PANEL III OF A HEARING OF THE NATIONAL COMMISSION ON TERRORIST ATTACKS UPON THE UNITED STATES

SEN. SCHUMER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I very much appreciate the opportunity to be here and the work that you are doing. I want to just say two things preliminarily about people in this room. First, when I look up at the panel here, I know about half of you personally, and others not personally -- more than half personally -- it gives me confidence. And I want to say that to both the families who pushed so hard for this and for the American people. This is a Class A group of people. Every one of them has a reputation for honesty, for thoroughness, for integrity, and I think we can have a lot of faith in the results of what this panel does based on the membership of the panel. So I thank you for serving your country at a time of real need.

Second, I do want to thank the families who pushed so hard. I don't recognize everybody here, but I know we have someone from the Petrocelli family, and the day we read all the names on the first anniversary, I was with Mr. Petrocelli's widow, learned all about him. We have the Barkow family here. And as well we have Ms. Gutwillick (sp), who lost four employees and has made this sort of a crusade. There are probably other family members here, too, that I don't see, but I thank them for coming.

You know, we know, that without the efforts of the families, this panel wouldn't have happened. And it's a noble thing, when you lose a loved one, instead of simply cursing the darkness, to do something to correct, to change, to improve. It's a hard thing to do, because the hole in your heart never goes away and you're not as strong maybe as you once were.

And so I want to commend the families who are here and all of those who really made this panel happen by their dedication, by their sincerity, and by their spirit of generosity to make sure that what happened to their loved ones doesn't happen, as best we can, in the future. So I thank both groups for being here on each side of our little table today.

I also want to thank my colleagues. We've worked together as a team, Democrat, Republican, from the tri-state area to do the best for our community after this horrible blow occurred. And we've accomplished some things and we have a long way to go.

Let me just say that, you know, the bottom line of this panel is simple, and I want to just add to something my colleague, Senator Corzine, said. If we were just -- if this panel were just constituted to find blame, it might make a few people feel good but it wouldn't be doing its mission.

The reason we're finding out what went wrong is so we can correct it in the future. And the great resistance to forming this panel befuddled me. A nation that is unwilling to confront truth, they almost always fail. They almost all tend to be secret societies, dictatorships, where the truth is abhorred.

We're a grand and great democracy, and the fact that we are seeking this truth is a testament to the strength of this country. And I just wish it had happened a little quicker, and I never understood the resistance. I never understood the resistance. But I think, again, that is gain said by the strength of this panel.

Now, the bottom line is that to me there are so many things that this panel can do; I don't know how you're going to deal with all of them. Obviously information -- why all the little signals beforehand didn't add up into a big comprehensive picture that we could see. We've changed in the way we're dealing with information.

Yesterday I met with the leaders of this new agency in Homeland Security, TTIC, which coordinates information from all the intelligence agencies. I guess we'd like to know from you -- and this is more normative -- will this TTIC do the kinds of things that weren't done before 9/11? Will it work? Do we have to change the structure?

In other words, I guess if I had a message for the panel, be as prospective as possible. Look what happened in the past, but give us some recommendations. You know, the war on terrorism is not going to be over in two or three years. In a certain sense, our society is where we were in 1946. In '46 we had beaten the Germans and Japanese. The average American's -- you know, their view was, "Let's put our feet up on the table, relax and forget the rest of the world."

And all of a sudden we see this huge Russian monolith staring over our shoulder, and we don't know how to react. And we make a whole lot of wrong turns at the beginning -- McCarthyism in the '50s, Vietnam in the late '60s. And finally we figured it out, and praise God, we vanquished communism.

We're at the very beginning now, and I think we all have to approach this with a bit of humility. Nobody knows what to do. The only people I resent are not the people who disagree with me, but people who think they have all the answers, because no matter how smart we are, both in our own minds and with computers able to assemble all this information, we don't have in an experience pool to know how to vanquish terrorism, which is a simple phenomenon, simple in describing it, which is that technology empowers small groups of people to do terrible and evil things which they couldn't do even 10 years ago. You can be in a cave in Afghanistan and be on the Internet if you have a wireless connection and learn as much about America as any of us know.

And the sad fact of the matter is that all the people in this room, all of us were bitten by an evil virus and decided to devote the next five years of our lives fanatically and evilly to figuring out how to do terrible damage to America in implementing it. The odds are too high we could succeed. We need answers on how to stop this.

And in terms of information and the failures of information, but more importantly on how we can pick up the signals, tie them into the big picture so that the norm is to find out something before it happens as opposed to the lucky aberration. We need your help on that and we need to know about coordination, coordination among federal agencies, coordination between the federal agencies and the local agencies. I think that's really important.

I'd like your advice on whether this new trilogy system that the FBI has set up will not make the same mistakes that their information systems had in the past. I've spoken to the director and all the people he's put in. They put great stock in it. Will it work? None of us want to be back here five years from now and say it didn't and something else happened and we should have known about it.

Other things that I hope you'll look at, and that is how we deal with the openness of our borders, how we keep those and maintain those open borders, and at the same time prevent bad people who want to do terrible damage to us from coming in. Again, it seems to me a lot of that can be answered by technology. Are we doing enough?

I don't know, again, if this is your domain, but one of the great things we're debating in America is the push and pull between liberty and security. How much change do we need there? There are some on the left who say make no change. I don't agree with them. You have to change in a changing world. There are some on the right who say we can't afford any of our precious liberty or we give up too much of it. They're wrong too.

Where's the balance? A dispassionate, intelligent panel like yourselves might give us -- you're not going to solve every one of these problems, but you might help us as we begin on this new path, protecting the world and America from terrorism, what directions we should go in and what kind of things we should do.

So when I think about it, the task before you is awesome, not in the way my 14-year-olds use it, but in a biblical way. The angels, in awe of God, trembled before him. The task is awesome. It's huge. You're not going to answer every question. We shouldn't expect it. But I think you can help us the way no group in America can, because you're dispassionate, you are intelligent, you don't have any ax to grind. I know none of you do.

And so I just urge you on in your mission and pledge, in my small way, whatever cooperation that you need. Thank you.