the very important topics here. And let me just merely try to follow up on a couple of them while we have your very helpful expertise and counsel and insight before us.

With respect to the body count and the number of people that terrorists are willing to take, kill, especially as we reflect back on September 11th, let me read a quote: "Terrorists want a lot of people watching and a lot of people listening and not a lot of people dead."

I read that not to embarrass anybody, not to, you know, try to throw that around at all. It's a quote from 1975. It's a quote from one of the panelists. And it is very, very perceptive in showing how much terrorists have changed. And Mr. Jenkins and I talked a little about that before the hearing. It has been a monumental change in what terrorists can do with what they have access to do and what they are willing to do.

Mr. Jenkins, you said that back in 1975. It was very accurate back then. Why do you think it has changed to such a degree today?

MR. JENKINS: Well, I am the culprit. And I believed it then. And in fact I think for many of the groups, even groups that we would label terrorists today, that that still applies. That is so long as an enterprise thinks in terms of a political ideology or a political agenda, that's what we were talking about in the 1970s when I wrote that, so long as there's a sense of political agenda, then there's a sense of political constituency.

And that imposes constraints that we recognized in the 1970s that terrorists, using primitive weapons that we knew they had, weapons of explosives, weapons of fire, could kill a lot more people than they did. And yet they didn't do so, not because of some technological ceiling, it had to be because of some self-imposed constraint. And over a period of time, through interrogation of terrorists and interviews in prisons, through trial testimony, we learned what those constraints were.

They worried about group cohesion, not all of whose members might have the same stomach for violence. They worried about their perceived constituents. They always imagine themselves to have legions of supporters. They wanted to provoke public alarm but not to provoke so much backlash that would change the rules and threaten their own survival.

And therefore, terrorists have a notion of some kind of a red line, some type of a line beyond which the violence would be counter-productive.

Now those constraints were not universal and they were not immutable. And over a period of time, they changed. And they changed in part because, as terrorism became commonplace, there was a built-in requirement to escalate.

Hijacking airliners may get you a headline in 1971. When you're up to the 150th hijacking, you're page 5 news. So they had to escalate. But I think the real change, the qualitative change that came about, that was referred to as a so-called new terrorism in the late '80s and 1990s was the decline of ideology as a driving force for political violence, and increasingly, either ethnic hatreds or religious fanaticism.

Now if one believes that instructions to act, instructions to kill, are handed down from God, however that God may communicate with an individual, then you really don't worry about the constraints of conventional morality, you don't worry about constituents on this planet. They are infidels or pagans or nonbelievers who will burn in hell anyway.

And it is that, the fundamental change in the quality of terrorist violence, so that by the 1990s, large-scale indiscriminate violence was becoming increasingly the reality of contemporary terrorism.

Now projecting that is scary because what it means, if the willingness is there because of technological advance, that power, power I mean crudely, simply is the capacity to kill, to destroy, to disrupt, to alarm, to oblige us to divert vast resources to security, that that is descending into the hand of smaller and smaller groups whose grievances, real or imaginary, it's not always going to be possible to satisfy.

Putting that another way, the bands of fanatics, irreconcilables, lunatics that have existed throughout history, are becoming in our age an increasingly potent force to be reckoned with. And how we, as a society, as a democratic society, are going to successfully cope with that and remain a democratic society to me is one of the major challenges of this century.

COMMISSIONER ROEMER: So your argument is, quite simply, constraints are coming off, the technology is going up, and we can't afford even a single mistake, given that these terrorist groups could get access to the kind of weaponry that their ambition already has them seeking to get.

MR. JENKINS: Exactly.

COMMISSIONER ROEMER: You talked a little bit, you talked a little bit in your testimony about how we got it so wrong throughout the 1990s in calculating the enemy. Al Qaeda's vision, al Qaeda's organizational capabilities, al Qaeda's money and fundraising.

The Clinton administration didn't get it right, they got it wrong in a lot of ways. The Bush administration didn't get it right, they got it wrong in a lot of ways. The Europeans, the same thing.

