by Dennis Smith
I could see that Rudy hadn’t fully realized the impact he was having on the nation. He had no idea of all the press on television. He was living in the zone, or almost as if he had tunnel vision. As we were walking toward the church, people were applauding and cheering, which seemed to genuinely surprise him.
Later that afternoon I worked up the nerve to go over to Jimmy Boyle’s house to pay my respects for Michael. And Jimmy made it easy. I walked in the door, and it was all graciousness—not, Here’s another politician coming in, and that kind of thing. Jimmy’s role was to keep everybody contained, but he did so in as lighthearted a frame as possible. He was speaking to everybody, introducing everyone. It was almost like the classic Irish wake that you read about.
I talked to Jimmy and he had told me he had seen the first plane hit that day and then thought about the first World Trade Center bombing. He remembered that the terrorists had taken refuge in a camera store on Broadway. So Jimmy thought how crazy it would be—and he was going to make a citizen’s arrest—if they were there again, hiding out. On 9/11 he actually walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and headed to that camera store, but just as he got to Broadway, the South Tower came down.
About a month later I went back to Ground Zero with some of the 9/11 families. I saw all the destruction again, partial buildings, fallen and bent steel, and that unforgettable smell in the air. I didn’t even realize that the buildings had pancaked. I just couldn’t imagine . . . where did it all go? Think about the combined two hundred stories of these two buildings, and suddenly there’s nothing there, just bits and pieces. How could this ever be put back together? It was like [pictures of] places you see in Germany after World War II or Hiroshima in Japan.
They didn’t create the Homeland Security Committee until after 9/11, so it officially began in the next congressional session, in January of 2003. Though it’s called a select committee, it is not a permanent one. None of the old-timers wanted it; none of the institutional people wanted it. Why? Because if you create a new committee it takes power from other committees. I was way down on [Speaker of the House] Denny Hastert’s list, and not even in the top half when they set it up. What Hastert thought to do to win over the recalcitrant was to put the chairmen of all the powerful committees on the Homeland Security Committee. He said, “That way they’ll work with the select committee.” Instead, all they did was sabotage it and spend the next two years not showing up for votes, and going out of their way to weaken every bill. It became, at best, like a debating society for two years.
At the end of 2004, though, Hastert became far more serious about it. He made it a permanent committee; cut its size in half, with twenty-eight or twenty-nine members instead of fifty or sixty, and threw everybody off who was a chairman of any other committee, seeing them as obstructionists. I became chairman of the Emergency Preparedness Subcommittee. I figured that was the one best in tune with New York, to be more aware of the needs of the firefighters and cops, to make sure the preparedness money was coming in, and to ensure that training would be available. And then President Bush appointed the then chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, Chris Cox of California, to be head of the SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission]. So there’s an opening, and I decided to run for chairman, even though I was fifth down on the Republican side.
In September of 2005 I was elected chairman of the committee. Republicans lost control in ’06, and so I was the ranking member from ’07 until January of 2011; then it became a Republican Congress again in 2010 and I was reelected as chairman. During my first term as chairman, which lasted only fourteen months, we did pass the port security bill, and a chemical plant security bill, and restructured FEMA. Also, I was very involved in the Dubai Ports legislation, and I stopped that deal. The Dubai Ports company was going to be given contracts to run major ports in the U.S., and I was concerned about lines for al Qaeda.
At the time of September 11, 2001, I was on the International Relations Committee and the Financial Services Committee. I was very involved in the Irish peace process, and also in Bosnia on the side of the Muslims. I thought that our government had not been doing enough to protect the Muslim community in Bosnia and Kosovo from persecution. Financial Services is always important because of New York’s financial industry, and International Relations is where I gained so much insight into our security problems, which is also the reason I supported McCain in 2000.
As of now I’m still on the Financial Services Committee, and the Intelligence Committee, too, where I’ve been since June of 2009, but that could change, because it is strictly appointed by the speaker. I’m the only member of Congress who’s on both the Homeland Security and the Intelligence committees. The Intelligence Committee gives me a clear view from outside ; Homeland Security is more inside out. The two together really complement each other, and you see how really dangerous the world is. How at any given time we have to worry about something coming from al Qaeda. We have to worry about things we think we know about, and even more than that, we have to worry about what we don’t know about yet.
I did not see a real attack coming before 9/11, but I did feel it was a dangerous world. After the Iron Curtain came down the general opinion in America was that foreign policy was no longer important, and the United States was safe. But I just saw continuing problems, so I put a lot of work into International Relations. But again, not as far as al Qaeda.
If you go back to the 2000 election, the closest election in our history, I don’t think there was a word said about terrorism. We did obviously miss the 1993 statement at the World Trade Center. When you do look at the bombings of the African embassies, when you look at the bombing of the USS Cole, and even before that the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia and the marine barracks in Lebanon, there definitely was a planned Islamic movement, and we didn’t take it seriously enough.
