Federal News Service - Hearing of the House Armed Services Committee - Implications of the Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission... - Transcript

Federal News Service

HEADLINE: HEARING OF THE HOUSE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE SUBJECT: IMPLICATIONS OF THE RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE 9/11 COMMISSION ON THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

CHAIRED BY: REPRESENTATIVE DUNCAN HUNTER (R-CA)

WITNESSES: STEPHEN A. CAMBONE, UNDERSECRETARY OF DEFENSE FOR INTELLIGENCE; VICE ADMIRAL LOWELL E. JACOBY, DIRECTOR, DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY; MAJOR GENERAL RAYMOND T. ODIERNO, FORMER COMMANDER, FOURTH INFANTRY

LOCATION: 2118 RAYBURN HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C.

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REP. TOM COLE (R-OK): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank you gentlemen for being here.

I want to put a proposition to you, Mr. Secretary, and then maybe have you respond. I think we have gone through a process where a lot of folks read the recommendations of the report, but not many people bother to read the report, just judging by the commentary that we've had over the last several weeks. When I read the report, you know, I find the failure frankly to be more attitudinal than I do organizational. You know, we did not perceive as a country the nature of the threat in front of us. We underestimated the capability of the enemy that we had. Frankly, we were probably pretty complacent about our own ability to defend in a very real physical sense our shores and our space. We saw the issue of terrorism as a law enforcement issue-some still do-seeing terrorists and terrorist incidents as crimes rather than attacks, and I think there's a very big difference. We responded to the first World Trade Center incident as a crime-not as an attack on the United States of America. So my instinct is now, having gone through 9/11, we know a lot more. We really do understand in a way, frankly, and then we had to pay for that understanding in a very bitter price, in the way that we did. And so my instinct is there's a lot more cooperation now, there's a lot more focus on the nature of the threat. There's a lot bigger realization of the danger. And that to me is a lot more important than the structural changes. As a matter of fact, I sort of agree with the statements you made earlier, that we run a big risk-or an implication of a statement-of wasting a lot of time in structural changes, some of which can be very good. But a system-had the system 9/11 Commission recommended been in place before 9/11, I don't think the result would have been frankly all that different, because I think the attitudes weren't there among the personnel. This isn't a matter of we-there was some vital clue that had we known it things would have like a light bulb gone off, and everybody would have instantly known what to do. We had a lot of education to do-as policymakers, as Congress, as a military. You know, I don't think the military was all that interested in terrorism per se in that particular period. They certainly are now. There was a lot of national learning that had to go on. I'm not sure the structure would have created that. It might have helped, might have made us a little bit better. But I'd just like you to respond to how much of this is an attitudinal problem-or was-as opposed to an organizational problem.

MR. CAMBONE: It goes in part to the question of bureaucratizing imagination, and that is hard to do. On the other hand, part of what is being looked for in these proposed reforms are the two things I tried to talk about in the beginning of my statement, which is recovering, restoring, the art of providing indicators and warning of threat or threatening developments and events. And that goes in part to your point about complacency. I mean, with the passing of the Soviet Union and the imminent threat that it posed, there was less attention paid to developing that talent, that art. And it goes in part as well to the question of whether we've got the right support mechanisms for presenting data in different formats, so you can see things differently. I mean, we tend today to do everything off our sheet of paper, and it tends to dull the imagination. So indications and warning are something we need to work on very hard.

The second thing we need to work very hard on is moving the recognition or a data piece to people who can use it, and making that happen very much more quickly than it happens today. And so if there were failures prior to 9/11 that this set of reforms would fix, maybe it's that: more attention to indicators and warnings, so people would be attentive; and, secondly, moving data more rapidly-data from the FBI to the CIA to the people who could use it.

REP. COLE: I think that would help. I would just put this, as my time concludes, as a point we ought to think about. In another lifetime I used to do a lot of political polling, and I can tell you what the American people's interest level in foreign policy and defense was in the 1990s, and I can tell you what it is today, and it is dramatically different. You know, Harry Truman at the beginning of the Cold War talked about we're going to have to scare the hell out of the American people about the Soviet Union to make them understand the nature of the threat, and to undertake the commitment that was going to take for two generations to deal with the problem. I would suggest this was as much a failure of the political leadership to educate the public at that time and to understand, as it was some sort of bureaucratic or institutional failure. Now, again, that doesn't mean we can't get better at what we do and there aren't lessons to learn. We can. But we ought to step back and invite our national political leadership-which I would include myself among-and look in the mirror as the American people and say, You know, we just didn't get it. We really did not see this coming. We thought we were pretty safe and pretty secure, and we didn't need to worry about these things anymore, and we paid a terrific price for it. I think you gentlemen have done a great price since we've paid that price in responding to it. So thank you.