I can't help but recall the words from one of the counterterrorism chiefs in the Joint Inquiry hearings of the FBI who said he was 98 percent certain in 2000 that the attack would come from overseas and be overseas and it wouldn't be in the United States. We not only got it wrong, there was no hand-off to get it right domestically. And if you might comment on how we do get it right in the future.

Mr. Jenkins, you talked a little bit about an intriguing proposal, with 15,000 to 18,000 local sheriffs and police officers that could help us get it right at the local level.

Could you flush that out a bit more and talk a little bit more in detail about that, and would that replace what the Bush administration has proposed a T-TIC center [Terrorist Threat Investigation Center] here, or work with them; how would that work together as a fusion center in getting information out to the local people?

MR. JENKINS: That is simply one among many proposals. It's a rough-and-ready response. We're talking about needing a lot more collection capability on the streets. And that is one approach to getting it. I'd say it probably gets us there faster than the creation of a new federal agency and the deployment of additional federal agencies, but by itself, it's not going to work.

Here we have to really address a broad variety of proposals, some of which have been discussed in this panel. Part of the problem, as has been mentioned, in terms of the FBI's unwillingness to share information relating to investigations that might ultimately result in prosecution, that itself reflects a trajectory in our domestic-intelligence capabilities over the years.

In the 1960s, much more of the FBI's counter-intelligence efforts in what we would call terrorist-related crimes was aimed at prevention, but because of abuses that were recognized in the 1970s, we imposed new rules, new constraints, that basically said at the federal level, and these were repeated at the state and local level, we don't want intelligence in the prevention business anymore. We want you in the prosecution business, that the prevention business is just too intrusive in a free society. So we imposed new guidelines in the bureau, at the state level. These were repeated by police commissions throughout the country.

By the beginning of the '80s, it was recognized that perhaps some of these constraints were having a serious impact on intelligence-collection capabilities, and so they were relaxed somewhat, began to swing a little bit the other way, but really there was at the same time, there was a perceived decline in the terrorist threat domestically in this country. And so in fact, because they were difficult to manage, because they were politically risky, because they were in some cases costly to operate, we continued to dismantle domestic-intelligence capabilities.

That reversed somewhat in the 1990s as we began to perceive a more serious threat again, but we really didn't rebuild the capabilities. And it wasn't until September 11th that we recognized we had a failure of intelligence in terms of looking at this. When I say, "failure," I want to put that in quotes. I am not one who believes that if we had had just a little better intelligence collection, we could have connected the dots, as the phrase goes. This is very, very tough.

When you read the last page of a mystery novel first and then read the novel, all of the clues are obvious. Going forward, it's a lot more complicated than that. But we probably can do it better. Now that we have pushed back into the prevention business, then that should allow us to more easily share some of this information across lines without some of the constraints imposed by prosecution, which was the real constraint. So sharing has to be made better.

The analysis does have to get there and does have to get better. We also have to keep in mind that we can't judge intelligence solely on the basis of identifying and preventing an attack. Of course we're going to do that, but intelligence is also aimed at disrupting your opponent's capability to operate.

We don't know how many attacks we may have thwarted since September 11th. It's a good many. And we can identify some clearly, but there may be many more that were aborted because of increased security or because of good intelligence that we will find out about years from now when we catch more of these people and interrogate them.

Better sharing, better analysis, better mechanisms across national frontiers, to work more closely with our allies, take advantage of this unprecedented cooperation I mentioned before.

When we can get a good flow of information from the streets of our cities across to, whether it is an investigating magistrate in France or an intelligence operative in the Middle East, and begin to assemble that kind of information and analyze it and repackage it and send it back out to users, whether it's a policeman on the beat or a judge in Italy or a Special Forces Team in Afghanistan, then we will be getting close to the kind of capability we need to deal with this kind of problem. That's going to take a couple, a few years.

COMMISSIONER ROEMER: More than a few years, I would suspect. Several years. Professor, you talked a little bit about the problems of communication and information sharing between the CIA and the FBI. The Joint Inquiry's findings agree very much with those systemic and endemic and ongoing problems.