One thing I see with these plots is that they seem to be in motion: people traveling to Pakistan, people going to tribal areas, a lot of contact and transmissions back and forth from suspicious individuals, and you almost never get clear and focused intelligence saying that, for instance, on October 11 we’re going to attack a specific building or target. It’s always just bits and pieces all over the place. It’s been fascinating to watch some of these plots coming to fruition and then have the plotters arrested at the last minute. What’s unsettling is when you follow one of these and suddenly everyone involved disappears off the face of the earth. That could mean that the plan has been called back, or there was no plan and we were wrong in the first place. Or that this is now an operation, and we don’t know where the people are, and that’s terrifying. Also, I think it requires a real change in mind-set for the police and FBI to realize that maybe 999 out of 1,000 plots, or so-called plots, that they follow end up going nowhere. Cops are used to solving a case and locking the perpetrator up, but most of these terrorist investigations end up going nowhere. You have to follow everyone all the way through, and that’s so hard. It’s going to be a real challenge for leadership to keep everyone focused, because the one you don’t follow is the one that’s going to happen.
Since 9/11 the big fear has been being attacked from overseas. We’ve done a good job of stopping that, and we’re much stronger now than we were then. Al Qaeda is adapting too, and now they are using people living in this country as well as those living in France and, especially, in England. They are finding people living in these countries legally who have no known involvement with terrorism and are under the radar screen. In 2009 we had Najibullah Zazi, the guy who had traveled to Afghanistan to be trained as an explosive bomber. Zazi was born in Afghanistan, but he was living here legally—raised in Queens, went to high school in Queens, had a hot dog stand or something downtown, no criminal record at all. And yet he came within days of a massive deadly attack on the subway system. Faisal Shahzad, the guy who brought a car bomb to Times Square in May of 2010, had actually become a U.S. citizen. He traveled back and forth to Pakistan a lot. He was actually questi
oned, but he gave all the right answers, and there was no reason to be suspicious of him at all.
At the time of the 9/11 attacks I cannot say that I knew the Muslim community very well, yet I probably had a closer relationship with it than almost anyone else in Congress. I was very involved with Bosnia and felt that Muslims were being oppressed there. I sided with them, and it hurt me politically that I supported Clinton on that issue. I thought that Pakistan had a better argument than India about Kashmir. I had spoken at the Islamic Center of Long Island a number of times. The president of that mosque has a daughter who interned at my office wearing full Muslim headgear. I got a human rights award from the mosque. I went to Muslim weddings, and I went to their homes, so I thought I knew them.
After 9/11 I was one of the people who said publicly that we couldn’t do to the Muslims what we had done to the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. These are good people; they are proud Americans. But some time around Columbus Day, about a month after September 11, quotes started appearing in Newsday from the interfaith director, the president, and the vice president at one of the biggest mosques, and probably the richest one, on Long Island. These guys were doctors—and they were saying there was no evidence of Muslims being involved: It was the CIA, the FBI, the Jews.
The fact that top people within the Muslim community were claiming this was when it first hit me that there must be a total disconnect between the rest of our country and the leaders of our Muslim community—a group living among us who are not assimilated. They were saying the Jews blew up the World Trade Center—really educated people were saying this, people I considered friends. I just could not believe it. And Newsday never criticized these quotes, nor did any of our religious leaders. The media would run stories saying we can’t have any oppression against Muslims, and I realized then that it was a big issue to even ask any questions. If someone had made the statement that the overwhelming majority—95 percent of Muslims—were great people, but that some in their leadership do not cooperate with our law enforcement officials, he would be branded as being a bigot for even raising the matter.
I started talking to law enforcement, and found again and again, whatever the Koran says or doesn’t say, the fact is that too many people in the Muslim community have separated themselves from the rest of the country. There was a Pew poll of American Muslims a few years ago, one of the most respected polls in the country, that found that 65 percent of men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine said they were Muslims first; only 25 percent said they were Americans first. Sixty-five percent is a big number when you also consider the fact that 15 percent of Muslim men between eighteen and twenty-nine said they could support suicide bombing. I mean, let’s just say there are three million Muslims in America, and 25 percent of them are between eighteen and twenty-nine; that’s 750,000 people, and 15 percent of them could support suicide bombing? That’s over 100,000 men who said they could support suicide bombing.
There is a knee-jerk reaction to defend Muslim leadership, but the fact is that you can go to almost any city in this country, any precinct in New York and Long Island, and cops will tell you that they get no cooperation whatsoever—that they, the police, are the enemy. There’s a major investigation I’m aware of in which families went to the FBI and said their kids were being recruited to be suicide bombers, and when the bureau began an investigation into this, the imams denounced it in one of the mosques. And so no one in that mosque was allowed to cooperate with the FBI.
It is frightening to think that if 15 percent of young Muslim men in our country support suicide bombings, what would that percentage be in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, Libya, and other countries? We are talking about well into the millions worldwide, and despite what is said, these are not necessarily poor people, or people living in the mountains. The attacks in England, for example, are coming from second- and third-generation Pakistani kids who live middle-income, middle-class lives, with fairly secular, nonsectarian upbringings. In our own country, many in the extremist groups have the same sort of backgrounds. We saw what nineteen hijackers accomplished—to think that there could be millions out there willing to do that.
