The Honorable Jane Harman
Director, President & CEO
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Washington, D.C.
Speech delivered at Town Hall Los Angeles on Tuesday, April 30, 2013
“The Second Decade After 9/11 –
Should Our Homeland Security Response Be Different?”
Hi everybody. That's perky. It's nice to see some former constituents, including Kim
(McCleary, Town Hall Los Angeles President) -- yes, she was--some former office
aides, very high-level ones--I won't reveal who you are--and some dear friends--all of
that overlaps--and some people I'm now going to get to know as I talk about something
that is pretty serious. I hope you knew you were coming for that, not just for the
cheesecake, which I ate. I recommend it. So, it's nice, it's just great to be home and
back at Town Hall Los Angeles.
My staff reminded me that I spoke here in 2005 last, when I was the ranking member of
the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, about our last effort to defeat terrorism and
strengthen homeland security. Eight years later, in my view, we're getting a lot of the
tactics right, and I support a lot of those tactics, but we still have no overall strategy.
And without that--and this is what I want to talk about today--we're never going to win
the argument with the kid in rural Yemen who's deciding whether to strap on a suicide
vest.
At the U.S. Senate hearing on drones a couple weeks ago, the most compelling
testimony came from the Yemeni writer and activist Farea Al-Muslimi. When he was a
kid, Farea won a U.S. State Department scholarship to an exchange program to build
understanding between Americans and Muslim countries. He lived for a year with an
American family in California, of course, and described that period as the best of his life,
when he learned about American culture, managed the high school basketball team,
and went trick-or-treating on Halloween. He said that what those in his village, his
Yemeni village, knew about the U.S, was based on the stories he told when he
returned. As he said, when he testified, "The friendships and values I experienced and
described to the villagers helped them understand the America that I know and love."
But the week before his testimony, a U.S. drone strike on his village turned most of
those same residents against America.
When I was at the Herzliya Security Conference in Tel Aviv last month, a thoughtful
Israeli academic named Boaz Ganor described the dilemma well. "There's often a
contradiction between dismantling the capability of terrorists and removing their
motivation. Doing the former," he said, "can create a boomerang effect." And we all
know what happens with boomerangs. In a recent interview, (U.S. Army) General
Stanley McChrystal, who you all know was the former commander of the International
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Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan and also the Joint Special Operations
Command discussed what he learned during his roles in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In Iraq, he said he first question was, where is the enemy? As things evolved, his
question became, who is the enemy? And then, what is the enemy trying to do? And
finally, why are they the enemy? The catechism is revealing, but not surprising. The
tactic of taking out bad guys may ultimately create more of them. Without a strategy and
a clear legal framework around our counterterrorism tactics, they can become
inadvertent recruitment tools--think Gitmo, a very timely subject since it was addressed
by President Barack Obama this morning in a press conference. My version of this is
playing whack-a-mole will not win the argument with the next generation of potential
terrorists.
So, how does that apply to the last few weeks? 24/7 coverage of the Boston Marathon
bombing and the 13-hour filibuster by newly-minted Tea Party Libertarian Senator Rand
Paul has finally helped the American public tune in, at least to the conundrum I'm talking
about. We need town halls all over America to air the issues, so listen up. Looking back
on my nine terms in Congress--that would be 119 dog years--I'm glad you're smiling--I
give myself mixed marks on this subject, and you heard I certainly had an up close and
personal view of it.
As ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, I had an extraordinary
opportunity to learn about our national security secrets through the Gang of Eight
process--that is a process where the four leaders, Democrats and Republicans in both
houses, two each, and the leaders of the intel committees, two each--that's eight--get
briefed on our innermost secrets, usually in the situation room in the White House.
When I was briefed on the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques in 2003, just
after I became ranking member, I wrote a classified letter asking whether there had
been White House guidance about this, and warning the administration not to destroy
any videotapes made of the use of the techniques. My letter has since been
declassified. It was never answered substantively, and I assume you all know the
videotapes were destroyed. But I'm proud that even at that early moment, I wrote it, and
raised the right questions.