How do you fix it? Do you create more agencies to do it and more stove-piping? How do we get either those agencies to talk to one another and share information or do you create this new Terrorist Threat Integration Center? Where do you put it, Homeland Security or outside of it? How do they communicate with the local people? Give me some tangible suggestions here.

DR. SOFAER: You're really in good shape. Your Executive Director happens to be the former Executive Director of the Markle Commission, a Commission Task Force Report on this very subject. And he was the principal author, Philip Zelikow was the principal author of that report.

And that report does a lot to move policy in the right direction on those issues. They're very complicated. And the Markle Commission is continuing its work and trying to develop a sort of a distributed intelligence framework where you have less top-down evaluation, the kind of thing that Brian had suggested earlier with the New York City police force and the other local police forces, but on an intelligence, computer-based intelligence system.

I think it's very, very complicated and important that it be done, but I think that's the way it's got to be done, through experts. We've got people in the room, I'm privileged to be on that task force, who I don't even understand when they start talking about distributed networks and all these other things.

And they clearly have a handle on how to use information and also how to control your seeking of information so that you maintain civil liberties. They have a handle on those issues that is really highly sophisticated at this stage in the private sector. And that's where we really have to turn to them and ask them to guide us in these very, very complicated issues.

But don't forget, Congressman, that when you know who your enemy is and he's killed you a few times, you can sort of skip the dots on a particular incident and go take him out before he comes back and kills our people again. Don't forget that.

COMMISSIONER ROEMER: There has to be an offensive and a defensive strategy.

DR. SOFAER: Absolutely. That's right. I think that it is very hard to keep, it's so hard to keep the attention of commissions and government officials away from this process of examination, this going deeper and deeper into intelligence, trying to figure out things.

There is a certain point at which that you have figured it out, you know what the issue is and who the enemy is. And when you get to that point, when you can indict someone twice, he had been indicted twice before 9/11, when you can do that, my God, you've waited around too long. You already solved the problem, you know who your enemy was. You know he is going to come kill you.

I think this is an important point not just for this case but for other cases. There aren't that many big terrorist groups in the world. There are some. And you have got here, with Brian and Magnus, we've got here really two of the great experts on this. Magnus has written the work on Hizbollah. I mean, no one knows more about Hizbollah in the world, I don't think, than Magnus.

And the fact of the matter is, there's Hizbollah, there's Islamic jihad, you know, you can make a list. It's not that long a list. And part of what you should do to keep America safe is focus on those people who say they hate us and they want to kill us, because those are the guys who are going to do it, Mr. Secretary.

COMMISSIONER ROEMER: Magnus, let me draw you in here and ask for your international insight into this. You mentioned earlier about al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, but specifically, I believe your words were that al Qaeda is dispersed from Afghanistan, but they're still an organization that has tentacles in a host of different places and are very much able to attack us from where they're going, whether that be in Indonesia or Malaysia or other parts of the world.

Can you draw this out a little bit more clearly for us in terms of how we expect they have dispersed, where they are, and how this 90-country international coalition continues to focus on this international law on terrorism and what are the two or three most effective ways to do that?

DR. RANSTORP: Well, let me say that from the American people's point of view, they can rest assured, from the international perspective of what I see, Europe, Europe's contribution, we have 500 people in custody in Europe in many, many different countries, we have thwarted many plots, and that is that we are getting things right.

Fortunately, unfortunately, 9/11 was the wake-up call for that. It was a tremendous secret war of intelligence hunters out there trying to learn as much as possible about al Qaeda, about how al Qaeda is changing from different regions. And of course, it is very difficult. It is not affected by the war against Iraq, rather, those are institutional linkages that are already, it's not affected in terms of the sharing and cooperation between a number of countries.

There have been some countries that have been tremendously helpful. Among them, of course, Pakistan, but also Jordan, particularly Jordan's role in contributing, and not only protecting itself and its royal family, but also in illuminating our understanding of how the al Qaeda network works, alongside the Egyptians and other, shall we say, coalition partners. So we are getting things right, but there are also of course tremendous challenges because they do exist.

