MSNBC "Hardball With Chris Matthews" - Transcript

Interview

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Let"s go through the data here. You both know it. Number one, the guy paid in cash. He didn"t check any bags. His father reported that he was troubled to the United States embassy--a lot of questions about that thing. He had explosives taped to his leg. He had a syringe in his underwear. And he walked right onto that plane and did his business until a fellow passenger stopped him. No official stopped him anywhere. No official would have stopped him. He would have blown up the plane except for a fellow passenger.

This is scary stuff, Congressman. Tell me what do you make of the data we have already on this case?

REP. DAN LUNGREN (R-CA), HOMELAND SECURITY CMTE: Well, it"s easy to be a Monday morning quarterback, and I don"t want to do that. But the fact of the matter is, a lot of what we do when we"re successful is connecting the dots. When you talk about a watch list, that"s very different than the no-fly list. It"s a much larger list. And you start to compile it and then try and bring bits of information together against the names that are already there.

Now we know there was sufficient reason to deny this person the opportunity to come to America, to have a visa to be on that airplane. The questions that we"re going to ask as members of the committee are, Where are the failures in this system? How can we make sure that you connect these dots much earlier than happened in this particular case? And how do we have better inspections?

I"ve been a strong advocate of the full body scan, something that we have not put into place around the country and around the world. Hopefully, we"ll take another look at that particular device, which would have given us an opportunity to see what this person had strapped to his body.

MATTHEWS: What did you do about getting us the full body scan, Congressman? How did you go about pushing for it before this happened?

LUNGREN: Well, what I"ve tried to do is to say, Look, if some people have objections to the idea, that it"s an invasion of privacy, we ought to have something as simple as what I call a "do not care" line. That is, most people, I don"t think, would care about the invasion of privacy. They wouldn"t see one being subjected to this sort of a system. And in fact, where we"ve done pilots, over 95 percent of the people have voluntarily gone through.

For those who would not want to go through, they would go through the conventional means, but they would also be more likely to be subject to full-body pat-downs. It seems to me when we have the suggestion that the balance is not appropriate in terms of the right of privacy, we ought to realize what this kind of a detection system would give us. It would give us an opportunity to see things that cannot be found by a magnetometer.

MATTHEWS: OK...

LUNGREN: ... and also...

MATTHEWS: Did you introduce this...

LUNGREN: ... without a full body pat.

MATTHEWS: ... legislation--Mr. Lungren, did you introduce this as legislation, the requirement that we go through that greater screening?

LUNGREN: Oh, I have worked with TSA on this, and I fought against an amendment that was on the floor that prohibited us from doing this.

MATTHEWS: I see. OK.

LUNGREN: It is not something that the TSA can"t do. They have it within their authority to do it, if we will give them the proper funding to buy these machines.

MATTHEWS: Congresswoman Norton, your thoughts about these facts here? I just want to know what more could somebody have done? The father blew the whistle. The guy had no--the guy paid in cash. He had no luggage. What else? He had this syringe that would have been shown on one of these detectors, had he gone through one. He had the explosive material in his underwear. I don"t know, what do we have to do to raise a red flag? And nothing was done.

DEL. ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON (D-DC), HOMELAND SECURITY CMTE.: Chris, Dan is right about the dots. He and I have been on the committee, the Homeland Security Committee, since its inception, and we spent a lot of time during the Bush years trying to connect the dots. And it looks like we still got some dots to be connected.

And you"re right, Chris, about red flags. That"s what"s most troubling to me. The father, a very credible--a most credible, I must say, source who comes forward and reports his own son to the authorities, and that"s not a red flag, a prominent banker who says that his son has connection to Yemeni terrorists? I"m going to want to know about that.

Now, the president did the right thing. He ordered the right investigations. He didn"t panic and do some of the things we did after 9/11. But I must say, my good friend and his Homeland Security Secretary spun this into a controversy. I think people like Dan and I--and we don"t point fingers, we try not to, when it comes to homeland security--would have been content to say, OK, let"s see what happened. When you get somebody getting on television saying, Everything went well...

MATTHEWS: Well--well, let"s go watch that. You brought it up, Congresswoman. Let"s watch. Here"s the secretary of Homeland Security saying things worked as expected--in fact, the system worked. Here she is making that dreadful comment.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JANET NAPOLITANO, SECRETARY OF HOMELAND SECURITY: One thing I"d like to point out is that the system worked. Everybody played an important role here. The passengers and crew of the flight took appropriate action.

And our system did not work in this instance. No one is happy or satisfied with that. An extensive review is under way.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTHEWS: Well, as Ross Perot would say, Congresswoman, measure twice, cut once.

NORTON: Well, you know--you know, Chris...

MATTHEWS: I think that was...

NORTON: Chris, you know...

MATTHEWS: ... cutting twice and measuring once.

NORTON: The American people will forgive a lot if you say, you know, I think we have a problem here.

MATTHEWS: Yes.

