Report of the 9/11 Commission

CONGRESSIONAL RECORD
SENATE
REPORT OF THE 9/11 COMMISSION

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I rise this afternoon to talk about what so many Americans are thinking about as they turn on their television today, and that is the 9/11 Commission report that is being issued by many of our former colleagues and partners in trying to address the security needs of our Nation. I am sure many Americans are going to want to know from this 9/11 report, is it going to result in us getting off our orange alert? Is it going to help us in providing better security across America?

One of the things we have to think about is the fact that this report now needs to be put into legislative action by this body. I thank the Commission, including Governor Keane, former Congressman Hamilton, and former Senator Slade Gorton, for their contribution to this report and their hard work. The voluminous report has a lot of recommendations, but I would like to call out two or three of those recommendations that are particularly important for us as a body to address when we return in September.

First and foremost is the need for us to focus on international cooperation. We in the Northwest learned that lesson very well when Ahmed Ressam came across the Canadian border with a car full of explosives on his way to LAX Airport. Many people in America know that story and know that a good customs agent was able to stop Ressam and confiscate those goods, and that act was never perpetrated on American soil. We also know after that, 9/11 did happen. So the question for us in America is, What are we going to do to make sure we have good international cooperation?

What is interesting about the Ressam case is Mr. Ressam started his efforts in Algiers, was successful in getting into France, then successful in creating a new identity and getting into Canada. Even though that was an illegal entry into Canada, he was able to remain in Canada and then create a Canadian passport and birth certificate and try to gain access to the United States.

As I said, the route he took through several countries to try to get to Port Angeles, WA, to start his journey shows the need we have in this country for international cooperation as it relates to our visa program and our visa standards. This is something we have seen a delay in in the last several years and something we need to pay particular attention to in the Senate to make sure this visa standard program gets implemented and gets implemented as soon as possible.

While we in the United States can have a visa entry program based on a biometric standard, that standard will only be as good as the standard that is then adopted by Canada and Mexico, our European partners, our Middle East allies, and various other countries around the world. By that, I mean if Mr. Ressam had entered France on a biometric standard which showed, perhaps with fingerprints or facial recognition, who Ahmed Ressam was, the various times he tried to perpetrate a false identity to get into the United States, we would be able to track that individual.

We know this is very important because we know that of the hijackers on 9/11, many of them had various trips back and forth to the United States. While we want to continue to have good international commerce with many countries and have people travel to the United States, we need a better security system with our visa standard, and we should make a top priority of getting such international cooperation based on biometrics.

I can say the same for international cooperation on port security. Washington State, being the home to many ports, needs to focus on the fact that cargo containers come in every day into the ports of Seattle, Tacoma, Vancouver, and various parts of Washington State. What we need is not to wait until the last minute for cargo containers to get into the Seattle area to find out whether they have explosives or whether the containers have been tampered with, but to have point of origin cooperation with countries all over the world to make sure that security system is deployed at the time the cargo leaves its port.

Here are two examples, one of human deployment of people coming to the United States and another of goods and services in which international cooperation is essential. That is why I take to heart the recommendation on page 20 of the 9/11 Commission report, the executive summary saying that:

Unifying strategic intelligence and operational planning against Islamic terrorists across foreign-domestic divide with a National Counterterrorism Center.

What I believe the report is saying is we have to have the cooperation of our allies and the global community in fighting terrorism and doing so in a cooperative effort if we are going to be successful in the United States.

Secondly, while I think the report emphasizes the focus of a flat organization, from my 2 years on the Judiciary Committee and review of the incidents of 9/11 through the FBI and their organization and changes that have been made to that organization, one thing that is very clear about the 9/11 report is that a flat, decentralized organization and network of information must be accomplished.

While the report does talk about consolidation and the central focus, the important thing to understand is we are facing an asymmetrical threat by terrorists. We are not facing a superpower. We are not facing a well-oiled, well-heeled organization with a lot of support that we can track, detect, and analyze on a large-scale basis; it is very decentralized, with a lot of information flowing from a lot of different cells through different parts of the international community. What is important about that is if we are going to face that asymmetrical threat and meet that challenge, having a large bureaucracy facing an asymmetrical threat of lots of cells presents a challenging problem.