Al Qaeda's network has a presence in over 98 different countries around the world. It has a global reach. One of the areas we have not tackled very much is in America's own back yard, Latin America. We know that there has been some al Qaeda presence there.

Of course, there are other problems there as well. There's a sort of al Qaeda elements, other Islamic extremist elements who are not only dispersed in Latin America but of course the world.

It's a tremendously difficult issue. And I think one of the issues and one of the things that I put in my recommendation is that we should coordinate our response, particularly because terrorism is fusing together with organized crime and even ordinary crime, that we should put together our efforts, particularly within the U.S. structures, of the war on terrorism as well as the war on drugs, because as we speak right now, we dealt with Afghanistan, it was a huge blow for al Qaeda.

The issue of reconstruction in Afghanistan is still a major issue. As we speak, there are Taliban and al Qaeda suspects flooding back into Afghanistan or using a large portion of the country. It's a lawless zone. It's a blind spot in this war of terrorism.

And it's not just Afghanistan, it's not just in certain portions of Iran, it's not just the fact that Iran has facilitated al Qaeda transit out of that area. There are large proportions in the world where we do not have effective central authority, where the authority does not have the capability. And the United States have been not only hunting down al Qaeda cells but also providing antiterrorism assistance.

The United States is the only country with global intelligence reach on a tremendous level. And I think that, you know, we may want to sort of do an inventory of how we can do things better, but I think that we have gone a long way of ensuring that al Qaeda will at lease not strike with ease against the American homeland or against U.S. citizens abroad.

COMMISSIONER ROEMER: You mentioned the need for central authority. I think a half a dozen commissions throughout the 1990s have recommended the creation of a Director of National Intelligence, somebody with centralized power and authority within the intelligence community that has the responsibility for a budget, that can implement policy and, if they declare a war on terrorism or al Qaeda, they have the resources to marshal the intelligence community forward to get it done.

Six or seven commissions have recommended it. We are probably moving in the other direction, in reality, from accomplishing that. Do you have views on whether or not, Professor, should we create a DNI, Mr. Jenkins, Mr. Ranstorp?

DR. SOFAER: I'm not sure we should, Mr. Congressman. I think that our reluctance to be strong and act positively, actively in our self defense leads us sometimes to overwork on the passive measures to the point that we do create real threats to our civil liberties. I think that an active defense would facilitate, in fact, less reliance on internal control of our own citizens. And so I worry about setting up institutions in this country that would change the nature of our life.

COMMISSIONER ROEMER: Mr. Jenkins?

MR. JENKINS: First of all, I thought at one time we had created someone that was supposed to be in charge of the intelligence community and it didn't quite work out that way.

There's a tendency, by the way, to try to approach a particularly gnarly problem like this one by the creation of some sort of a czar. This is a recurring theme in our governmental approach. I'm not sure. I'm not going to make a powerful argument against it, but I'm not automatically convinced that it provides an answer that simply a new organization or a new head of organization gets us there.

There are rather procedural issues, there are issues of imperative, there are issues of incentives that I think we have to address quite apart from the issue of government reorganization. The fact is, my own view is that we do have the basic building blocks now to do this thing. We are making progress. We do have to improve and we will improve as we go along. Every time we create another entity, that may expand our capabilities in one sense, but at the same time, it becomes a distraction.

I mean, I'm not going to argue against the creation of a Homeland Security Department. Bringing together is a good idea, but at the same time, how it is going to function, how it is actually going to integrate them in this major post-merger environment now that has been created, and effectively operate, that becomes, that almost tends to slow you down somewhat in terms of dealing with the actual process that we want to deal with.

So as I say, I'm not going to argue against it, but I'm not sure an Intelligence Czar or a Counterterrorist Czar is automatically going to get us there.

