Secretary Chertoff: I want to thank Tom and David for bringing us all here together. I want to thank David for that very fine introduction. Usually, you don’t get to hear an introduction like that until you’re being buried. It reminds me of the scene in, I think it’s Huckleberry Finn, where I think it’s – Tom Sawyer comes back and they think he’s been lost in a flood and he hears these wonderful things said about him. And that’s one of those rare times like this where you get to hear nice things said about you.

I do want to say that CSIS and David, in particular, have been outstanding in trying to put before the public and before Congress and decision-makers a very thoughtful and tough-minded analysis of some very challenging policy issues. And I really appreciate his work. I think as we develop the field of homeland security and the doctrine and the theory of what we’re doing, having good, thoughtful policy discussion – recognizing these are very difficult issues, and that they don’t lend themselves to bumper stickers or political slogans – that kind of thoughtful discussion is very important. And CSIS has been a leader in making sure that we have a balanced, intellectually honest, and thoughtful view of some of these major, major contentious issues that we have before us.

I also want to thank the panelists who are going to be following, for discussion, this critical issue. You know, in some ways, the discussion of IED threats is the discussion of terrorism because although we can conceive of a terrorist attack that would be focused on a biological infection or some kind of a chemical spray, the reality is the vast majority of terrorist attacks are conducted with bombs. And of those, the vast majority are improvised explosive devices. They’re not pre-existing manufactured bombs that would be used by a military force.

And so it’s not surprising that the challenge of dealing with IEDs is one that is a global challenge, whether it is in the war zone in Iraq or Afghanistan, or in Europe where the Germans recently rolled up a plot to use peroxide-based IEDs to cause damage in Germany, or in Britain where we’ve seen an aborted effort earlier this summer to use vehicle-borne IEDs to cause damage in London, or whether it’s the concern we have in this country about IEDs. And of course we all remember the bombing of Oklahoma City, which was in fact an IED. So the very essence of what we do in fighting terrorism in a way is a challenge to the issue of IEDs.

And that’s why I’ve got a little display I’d like to put up here because I do think it illustrates and puts in context the whole Question of how we look at IEDs. It basically examines the spectrum – I think we’ve handed this out – going from left to right. And I hasten to add that the left and right have nothing to do with politics; it’s just the directional flow of the spectrum. But you’ll see that really the way of dealing with IEDs is a recognition that we have many different points in which we can counter an IED threat.

In some ways, it’s the expression “left of boom” that captures and articulates this concept; that before we actually have the explosion, there are a series of intervention points, when if we can prevent something from happening, we can stop that boom from taking place.

That begins with deterring and incapacitating those who obtain the funds for IEDs, the development of the organization that’s going to manufacture and plant the IED, intercepting the gathering and provision of materials for the IED. And then as we move closer to boom along the spectrum from left to right, we get into the actual detection and disruption of planning of attacks, the on-site blocking of the detonation of a bomb. And then of course, if worse comes to worse and we do have boom – the bomb goes off – our ability to manage and mitigate the consequences does have a major impact in terms of at least reducing the amount of damage and the amount of impact that that bomb does have on innocent people. And finally, there is attribution, which is our ability to go back and find those who caused it.

The reason I lay this spectrum out for you – and I think a lot of you have the handout – is because it’s easy to view the issue of IED prevention in a very narrow focus; to look only at the issue of what do we do on site to prevent people from actually bringing in the bomb and detonating it. But actually if you look at – there we go – if you look at the whole spectrum, you see we have many, many points of intervention where we can stop an IED well before we arrive at the scene where the bomb is being delivered.

And much of what we’re trying to do is push that effort to counter the IED as far left as possible: interfering with the obtaining of funds; stopping the organization from developing; preventing people from coming into the country if there are operatives from outside who are going to be the ones who actually manufacture and deliver the bomb; finding ways to disrupt the manufacture of the bomb; making it harder to accumulate the materials that would go into a bomb; making it hard to move a bomb, once it’s manufactured, into the site where it’s going to be detonated; and ultimately giving us the ability to detect and defuse the bomb if it’s delivered on site.

So I would say that spectrum is something you all ought to bear in mind as you consider the issue of the IED threat. Now I won’t talk about all of those issues. I’ll be focused more at the kind of middle of that spectrum in this conversation. It would be a mistake not to recognize that the more we can do left of boom earlier in the spectrum, the less we’re going to have to do as we get closer to boom.

A second general observation I’d like to make is, this is not just a federal problem. This is a problem that takes place at all levels of government, state and local. And also, a lot of the role that has to be played in dealing with IEDs is going to be carried out by the private sector. And that’s because, certainly when it comes to building the architecture of protection but also when we talk about the issues of controlling materials that could be the ingredients of bombs, the private sector is going to have to play a major role in that. And how we integrate the private sector with various levels of government in this enterprise is one of the key challenges for Homeland Security as we move forward.

The third element I’ve got to emphasize is the importance of intelligence. Basically, everything we do in the area of prevention is a trade-off. The more precise the information we have about the source of a threat, the narrower and more focused our intervention is to prevent the threat. That results in reduced disruption and reduced inconvenience to the vast majority of people, and a much more efficient use of our resources to prevent bad things from happening.

When we don’t have intelligence and when we don’t have information, we have to operate in a much more generalized and, dare I say, blunderbuss fashion. We have to sweep more broadly because we don’t know specifically what we’re targeting. That means we have to intercept and engage with more people, including more innocent people. We have to take broader counter-measures that will result in more inconvenience and more general disruption to our way of life. That’s why the better we hone our intelligence, the better we are in having a focused, less disruptive and less costly intervention to prevent an IED from detonating.

