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Washington, D.C. Georgetown University September 8, 2006
Secretary Chertoff: Well, thank you very much for that warm welcome and for the opportunity to address you in a very handsome hall here in what I gather is the oldest building in the campus and one in which George Washington used as the basis of his farewell to the diplomatic corps.
Provost O'Donnell, I appreciate your introduction. I want to thank Gary Schiffman, who is a former colleague at the Department of Homeland Security, for welcoming me to the university to speak.
And I'd also like to thank Daniel Byman, the Director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies, who I gather was not able to be with us here today. And of course, it's a pleasure to have colleagues from the Department, students, and friends, as well.
Today, we are gathered just a few days before the 5th anniversary of the September 11th attacks against the United States. And as we begin to think back on the events of that tragic day, we have an opportunity to look, both in terms of what we've learned and to look ahead in terms of what we know we need to do. It's appropriate to reflect on some of the steps we've already taken, and to measure the progress we have already made to protect our country and our citizens against further attacks. And of course, it's certainly worth remarking on the fact that there has not been a successful attack against Americans on American soil since September 11th.
But we also have to recognize remaining challenges and be clear about setting the priorities we need to have in place to make sure that there is not a successful attack in the years to come.
For everybody in this room and for everybody in this country, September 11th remains a defining moment in our personal lives and in the history of our country. Even today, looking back, it's difficult to comprehend the full nature of the devastation and loss of life that flowed from this premeditated and infamous act of war against innocent people from all over the world, doing nothing more than working here or visiting here in the United States; a senseless campaign of murder that resulted in the death of nearly 3,000 men, women and children of all backgrounds and all faiths.
All of us have our personal memories of that day where we each -- where each of us were, what we experienced, how we first learned about it. I can tell you, speaking for myself, I was the head of the criminal division, and from the moment that I first learned that there had been airplanes directed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, I dedicated myself, with my colleagues in the government, to tracking down those who had done us harm and who still intended to do us harm.
And even today, when I go into New York, and I look at the scar in the earth that is what remains of the physical structure of the World Trade Center, it's hard to escape that feeling of the breathtaking devastation and the infamous nature of that crime against humanity, which was the attack on the World Trade Center.
So for those who need to be reinvigorated in the struggle against terror, I suggest that as we approach this 5th anniversary, you visit the site of the World Trade Center or the Pentagon, where an airplane killed many, many of our soldiers and our defense workers, or to go out to the field in Shanksville, where the heroic passengers of United Flight 93 averted yet another attack against our nation's capital.
The fact of the matter is, no words can fully describe the measure of the tragedy of 9/11. But amid the horror of that day, we should also remember that we witnessed tremendous courage, valor, and sacrifice: first responders who gave their lives entering burning buildings, citizens who fought back over the skies in Pennsylvania, other citizens on other aircraft who picked up their cell phones and called loved ones in the last moments before those planes were turned into weapons of mass destruction. Out of the crucible of 9/11, we witnessed not only horrible evil, but also wonderful courage and virtue. And I think that we ought to consider the shining example that comes out of it that day, as well as the clear warning of what lies ahead if we do not continue to build our safety and security here in the United States and all over the world.
We've had five years to absorb the lessons of 9/11, and we have acted deliberately and decisively to reduce the risk that we will ever face another day like that infamous September morning. We've learned that we cannot be complacent in the face of terrorism. The fact is that terrorists continue to plot, even as we strike against them. That was exposed yet again this past August, when we uncovered and disrupted a potential horrible attack against airliners flying from the United Kingdom to the United States.
And we've been less successful in other parts of the world. There have been attacks against American citizens overseas, our allies and innocent civilians in London, in Bali, and in Madrid, and all over. Americans have come to understand that protecting our nation involves trade-offs. We cannot pursue the illusion of perfect security obtained at any price, but we must pursue a security that is strong, and it has to be one that is also consistent with our freedoms, our values, and our way of life.
As we begin this first decade of the 21st century, therefore, having emerged from the Cold War and the struggles of World War II, we face a new challenge that has every bit as much danger as the challenges we have faced in this country in prior decades. And we have to reorient our approach to that threat. We have to build a security system with urgency, with flexibility, and with resolve.
Now, a critical part of the President's strategy in dealing with this new threat of terror involves in taking the war to the enemy overseas -- in Afghanistan, in Iraq, all over the world -- working with our international partners to disrupt terrorist plots and to dismantle terrorist threats before they reach our own shores.
Here at home, we have to continue to work to build a unified set of effective capabilities to manage the risk to the people of this country. The Department of Homeland Security, which I am privileged to lead, was created specifically to integrate our national capabilities against all kinds of threats, whether they be acts of terror or natural hazards, or even medical hazards like pandemic flu. And the key to this integrated approach, this partnership, working with state and local governments, working with the private sector, working with our allies overseas, and most important, working with the individuals and families and communities all over the United States.
So looking back and looking forward, how do we build on our progress to date? What are the remaining challenges we have to face? And how are we going to allocate priorities among them? And what is the path we have to follow to achieve those steps that must be in place to guarantee ourselves and our families safety in the years to come?
Well, let me say, there's one critical thing we have to recognize at the threshold. We have to be focused on the most significant risks, and we have to apply our resources in the most practical way possible to prevent, protect against, and respond to manmade and natural hazards. That means we have to make a tough-minded assessment, and we have to recognize that it is simply not possible to eliminate every threat to every individual in every place at every moment. That is simply not the way life works.
And if we could achieve absolute perfect security against all threats, we would only be able to do so at an astronomical cost to our liberty and our prosperity. As the President said a couple of days ago, you need look no further than the words of bin Laden, himself, to see that he sees victory for his cause in bankrupting and destroying the countries of the West. And we cannot hand him the victory by being so hysterical and overreacting to such a great extent that we destroy our way of life in order to protect it.