On the other hand, I was briefed on the codename program now known as the Terrorist
Surveillance Program, TSP. I was assured over and over again that it complied fully
with law. However, following undisclosed, unauthorized disclosures about TSP by The
New York Times in 2005, President (George W.) Bush declassified its existence, and
experts I could finally consult clarified for astonished me that the assurances that the
program was legal referred to the Justice Department memos written about it, not the
applicable statute. I was stunned, and it took three years to amend the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act to put the program fully under law.
I am proud of my own role co-authoring the 2004 Intelligence Reform Law. That
bipartisan legislation refashioned the intelligence community's 1947 business model to
create a joint command across America's 16 intelligence agencies. The experience
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allowed me to forge a strong friendship with Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins,
who remains one of my dearest friends to this day. By collaborating across party lines
and across the capitol, and my sharing the credit--just think about that for a minute--we
showed that big issues can be addressed and good policy can be developed by the
United States Congress. I have to repeat that, because none of you believes that. Big
issues can be addressed, and good policy can be developed by the United States
Congress. Sadly, the experience is too rare, and actually almost nonexistent these
days.
As threats, technologies, and tactics have evolved, the law has not kept up. Before he
left the White House for the CIA, John Brennan reportedly compiled a highly classified
playbook, a set of standards to guide our counterterrorism actions. I haven't seen it yet,
but whatever it says, it's a necessary short-term fix. In the long-term, Congress needs to
own the game and insist on transparency and legislative limits. Using new tools,
particularly lethal ones, without public debate or clear legal authority, is a mistake, and
as the lawyers here would put it, a slippery slope. We need a comprehensive
counterterrorism strategy across the U.S. government. Disparate tactics with varied
consequences will not win us any friends--we've lost quite a few, by the way--and will
not ultimately help reduce threats against the United States. We've seen this movie
before. I was working the Carter White House when Congress FISA--that's the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act--in 1978, and created the House and Senate Intelligence
Committees. That framework worked really well until 9/11. After that, and let's all
understand how we all felt after that, the Bush White House leaned in and asserted
executive power, which essentially cut out Congress. I was serving there, as you know,
until 2011. I have heard all the arguments that the President is more uniquely positioned
from an institutional perspective to exercise dexterity as it relates to national security.
However, to remind, Congress is constitutionally and structurally capable of taking the
lead on laying down the ground rules.
So, what should our strategy look like? For starters, I think we need to review the
operational framework for new declarations of armed conflicts or attacks if a group
poses a sustained and organized or imminent threat to the U.S. or its citizens. Congress
must take the lead in doing this. A full debate about this framework will be crucial, and
likely painful, but without it, we have no hope of addressing the concerns of both sides.
Then, we must determine what laws must be amended, and if new ones must be
enacted. The drawdown in Afghanistan, the decimation of core Al-Qaida leadership, the
horizontal affiliation and organization of Al-Qaida membership organizations, the
explosion of drone technology across the world, suggests that the U.S. can and must
reevaluate our counterterrorism policies and strategy starting now. We need clear rules
of the road.
But there's more--at least I think there's more. As technology and threats evolve, we
also need to recognize that there is no such thing as 100 percent security. So, as
businesses in this room understand, we need to focus on managing risk. Anne
Applebaum made a great point in The Washington Post a week or so ago about the
Tsarnaev brothers. She thought they're a lot less like the 9/11 attackers, and a lot more
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like the two bombers of London or the train bombers of Spain. In other words, they're
pissed-off--yes, that's an intelligence term, no kidding--immigrants who resemble those
in Europe, a risk very hard to manage.
A 2012 survey showed that 57 percent of Americans in urban areas believe that
occasional acts of terrorism are the new norm. In fact, Mike Hayden, who was formerly
director of the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) and the National Security Agency, calls
this the “new normal.” That means people from all types of backgrounds, and not just
Muslims, could fit the profile of the Tsarnaev brothers and could be radicalized online. In
2007, while still in Congress, I sponsored the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown
Terrorism Prevention Act--it's a mouthful--which passed the House twice. It would have
created a multidisciplinary commission to study the cases, the causes of radicalization
across gender, race, and ethnicity. But when it made it to the Senate, civil liberties
groups attacked it, even though it was just a multidisciplinary commission to make
recommendations to Congress. They attacked it as an unfair intrusion into our civil
liberties. I think that was unfortunate.
