MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Much of NPR's reporting this week has remembered the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 - the blue, blue sky and the horror that unfolded in Manhattan, at the Pentagon and in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. For 25 years now, those events and the response to them have shaped the nation's approach to national security. The Bush administration began housing detainees in a prison at Guantanamo Bay. Some of them are still there today. And it redrew the intelligence community, creating the Department of Homeland Security and the director of national intelligence.
Did it work? Is America safer? And did the country compromise its moral compass along the way? Those are some of the questions I posed during a live taping of NPR's national security podcast Sources & Methods. Joining me in that conversation were Stephen Hadley, who was deputy national security adviser on 9/11, also John McLaughlin, then deputy CIA director, Michael Morell, then President Bush's CIA briefer, and then California congresswoman, Democrat Jane Harman.
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JANE HARMAN: I think the intentions were excellent. I don't disagree there, but I think mistakes that we have made - and I just wrote an op-ed on this - were egregious and have metastasized since. For example, now we have shortchanged totally our soft power. We - Bob Gates, the former secretary of defense, wrote about overmilitarizing our response to 9/11. He's right. We did, and we're still doing that. We are pushing away our partners and allies who were crucial then. And I think that because of new technology, the threats are much more difficult, including cyber and AI. And we have hollowed out some of the leadership of our intelligence community now. And so while we all tried our hardest - and I think we would all do it again, try our hardest - I worry that our country is more vulnerable, not less.
KELLY: This comes from Julie in the audience. Thank you, Julie. How confident are you with the current administration's focus on terrorism?
JOHN MCLAUGHLIN: Not so confident. The - one can say, I think, that terrorists today have a larger safe haven than they did at the time of 9/11 when you add up the openness of the Sahel, Afghanistan itself, other parts of the Middle East, parts of Syria, the tribal areas and so forth. So the question is, are terrorists planning another attack, or are they just laying low and trying to recover from all the pressure we've put on them? And frankly, no one knows, and I would worry that we're not giving this the sufficient attention it needs.
KELLY: Steve?
STEPHEN HADLEY: I think you got to make the point Jane made. The new technologies available could potentially really empower terrorists in a very sobering way, and we need to get on top of that.
HARMAN: I would just add one thing. The qualification for picking leaders should not be total loyalty. The qualification should be enormous experience and loyalty. And this group right here, those who were in the executive branch on 9/11, had enormous experience.
KELLY: You're talking - I take that as a reference to some of the people running things like ODNI or CIA or the Pentagon.
HARMAN: Well, some are good. Some are picked only because they are loyal and are inexperienced. And I think that is very dangerous.
KELLY: Michael, last word, how confident are you with current administration's focus on terrorism?
MICHAEL MORELL: I mean, I would just say that I focused on terrorism for the entire second half of my 33-year career, and one of the things I learned is that if you have intelligence, if you have the right military capability, and you have a president who's making the right policy choices, it is fairly easy to degrade a terrorist organization. If you're missing any of those things, it's not. And not only is it easy to degrade if you have those things, but if you don't have those things, it's very easy for them to bounce back. So prudence is absolutely required. I have no idea what the Trump administration is focused on this or not. I just have no insight information.
KELLY: That was Michael Morell, President George W. Bush's CIA briefer on 9/11. You also heard Jane Harman, John McLaughlin and Stephen Hadley. On 9/11, they were serving, respectively, as a California Democratic congresswoman, as deputy director of the CIA and as deputy national security adviser in the Bush White House. They joined me live at NPR earlier this week for a special taping of Sources & Methods. You can hear our hourlong conversation wherever you get your podcasts, or you can watch the discussion on NPR's YouTube channel. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