That means we do have to be disciplined in assessing the threats, looking at our vulnerabilities, and weighing consequences, and then we have to balance and prioritize our resources against those risks so that we can ensure the right amount of protection for Americans in our nation without under-protecting, but also without overprotecting.
So let me ask the question: What are those things we ought to be most concerned about? Well, it seems to me that our priority has to be focusing on those possible terrorist events that pose the greatest potential consequences to human life and to the continuity of our society. At the top of that list is the threat of weapons of mass destruction. Weapons of mass destruction are weapons that, if used, would have a shattering, earth-shaking consequence for this country. And preventing the introduction and use of those weapons has to be the number one thing we attend to in the years to come.
We also must continue to guard against infiltration of this country by international terrorists, international terrorists who have the capability and the intent to cause real damage to the functioning of this country by engaging in multiple high consequence attacks on people and our economy. And the illustration of this kind of a plot is the plot of London -- that plot in London that was uncovered this past month; a plot that, had it been successful, would not only have caused the lives of -- cost the lives of thousands of people, but would have had a -- would have raised a very significant blow against the functioning of our entire system of international trade and travel.
But even as we look at these high consequence threats, we have to be mindful of something else: the potential for home-grown acts of terrorism. We have to recognize that there are individuals who sympathize with terrorist organizations or embrace theireology, and are prepared to use violence as a means to promote a radical, violent agenda.
And to engage with this emerging threat, we have to work not only across federal, state and local jurisdictions to prevent domestic radicalization and terrorism, but we have to build a new level of confidence and trust with our American Muslim community, who have to remain critical partners with us in protecting our country.
So let's look back and measure where we've come, and then let me be very clear about where we need to go and what our plan is to get there. Well, over the last five years, we've taken some very significant steps to address the threat of terrorism by closing vulnerabilities that existed five years ago on September 11th, and by creating what we call layers of security across land, sea and air.
And I think I'm going to take the opportunity today to highlight some of the new capabilities we have in place and point out what we're building for the next couple of years. These areas include screening people at the border to keep bad people out of the country; screening cargo to prevent bad things from coming into the country; protecting our critical infrastructure so that even if someone mounts an attack, we can reduce our vulnerability; sharing information so we can stop attacks before they begin; and, finally, boosting our emergency preparedness and response so that even if there were a successful attack, we could minimize the damage by acting promptly and effectively in response.
First, screening people at the border. Our number one defense against terror involves the perimeter, keeping dangerous enemies from entering the United States of America.
Five years ago, before September 11th, we had very limited tools to accomplish that mission. We had fragmented databases, biographical information to determine whether a person posed a security threat or should be allowed to enter the United States. The process, even if it worked at all, was cumbersome, inefficient, and fraught with vulnerabilities. And the proof of the pudding is in what happened on September 11th. We learned looking back that terrorists had accessed this country on repeated occasions, even though we knew who some of them were, and we weren't able to screen them from coming into the United States to execute their deadly plot.
Today, five years later, we have transformed our screening capabilities at the international ports of entry. And we've done that in order to prevent terrorists and criminals from entering the United States to do us harm. We have pulled together and unified our counter-terror databases, and we've dramatically strengthened the process we use to issue visas.
Equally important, we have implemented biometric capabilities, fingerprint-reading capabilities at all of our international ports of entry. With these new fingerprint reading capabilities, which are part of the program we call U.S. Visit, deployed all over the ports of entry at land and in the air and at sea, we can now, within seconds, positively confirm a person'sentity against their passport and against our databases by checking two-digit finger scans against watch lists and immigration records.
The result of this dramatic step forward in screening at the border is illustrated to me day in and day out when I come in to get my briefing in the morning as Secretary. Because repeatedly I hear about dangerous people who have been stopped at the border and denied entry based upon the tools we have given our border security officials five years after 9/11.
Of course, we have to worry not only about those who come in through the ports of entry, like the 9/11 hijackers, but we have to worry about those who might come in to do us harm between the ports of entry. And here again, we have made protecting our borders one of the top priorities of the Department of Homeland Security and, indeed, of the entire administration.
And we've made progress securing the miles of border, the thousands of miles of border that lie between our designated international ports of entry. We've done it by giving the men and women who do the job of patrolling the border the tools, the technology, and the resources they need to do their very important job of protecting the perimeter of this country.
Again, looking back five years ago, before 9/11, we had about 9,000 Border Patrol agents along our southern and northern border. But under the President's leadership, today we have more than 12,000 Border Patrol agents. And by the end of 2008, we will have over 18,000 agents. We will have more than doubled the number of Border Patrol between our ports of entry. And while we are waiting to recruit and train and deploy these additional Border Patrolmen and women, the President has ordered the National Guard to the border to support the existing Border Patrol agents. And that has caused a huge amplification of our capabilities in protecting this country against those who want to cross illegally to come in to do us harm.
Since 9/11, the Border Patrol has apprehended and turned away some 6 million illegal migrants trying to cross our borders. Now, I'm not saying, of course, the vast majority of those are terrorists. Quite the contrary, the vast majority of those are coming for economic reasons. But the fact of the matter is, if we can control our border and do it in an intelligent and comprehensive fashion, we can focus ourselves in continuing to raise the barrier against those who would come to this country to do us harm.
Let me tell you some other things we have done to control the space between our ports of entry. Before September 11th, we did not have the adequate bed space that we needed to detain people who came in illegally that we captured. And so a significant number of these people, even if they were caught entering illegally were released into the community -- and to no one's great surprise, never showed up again for their court appearances.
But today, by taking a disciplined and strategic approach to dealing with the crisis of illegal migration, we have completely transformed that policy. We have end