I do think, and this is a cultural problem, it's not a government-organizational problem, that we, being a very pragmatic nation, that we like to view things in terms of finite achievement -- there's a problem, we identify the problem, we solve the problem, move on to the next problem -- and that we are so desperate for closure after September 11th that we're looking for some way, organizationally, that we can put the lid on this thing and say we have now solved that, we are now moving on.

Instead what I think our message is here, and I'm not putting words in the mouths of my colleagues here, but that this is an open-ended thing we're engaged in here. Our pursuit of al Qaeda itself must be unrelenting. If it takes us two years, if it takes us 20 years, this enterprise must be destroyed to reduce its capabilities to attack us and also as a lesson to other organizations around the world, that if you do this, this will be the response of the United States and we will spend the rest of our lives hunting you down.

At the same time, where we can appropriately use the term "war", and I think language needs to be precise here, where we can appropriately use the term "war" for dealing with an al Qaeda or its successors, that we're also simultaneously engaged in an effort to improve the security of our homeland against catastrophes like 9/11.

And as I pointed out here, that's going to take certain kinds of strategies, both intelligence strategies, response strategies, infrastructure, the way we do security, to do it in a way that doesn't cripple our own economy, that doesn't create some sort of a neo-medieval society where we spend the rest of our lives living under the kitchen table.

At the same time, another court of our activity must be to combat terrorism. Now here the verb is important. Combat implies an enduring task. We're going to do the things that we can internationally to improve the exchange of intelligence, to improve travel documentation, to improve border security, aviation security, all of the things, financial controls, all of the things that we can do to make the environment operationally more difficult for the terrorists, whatever group they belong to.

We are doing all these things simultaneously, some we will succeed. Ultimately, we will destroy al Qaeda. These other tasks that we're talking about, these are tasks that are going to take years, probably decades.

And there will be other commissions to follow this one that will be examining and making useful contributions to improve things along the way. But the notion that we can come up to some moment and say, we have won, the terrorists have lost, probably not in my lifetime.

COMMISSIONER ROEMER: Sir?

DR. RANSTORP: I think Brian echoed exactly my sentiment in terms of looking at this as a ceaseless struggle. I think there is, from the outside, I have to preface my comments as being an outsider, a foreigner to the United States, that there's an over-tendency to look at trying to hermetically seal the U.S. or immunize itself from a future attack.

It's important that we do the work that has been done so far in terms of homeland security, in terms of the possibility of centralizing intelligence, in making intelligence flow, not just from the top between different agencies but also, as Brian said earlier, more importantly, the front line of defense, the local law-enforcement officers, the police, equipping them with the right equipment.

I think, thinking back, and I was in the United States in 1998 on the day on which President Clinton ordered air strikes against Afghanistan and instituted some protective measures, in part to try to protect the U.S. against what I would call catastrophic terrorism, but I would have to say this, that we have to balance our protective measures, our defensive measures, with more aggressive preemptive action.

I mean, logic would prevail that once they start moving towards the target, we've already lost half the battle. And therefore, we have to work on multilateral cooperation, we have to work on making it as difficult as possible, we have to create the sense of insecurity for the adversary, for al Qaeda, so that they're not able to plan undisturbed, but they also have to worry about their own security and the fact that they may become apprehended by the U.S. in the future.

Therefore, I think, you know, we have gone a long way towards getting it right. A lot of the measures we don't see because they're occurring in the quiet, occurring in the intelligence sphere. Therefore, you know, on the one hand, we're creating different structures and trying to centralize different decisions, pooling intelligence and intelligence analysis, but there's a tremendous force, an unseen force out there that are hunting these people down, that will seek justice, no matter how long it will take.

And that goes not only for al Qaeda but also for those forces that killed the U.S. Marines in '93.

COMMISSIONER ROEMER: At the end of the day, this Commission will be about some recommendations. And what I am hearing very clearly from you is that part of those recommendations might be in fact communicating to the American people that this war, this combatting terrorism, as Mr. Jenkins says, one needs the sense of urgency that we have when our troops go into Afghanistan or Iraq, and secondly, that this is long-term, almost ceaseless struggle, that will take a lot of time, that despite the recommendations that this Commission makes in May of 2004, al Qaeda may be out there in 2014. I see you nodding.