NORTON: But when you look like you"re spinning it, they really turn away from you. She did the president a disservice when she did that.

MATTHEWS: You know, Congressman, I want to go over this, and I accept

everything about your efforts to try to deal with this by having people

screened properly. And I keep thinking of the fact of all the times I fly

and you fly all the time to California back and forth to do your job--all the time, we see old women or old men being taken out of their wheelchairs and having to do this Lord"s walk for about 20 yards to prove that they can walk. It"s insane. And then you hear about this guy who raises all the red flags and walks right through.

Why do we put through this--you got to take your shoes off, you got to do all this crap. And yet if a guy--well, is this really going to get down to profiling? Is that what it"s going to come down to, like they do in Israel where they have a 45-minute interview with the person and you try to figure out their politics, you try to figure out where they"re coming from and where their head"s at and hope they"ll sweat enough so you"ll know there"s trouble? I mean, do we have to go further than robotic effort, to go to human common sense in screening people? Is that where we"re going to have to head here?

LUNGREN: Well, we have adopted some...

MATTHEWS: I mean, do systems work, or do you need common sense?

NORTON: We do need common sense. And have adopted some of the processes that the Israelis have used. We use it in a more subtle fashion than they do. But the fact of the matter is, I"m concerned about what people call PC. We"re afraid of being criticized for what we do. The fact of the matter is, we don"t have the sense of urgency in this country about the threat that remains. This is a consistent, constant, intensified threat, and what we have to do is be agile enough to respond to the new manifestations of this threat.

We know that it"s not just poverty. We know that it"s not just people who are ill-educated. The most recent ones are educated people, sometimes acting in a single act but with connections to others. We have to constantly refine what we"re doing...

MATTHEWS: I know.

LUNGREN: ... and we have to try and stay ahead of these people every single step of the way.

NORTON: Look, Dan, I agree, but you know what? This is the same old problem with the watch lists and the no-fly lists. And we"ve never gotten that act together. This guy was on one list, but he didn"t kind of make it to the next list. He wasn"t even an American citizen. What does it take to get off a list?

MATTHEWS: Well, I want to know whether we even go by these robotic things like, if you"re paying in cash, if--that used to be an old way to catch drug dealers because they dealt in cash. I mean, that was the old way...

NORTON: And he paid in cash.

MATTHEWS: ... twenty years ago of catching people.

NORTON: And this guy paid in cash.

MATTHEWS: Can you catch a person how pays in cash and has no luggage?

Is that enough to say to the guy, You can"t get on the plane?

NORTON: Well...

LUNGREN: That"s not the only thing we do--that"s not the only thing we do, Chris. We add a number of different pieces of intelligence that we get on a regular basis, and we refine things on a very, very regular basis. That"s why intelligence is so important in this matter.

MATTHEWS: Yes.

LUNGREN: We utilize the intelligence.

NORTON: We say we have a layered approach, and we do. But at each level of the layer, we failed here.

MATTHEWS: You know, the problem is, I wonder whether it"s even

possible--because Congresswoman, let me ask you this. If this fellow had

given a little attitude at the airport and said, Look, I know I don"t have

I"m paying in cash, that"s how we do business in Lagos these days. I don"t have any luggage because I"m smart enough to pack light on long trips. I don"t want to have to go through luggage and getting the luggage back. And by the way, my father"s a big banker over in Lagos. Get off my case. You"d have to let him on the plane.

NORTON: No, you go to the list next.

MATTHEWS: Well, the only reason...

NORTON: You go to the list next.

MATTHEWS: ... he was on the list, though, is his father complained.

Suppose his father hadn"t complained.

NORTON: Well, but he was on the list.

MATTHEWS: Because his father complained.

NORTON: I don"t know. He may have been on the list all along...

MATTHEWS: I see.

NORTON: ... because he had Yemeni connections.

MATTHEWS: Oh, I see.

LUNGREN: Chris...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Go ahead, Congressman.

LUNGREN: Chris, this is why we have--this is why we have to have the layered approach. We use intelligence. We use the robotic approach. We use personal observation. We use police dogs. We use all of these different things because we know nothing is a fail-safe.

MATTHEWS: Right.

LUNGREN: That"s why we have to have a comprehensive approach. That"s why we have to have American people alert to the kind of suspicious activity that might take place. You might make a mistake when you say, This person looks suspicious. But we ought not to have people cowed--that is, afraid to say it. Let the authorities make those decisions.

NORTON: Chris, this man did not go through the whole body or entire body mechanisms that they have in Amsterdam. And there are reports that people coming into the United States don"t have to go through that technology. That doesn"t make much sense.

MATTHEWS: Yes. OK.

NORTON: This is a sovereign country...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Well, I feel a little better after talking to you two. Thank you very much for joining us, Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton of D.C. and U.S. Congressman Dan Lungren of California.

Coming up: Where does the United States need to fight these terrorists? We"ll ask two former CIA officers about where the real danger is. And they"ve been out in the field.

You"re watching HARDBALL, only on MSNBC.

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