That’s one of the reasons why I argue that people who resist intelligence-gathering are often seeing a false trade-off between intelligence collection and security on the one hand, and privacy on the other. I believe that the more focused our intelligence gathering is, the more we can respect the privacy and the way of life of the vast majority of people because we can be very targeted in what we do.

The final thing I want to point out in terms of kind of general observations is the importance of public observation and what I would call public networking in terms of countering the IED threat. It is not an accident or, frankly, not a surprise that many of the plots that have been disrupted over the last few years have been disrupted because individual citizens noticed an anomaly and contacted the authorities.

Earlier this summer, the disruption of the plot to set off bombs in London and Glasgow began with an ambulance driver in London who saw something funny about the way a car was parked outside a nightclub and notified the police. Now that is not government detection, it is not a sensor on every corner, it is not some magic piece of technology. What it is, is the fact that ordinary citizens looking around, being alert, and not being embarrassed to speak up actually are a force multiplier for protecting us against IEDs.

I can go back to 2001, when Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was trying to light his shoe on an airplane. And that seems a little comical sometimes, but let me tell you, had he succeeded in lighting the shoe, the bomb would have gone off and would have caused enormous damage to the plane with a very high likelihood that the plane would have actually been destroyed and crashed with a substantial loss of life. Again, it is the intervention of people and ordinary citizens that is a key element in this strategy.

So, with that, let me try to focus a little bit more on some specific elements of what we are focused on, particularly in the middle of the spectrum. And one theme that is going to be repeated throughout all of the discussion that I have is this is about risk management; it is not about risk elimination.

I find that a lot of the debate we have about countermeasures tends to fall into one of two extreme categories. One category is, how come we don’t have a hundred percent protection; why can’t we guarantee that there won’t be an IED, and aren’t we a failure because we can’t do that? And the other end of the spectrum is, how come we want to regulate business? You know, we’re destroying prosperity, we’re destroying the economy, it’s over-regulation. It’s quite obvious both of those perspectives are fundamentally incompatible, and either one of them is actually unsustainable. And I’ll give you a concrete example on each end.

One of the challenges that we face is peroxide-based explosives, which are a little harder to detect than nitrogen-based explosives. And we are constantly working – you probably saw a story in the paper yesterday about how we continually challenge our screeners to look for smaller and smaller component parts of detonators, and smaller and smaller elements of what might be built into a bomb, to see if we can run these components by them when they go through the screening process. And we test to failure. The example I use is what they do in the aircraft industry when they roll out a new jet, a new airliner. They put it through maneuvers and they stress it in the air environment in a way that no sane pilot ever would do when you have passengers on board, but that’s how you see what the limit is and that helps you to prepare.

So some people say, well, why can’t you have a perfect way of banning these things and preventing bomb parts from being smuggled on board? I do have a perfect way. If I were to order that no one can bring any hand luggage on an airplane, that would be a hundred percent guarantee against someone sneaking a bomb on board in their hand luggage. And if I went further and said there has to be a strip search for every person getting on a plane, I could guarantee they’re not going to bring any bomb components on.

That is a hundred percent solution. That is an unrealistic solution, it is a solution I don’t think a sane person would advocate, but that is, in some sense, a perhaps slightly exaggerated but not terribly exaggerated example of what you would need to do to have a 100 percent guarantee against something. Likewise, we could ban peroxide. We could make it illegal to manufacture sub-peroxide, but there would be many very, very important and useful functions that we would lose if we were to do that.

On the other end are those people who don’t want to have any regulation. Their view is, anything is too much. And there I would say, again, that seems to me to be not only a recipe for insecurity, but actually quite bad for business as well, because the fact as we all know it is, if a failure to regulate – an undue failure to regulate led to a chemical plant being blown up in the middle of a city and there were drastic and horrible consequences, the resulting reaction, both from a liability standpoint and a probably over-regulation standpoint, would be far worse for business than some judicious regulation up front, to make sure that we are attending to the risk in a reasonable way and reducing it in a reasonable way.

This is about making investments and making preparations before the emergency happens, something that we’re, frankly, not always very good at doing in this country. We tend to wait until the emergency and then we kind of overreact. My suggestion here is – and I think smart businessmen see this – we ought to do some judicious regulation up front to minimize – not eliminate, but minimize the risk so we can do it in the coolness of the period before something happens rather than in the heat after a disaster occurs.

With those basic concepts laid out, let me take you briefly through some of what we are doing as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s bomb prevention and IED prevention strategy. We’ve been working on this now for a couple of years; it is a very high priority. I think we have made dramatic strides all across that spectrum from left to right on – I think many of you know that what we are doing and what other agencies are doing will very soon be memorialized in some national-level planning documents, including a Homeland Security Presidential Directive. But we haven’t waited for the paperwork. The paperwork is really going to be what institutionalizes and memorializes what we have put into effect in the real world, because my concern, frankly, is not words, it’s deeds and actions. And that’s what we’re about.

Let me begin by talking about prevention. And again, just to remind you and put a little place-holder in, I believe the very worst IED attack in terms of casualties, or certainly one of the worst, in Iraq was a casualty – an attack triggered by an individual named al-Banna – I think his first name was Hassan al-Banna – a couple of years ago in Iraq, with about 124 people being killed as a consequence of a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device detonating. We know the perpetrator because we lifted his fingerprints off the steering wheel of the VBED that detonated.

Why did we do that? How do we know what his fingerprints were? Because, amazingly enough, he tried to get into the United States a couple years earlier. And it was our capability of targeting him as a potential risk that resulted in him being put into secondary, Questioned, and then the officer at O’Hare who did the Questioning refused him admission to the country. But we did get his fingerprints. And that’s how we know this is the same individual who detonated a VBED a couple years later in Iraq. That is really the left of the spectrum. What that is, is using intelligence and analysis toentify