MR. JENKINS: If not al Qaeda, the son of al Qaeda or the grandson of al Qaeda or some other enterprise.

Look, we have been dealing with terrorism, fortunately not at the scale of 9/11, for many, many years. And it's not because of an absence of intelligent people who have been addressing this topic, it's because this is a very, very big challenge. This thing is going to go on. It's not simply going to be a matter of how we can reorganize our intelligence collection or how many National Guardsmen we can deploy or how much concrete we can pour around every identifiable piece of critical infrastructure we have in this country.

Ultimately, it is going to be our own sense of urgency, our own tenacity, our own determination, our own courage, to a certain extent, our own stoicism about accepting that there are going to be some failures, there are going to be some losses, and in the process -- and I think this is very, very important because it's long-term and because we are America -- our own continuing commitment to the values for which this country stands.

It's not something that we can simply reorganize, toss the values, forget the rules, and go off and blast away and fix things up and come back and restore the old rules and say we'll go back to whatever normality was on September 10, 2001. We don't get to go back. It is a different world. It is a long-term contest. And so we better do it in a way that we can maintain the sense of values.

I'm not saying we don't change the rules. We can change rules. Every country that has dealt with terrorism has been obliged to change the rules of detention, of intelligence gathering, of trial procedures, but the countries of Europe that have done this, they have done this as democracies and remained democracies.

We can do the same, but we cannot, we cannot violate fundamentally those rules and maintain the support we will need domestically and internationally for what promises to be a long-term struggle.

DR. SOFAER: I would agree with all that, Mr. Congressman. I just want to say that I think this Commission should make it clear that the duty to protect and defend the American people includes, very explicitly, the duty to go out and stop a known enemy that has killed Americans from doing it again, that that duty is a clear, precise duty.

You're not supposed to sit in Washington with a bunch of experts trying to make dots and connect ideas to figure out when someone is going to kill you and where he's going to do it if you know there's someone out there that is determined to do it and capable of doing it and you know where he is.

So this Commission should, I think, make it clear that presidents don't have the option of sitting back and playing that game, that part of fighting terrorism is that when you know there's an enemy who rises up to kill you, and the words that should be familiar to all of us in all three of our religions, that you rise up and kill him first.

CHAIRMAN KEAN: I'm going to interrupt this shortly because we have already kept our panel more than we expected.

COMMISSIONER ROEMER: Thank you for your patience.

CHAIRMAN KEAN: Do you have anymore questions?

COMMISSIONER ROEMER: No, I'm all done. Thank you very much. I want to thank the panel, too. You've been terrific.

CHAIRMAN KEAN: Senator, you have a question?

COMMISSIONER CLELAND: Mr. Jenkins, all of you, you've been eloquent to a fault. Thank you very much.

Mr. Jenkins, right at the end of your incredible, wonderful presentation, you talked about, in effect, defeating al Qaeda, that is a specific goal, they did rise up to kill us and did, and they declared war on us. And I couldn't agree more. Then you went to combatting terrorism.

What that reminded me of was an experience I had in Malaya, or now it's Malaysia. I was in Vietnam, '67, '68, fighting guerillas, terrorists, suicide bombers and the like, took a little R & R in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and read a book called The Long, Long War. It was about the British experience in combatting guerrillas, terrorists, suicide bombers. And one of the things they learned was that the terrorist doesn't lose, he wins. The terrorist doesn't lose, he wins.

So for those who came after us, you're exactly right, and that's specific. We know who did it and we must kill or capture them or else they will do it again. What little I know about al Qaeda, that is true. Within the combating of terrorism, doing what you can in terms of strategic offensive abroad, strategic defensive at home, that is the long, long war.

What I want to pose to you is a couple of problems with this. One of the problems is that in terms of stirring up the bee hive, Mr. Ranstorp, your point about the Hizbollah, it seems to me that Osama bin Laden deliberately has stirred up the bee hive to create an overreaction by Western democracies, particularly America, so that we would then trigger more recruits for his jihad.