If you can’t identify your enemy, you’re not going to defeat your enemy. You have to know who your enemy is, and it’s Islamic terrorism. That’s why, as chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, I had my first hearing in March of 2011 on the radicalization of Islam, demonstrating that al Qaeda and its affiliates were recruiting Muslim Americans, and local Muslim leaders are facilitating or ignoring that reality. Despite the mindless and hypocritical attacks the mainstream media made against me, I have since acquired so much support from real people.
If I had to make an ethnic generalization about the Muslim community, I would say it was characterized by very low crime, very good family structure, and very solid education. I have met with Muslim leaders, and it’s very frustrating. These are doctors, pharmacists, teachers, all extremely educated and very polite, and they would tell me: You know, I’m a doctor, how do you think it makes me feel when people look at me like I might be a murderer? And I ask back: Why, then, won’t you ever denounce what these imams are saying on Long Island? They say that these imams don’t speak for them. I say, Wait a minute. If Catholic priests got up and said to kill all the Jews, I hope some Catholic leader would stand up and say, This is wrong. When I ask why nobody in the Muslim community stands up, they say, That is not our tradition. So we go in circles.
When my book Vale of Tears came out in 2004, I was on a few radio shows and was attacked for being anti-Muslim because I said that I thought that 80 to 85 percent of the mosques in this country were controlled by extremists on the Wahabi side. But in 2000 the State Department [had] held a seminar, a forum on religious extremism, at which a Muslim leader, Sheik Khabani, stated that 80 percent of the mosques had been taken over by extremists. What Muslims say in defense of this is that when extremists come in and take over, the rest of the congregation doesn’t really care, because the imam doesn’t have the sort of power over them that a priest would have in a Catholic parish, for example. Whether it’s 85 percent or 70 percent or 60 percent, that there are that many mosques in America dedicated to Islamic fundamentalism is a frightening proposition.
Also, because many of the Muslims in America are African American, we face the situation of a double political correctness: religious correctness and racial correctness. Many African American prisoners are recruited and converted in prison to radical Islam. There are mosques in the New York and Long Island areas that actually recruit their security personnel from the black Muslims coming out of prison. And the imams who go in there to the prisons—what are they preaching? It’s a real issue, and a growing one.
This is an issue for our culture, and for our survival, but it also says something about our national will. If we’re not willing to stand up and be willing to seek the truth about this, then we’re just kidding ourselves. We must become aware nationally of the issues involved.
Scientists are now working on trying to genetically modify various diseases so we won’t have antidotes for them. Say that two people—suicide bombers, in effect—are willing to get smallpox. Fly them over here on planes, have them ride on subways, walk through shopping centers. Smallpox has just a three-day incubation period, so picture the calm devastation they could cause. There is no silver bullet to stop any of this, no wall we can put up.
That’s why I said several years ago that the New York Times should have been indicted for espionage when they revealed our counterterrorism wiretapping programs on page one, and that we were going after terrorists bank accounts—which is totally legal. If the media used as much effort to criticize and attack al Qaeda and radicalized Islam as they do the CIA or the NSA for intercepting phone calls coming from overseas, we’d be a lot safer.
I’m not optimistic about the debate changing, and I’m not optimistic about the overall mood shifting the way it should. What I am confident of is the people—not at the top level b
ut at the very next level down—are doing a good job despite the lack of support. Here in New York you’ve got the police and fire departments in the city, and on Long Island, working together, and they are doing a tremendous job. There are major cities in this country that spend almost nothing on counterterrorism. New York, Nassau, and Suffolk are doing a phenomenal job.
It’s undeniable that the American people responded against holding the 9/11 trials in New York, they responded against building the Ground Zero mosque, they responded against Obama apologizing to the Muslim nations, so there does exist a concern for national security. The gut instincts of the American people are very good, and we have to translate that to more of a political agenda.
The killing of Osama bin Laden brings a fitting end to a tragic and searing chapter in our history. America has brought final and complete justice to this diabolical terrorist who brought death to so many of our friends and neighbors on September 11, 2001. I truly hope that the family members of those who were murdered on 9/11 will now have some measure of solace and relief.
Ultimately, the American people want to do the right thing, and I’m hoping that the Homeland Security Committee can generate facts that will get people talking. We need to get Americans talking about more issues that have the potential to raise the level of education, the potential to raise an intelligent debate. It’s hard to frame that debate, and so far, galvanizing debate into a coherent force hasn’t been done. We made a commitment after World War II that all the parties would be opposed to and would fight Soviet totalitarianism and Soviet expansion. The only debates we had over the next forty years involved the question of how we accomplish it—should we be more aggressive, less aggressive, make this overture, or that? We have not had that real commitment on Islamic terrorism. So while I’m optimistic for the long haul, the problem today is that the enemy is so deadly that in the short haul we could suffer real losses.