The idea was to address the gray area which we need to understand in order to
manage risk better. Gray area is that little connection between someone who has
radical beliefs, which are protected under the 1st Amendment of our Constitution, but
who changes from a believer into someone willing to carry out acts of violence. The
intervention needs to happen right there at that line before the violent acts occur. And
we've been actually pretty good, law enforcement in this country, pretty good at finding
that line and stopping most of the intended homegrown terror attacks against us during
the past years.
We still don't know everything about the Boston bombings, but we believe that these
guys essentially, maybe with a little help from a visit back home, were radicalized on the
internet. Apparently, at least according to what the younger brother said, motivating
factors were Iraq and Afghanistan, which have become B-roll for the recruiting videos. I
saw "How to Build a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom." I read "How to Build a Bomb
in the Kitchen of Your Mom" in Inspire Magazine three years ago, and I knew
immediately that this was internet guidance that these kids probably used. Inspire is
now in its 10th edition. It's written in colloquial English, and the 10th edition, which you
can access on the internet, encourages homegrown terrorists to commit jihad and to do
small attacks on U.S. soil.
So, what is the way forward? Beyond a narrative and a strict legal framework, we need
a whole of government approach, where the use of diplomacy, development, and
kinetics are all assessed against what the problem is. That is what Joe Nye (Joseph
Nye, Jr.), a Harvard professor, means by smart power. It's hard to be optimistic,
because sequestration is whacking our budget, both for the State Department and the
Defense Department. Congress appears incapable of a serious review of the
authorization to use military force, the statute I mentioned that has become the basis for
all kinetic actions everywhere in the world. It was passed right after 9/11 to authorize
attacks in Afghanistan against the Taliban, but few of us who voted for it imagined it
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would become this larger than life statute that authorizes actions both President Bush
and President Obama have decided to take.
But, there are bright spots. The response in Boston was nothing short of magnificent. I
loved the crowds cheering law enforcement, and the pitch-perfect memorial to the
fallen. It showed American resilience, something much less evident in prior terror
events. Maybe that's peculiar to Boston, which is a tough town full of immigrants and
smart students, but my guess is that if this happened in LA--and I hope it never does-we would stand tall too.
In LA, we've thwarted a number of potential attacks. One of the early ones was in my
old congressional districts. The Torrance (California) Police Department figured out that
a string of gas station robberies must be about something else, they must have been to
raise money for something. And so, when a warrant was secured to search the
apartment of one of the robbers, it uncovered a wealth of military-style equipment and
maps of local military recruiting centers and Jewish community centers. And so a trial
was held, these guys were convicted, and they're serving long sentences safely in U.S.
jails--again, something we are capable of doing. There have been other successes too-some that can't still be made public.
So, I hear we have a few students in the room who are still in high school. To you, you
are growing up in a very different time from mine. Yours is an interconnected world
where somebody anywhere can invent a billion-dollar business, but somebody
anywhere else can become radicalized and engage in the senseless cruelty of the
Boston Marathon bombers.
When I was a sophomore at University High in Santa Monica, I attended the 1960
Democratic Convention and witnessed the nomination of John Kennedy for president.
That's what got me hooked on politics. Many of you, or I think there are two of you here,
may already be hooked. And you need to design and live the narrative for our country's
future. The goal is, as I said at the outset, to convince that kid in the boonies of Yemen
not to strap on a suicide vest. He or she needs to believe that America offers
opportunity, the rule of law, tolerance for all races, religions, and orientations. It will be
up to you to make sure we really do, and that your counterparts in Yemen believe we
do. The narrative your generation creates will have a lot to do with whether our world
turns out better or worse. So get to it. Can we make America better? Yes, we can.
Thank you very much.
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