In his declaration of war, for instance, bin Laden states that the stationing of American forces on the soil of the Arabian Peninsula constitutes the greatest aggression committed against the Muslims since the death of the prophet Mohammed in AD 632. Well, we don't believe that, but that's his rhetoric.

The point being, is it your understanding, Mr. Jenkins, that to the extent to which we increase our footprint on Arab soil, Muslim soil, and appear to be the Crusaders of old trying to take over Islamic lands, which fulfills his rhetoric, that as we do that, we stand in difficulty or difficult trouble, or potentially potential trouble of creating really a backlash against us and more terrorist activity?

Talk to me a little bit about it. We created an air base in Saudi Arabia and one in Iraq. We have a presence in the Middle East in many, many ways. Talk to me a little bit about the potential dangers that you see about increasing what -- another article is called the Pax Americana in the Middle East -- and how that could possibly generate a greater terrorist threat ultimately in terms of a backlash against us.

MR. JENKINS: This is not easy because this is a balance and, as you know, policy is always a matter of trade-offs. To not respond forcefully to the events of September 11th, to me, would have been unimaginable. In responding, whether it's responding to September 11th or whether it's what we are currently engaged in in Iraq, clearly unavoidably, does raise risks. It raises risks that our opponents will be able to exploit these, we know they will, in order to increase their recruiting.

So the challenge for us becomes can we respond forcibly and effectively in a way without signalling a desire for dominion, a desire for Imperialist rule, a desire, communicating the desire that we wish to remake the world in our, in our image or in anything that suggests that we're opposed to a religion. Now that is hard to do. I'm not sure that there's a single formulaic answer to that specific question.

By the way, the question to our opponents would be unimaginable, it would be utterly bizarre because while we may say that we're not engaged in a war on Islam, correctly so in that we're not interested in dominion and that we make separations between what people believe and how they behave and we respond to how they behave to us, these bifurcations of a spiritual world of belief, of political developments, are completely foreign to them. This is all of a single piece. So can we operate in this territory and do it.

In Afghanistan, although we're not home yet in Afghanistan, in Afghanistan we were successful. We used military force, we destroyed al Qaeda bases. And there was no uprising of Islam. There was no worldwide surge in terrorism against us as a consequence, as a consequence of this.

Now, as I say, we're not there yet. And one of the things that we also have to figure out how to do to ensure, and I think a mistake made the first time around in dealing with Afghanistan is that probably, without being Imperialists, we can't afford to leave too many black holes on the planet, can't afford to have too many badlands where these type of things can find a petri dish they need to grow and survive.

So we're going to have to actively go out and, in one way or another, not always with Special Forces or smart bombs or other applications of military force, we're going to find out how to address some of these.

That doesn't mean straying off into what to me is illusions about addressing root causes. It is not demonstrable that there's any causal relationship between poverty and terrorism. We will address, we will address poverty in the world, we will address lack of education, we will address political oppression because it's the right thing to do, not because we have any illusions that it is going to end terrorism.

As I say, in doing so, we run these risks, but I think we have to take these one at a time and get them right.

COMMISSIONER CLELAND: Mr. Ranstorp?

DR. RANSTORP: Connecting with what Brian said, I think the environment is such that we're moving towards greater complexity. I mean, unfortunately, if you look at the Middle East, for example, U.S. economists have estimated it will take economic growth rate five times that of the United States to get the region on an even keel.

There's been a youth explosion. There's been demographic growth. There's no link between poverty and terrorism, yet it's that environment which so easily lends itself to certain radical nodes of radical Islam. I think that we have, following 9/11, we addressed many of those issues. We are aware of them.

We do not have the capability of reaching into so-called black spots. We're simply not perhaps developing our own capabilities, but we're outsourcing this. This is not just the United States' problem, this is a Western problem, not just a U.S. problem, but also a European problem. And therefore, we're working hand in hand in trying to alleviate this.