That is why it is very important, as Special Agent Coleen Rowley pointed out to many of the people in the intelligence community and the FBI community, the information that existed in different FBI offices throughout America but was not shared, was not pieced together with the other intelligence information by the CIA about potential people entering and exiting the country, needs to be pieced together in a flat organization.

Critical to this report and our success is for us to monitor the new organizations and agencies, such as Homeland Security, the structure of the FBI and CIA, and any new structures coming out of the 9/11 report to make sure we are keeping a flat organization. That flat organization is about getting access to as much information as possible.

Just as the Intelligence Committee report released by my colleagues in the last 10 days showed and just as this 9/11 report shows, the third thing we need to do is make sure we use the information we acquire and put much more focus and analysis behind that. While that sounds simple and it sounds like something that can be easily forgotten, I remind my colleagues that in 1998, ADM David Jeremiah, under a CIA governance order study, was asked the question: Why did the CIA miss India's testing of a nuclear bomb? Why did we as a country not really understand that was happening? Well, the No. 1 recommendation from that report was not enough analysis, and we had a culture that was not really assessing the 21st century threats to our country.

That is a report that was done in 1998 about a particular part of intelligence, in a particular part of the world, that missed something. We had a report that basically is saying the same things the 9/11 report is saying today, that information and analysis are critical to our success on international efforts at understanding information and potential threats or use of weapons of mass destruction.

To me, it is very important that we take to heart the fact that we need more analysts, and how that analyst structure is going to work. We live in an information age. You can say that terrorists, in their decentralized structure, are going to create much more information about their prospects, their attention to different projects, their communication with cells across the globe. It is this information that we need to acquire, put together, and have analysts working on, on an ongoing basis.

It is safe to say we need a dramatic increase in the number of analysts that we need to recruit into Government, new processes to put this information into a network, and access and assess it on an ongoing basis. I believe this is going to be a very hard challenge for us in Congress because we will see it as something that an agency is assigned to do, and we will forget about the challenges that face each of these agencies as they change their culture and change their structure.

We must keep in mind we are facing a threat of a very decentralized nature. To face a threat of a very decentralized nature we must build organizations and teams of people, including analysts, who also think in a decentralized way.

The report also talks about technology and the role that technology can play. I am a big proponent of technology in this information age. Something like a biometric standard on fingerprints and identification can be helpful. The report goes into a great deal of detail about implementing those at borders, at airports, at various other facilities. Yes, I want to expedite the speed and flow of individuals in and out of the country and have the United States continue to remain a great place where people want to visit. But in adopting these technology solutions, we need to work hard, as the 9/11 report says, to make sure the civil liberties and privacy rights of individuals are protected.

The United States has its privileges. The right to privacy is one of those. So we need to work on this recommendation in the report with that in mind. I think the structure within the FBI and Homeland Security needs to have someone, as these recommendations are implemented, who can-as databases are created, as information is assessed-help create the safeguards that are necessary.

But that should not impede us from working on an international basis to make sure that information about terrorist threats is shared through numerous countries in the world, and shared on a systematic database form with the United States. That is where I believe we have been lacking since 9/11. We have had a visa program and standard that we set in the PATRIOT Act and other bills as an objective. Yet we have failed to execute those. We should use this report today to continue our sharpened focus on getting that standard implemented so we can be sure the same people, like the 9/11 attackers, are not moving in and out of the country.

This report is so critical for us now to join together on these specific recommendations. We must not continue to focus on the past but focus on what we can do to get off of orange alert. It is important that we look at international cooperation, organizations, resources for analysts, new technology, and protecting civil liberties. But as I think about this issue, I think about the significant threats we face from those asymmetrical forms. Yet the results of those could be very catastrophic. That is why we need to get this program implemented.

I look to my colleagues, when we return in September, to keep away from what now has been an analysis of the past and look forward to implementing these solutions as quickly as possible, giving Americans better security in the future.

I yield the floor.