With the urgency of war
A lot needs to be done, moving with all due speed in the face of a clear and present danger. We were unprepared for this new world war. But we were also unprepared for WWI and WWII, and indeed for Korea--and some would say for Vietnam. But Americans are adaptable. We have the capacity to refocus our resources, to reshape our policies, and to reconfigure a variety of federal agencies. We know what is at risk is not just death and destabilization but the demoralization that would come from an erosion of our domestic security and tranquillity. We are quite simply going to have to fight back and devote to this war the same attention we once gave to aggressive communism.
That is why the president's leadership, as articulated in his speech to the country, was so welcome. Our efforts must be focused on three vital fronts:
The first is protecting the framework that holds the country's economy together. We cannot guard every single vulnerable site, every public place, every bridge and tunnel. We have to set priorities (whose details need not be announced for the benefit of al Qaeda). A key is our national networks--such as electricity grids, our oil and gas pipelines, our cybernetworks, our food production and distribution, and the cross-border flow of people, cargo, and conveyances. The right level of scrutiny here will require thousands of state and local government authorities, along with the federal government, and literally millions of individuals who will have to be trained to a whole higher level of alertness. Just think of the international traffic that we took for granted. In 2000, 489 million people, 11.5 million trucks, 2.2 million railroad cars, 829,000 planes, and 211,000 vessels passed through the U.S. border inspection system, in addition to tens of millions of containers. We don't know the contents or even the senders of thousands of these multiton containers, traveling on trucks, trains, or barges. The cargo is cleared not at its arrival ports but at its final destination within the country, generally more than 10 days after the containers have gone through our borders and moved on to major industrial cities. We must develop a system that prescreens these containers before they are loaded on the ships and trucks in foreign parts. We cannot allow death to arrive in a metal box.
This is hardly an idle concern. Last October a suspected al Qaeda terrorist was found inside a container at the southern Italian port of Gioia Tauro. This container was fully equipped with food, water, and a makeshift bathroom; an aviation mechanic certificate; a laptop computer; and airport security passes--everything a terrorist would need to cross the Atlantic. This discovery sparked more inspections, which led police to several other containers similarly outfitted.
Second, the president was right in calling for key government agencies to change their modus operandi. The relevant agencies failed to coordinate and failed to put the pieces of the lethal jigsaw together. In terms of public confidence, it was the missteps and missed clues in our security agencies, especially the FBI, that were most damaging. Would better coordination have forestalled one or more of the 9/11 attacks? It's impossible to know, but clearly too many clues fell through the cracks, and there are way too many cracks.
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