But we have tremendous challenges. I think one of the issues particularly we have to grapple with is the global feeling of anti-Americanism, in using public diplomacy to much greater effect, in thinking ahead about tactics and strategies, explaining better to the world why American is doing what it is doing.

And you can see that's happening now as an integral part of the war against Iraq. In the war against the hearts and minds and the war against Islamic extremism, it's very difficult to do, but it has to be done at some level. It has to be, it has to be confronted.

I have spent 15 years working, mapping Islamic extremists. And let me say that one of the issues where it is both the strength and the weakness which we have to tackle with greater ingenuity and innovation is the issue of their legitimacy. We have to tackle at the root heart their legitimacy. And there are many ways one can do that, but it will take a greater ingenuity. It has to take greater effort. And it is not going to be an easy road ahead.

COMMISSIONER CLELAND: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

CHAIRMAN KEAN: Thank you. Mr. Commissioner Ben-Veniste.

COMMISSIONER BEN-VENISTE: I know it's getting late.

CHAIRMAN KEAN: This is going to be the last question, just to let these people go.

COMMISSIONER BEN-VENISTE: Also a biblical expression. Both Judge Sofaer and Mr. Jenkins have commented on the concept of creating a new domestic intelligence agency from different perspectives. Judge Sofaer, you have mentioned that you opposed it, and one of the reasons that you stated was because of the greater threat to civil liberties. And Mr. Jenkins said that he thought that the basic building blocks to do the work were there.

And perhaps that ties into the extraordinary presentation of Miss Kleinberg earlier this morning. She talked about all of the things that were missed by our intelligence agencies that could have, in fact, on the basis of information in hand, had they been working cooperatively and done the work that was expected of them, could have identified at least some of the terrorists involved in 9/11.

I wonder whether you would each expand upon that because one of the major objectives I think we have in making our ultimate recommendations will be related to whether a new system of domestic intelligence should be instituted or whether in fact we can make do with what we have with significant improvement.

DR. SOFAER: I think the latter. I think we can make do with what we have with significant improvements. I think we ought to use DHS more than going back to the FBI and CIA. I think that we're not going to make much progress if we rely on those agencies exclusively.

I think the list of failures and opportunities that the Joint Committee has put together with Miss Hill, her report has been very impressive. And I can't imagine that the Commission needs to spend a lot of time building on that record.

I mean, it's just clear that we lost, we missed a lot of opportunities. And I think we can do a lot to correct that if we don't rely exclusively on the same agencies that missed those opportunities, incidentally, without any accountability whatsoever. There's be no accountability whatsoever for those missed opportunities.

MR. JENKINS: Again, I think we could have done it better prior to September 11th. I'm not sure that that would have prevented the September 11th attack. I just don't know that. Putting aside the issue of whether could have or could not have identified the attack coming, how do we approach this, how do we approach it now. I notice that you used the word, can we make the system better. I think you said system.

COMMISSIONER BEN-VENISTE: That supposes a fact that perhaps is not yet in evidence.

MR. JENKINS: That is, my point is that I think there's a key word there that we want to focus on, can we make this into a system and how do we achieve that. It's not a question of can we create another entity or not create another entity. That, to me, is a tactical question, it's a how-you-get-there question.

The root, how do we create a system out of the capabilities that we have now and that we can reasonably create? We can enhance those capabilities. There's a variety of ways we can do that, one of which I have indicated already, but how do we procedurally, what is the machinery for creating a system?

If that requires a new entity, then so be it. I'm not convinced that it does yet, but I am persuaded that we need to do something to bring about a system.

COMMISSIONER BEN-VENISTE: Mr. Ranstorp, do you care to comment?

DR. RANSTORP: No, I totally agree that there has to be an integrated system. I think we're on our way there. I think though within, this is the European experience, within bearing in mind civil liberties, I think that cannot be the casualty of any system. I think protecting and preserving them is something that we all cherish.

CHAIRMAN KEAN: Dr. Sofaer, Mr. Jenkins, Mr. Ranstorp, thank you very, very much for the enlightening discussion. We are adjourned until 9:00 tomorrow morning.