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Secretary Lehman Admits - We're in a Religious War All Americans need to come to this realization because until we do, we will not understand that the only way to stop terrorism is to change what terrorists believe about how to get to heaven. Neither fear of punishment under criminal law nor fear of death at the hands of the U.S. military will stop someone who thinks the only way to get to heaven is to die killing non-Muslims. Secretary Lehman's address is quoted below: Address by Former Secretary of the Navy John
Lehman We are at a juncture today that really is more
of a threshold, even more of a watershed, than the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was in 1941. We are
currently in a war, but it is not a war on
terrorism. In fact, that has been a great
confusion, and the sooner we drop that term, the
better. This would be like President Franklin
Roosevelt saying in World War II, "We are engaged
in a war against kamikazes and blitzkrieg." Like
them, terrorism is a method, a tool, a weapon that
has been used against us. And part of the reason we
suffered such a horrific attack is that we were not
prepared. Let's not kid ourselves. Some very smart people
defeated every single defense this country had, and
defeated them easily, with confidence and
arrogance. There are many lessons we must learn
from this. We were not prepared intellectually. Those of us
in the national security field still carried the
baggage of the Cold War. We thought in concepts of
coalition warfare and the Warsaw Pact. When we
thought of terrorism, we thought only of
state-sponsored terrorism, which is why the
immediate reaction of many in our government
agencies after 9/11 was: Which state did it?
Saddam, it must have been Saddam. We had failed to
grasp, for a variety of reasons, the new phenomenon
that had emerged in the world. This was not state-sponsored terrorism. This
was religious war. This was the emergence of a transnational enemy
driven by religious fervor and fanaticism. Our
enemy is not terrorism. Our enemy is violent,
Islamic fundamentalism. None of our government
institutions was set up with receptors, or even
vocabulary, to deal with this. So we left ourselves
completely vulnerable to a concerted attack. Where are we today? I'd like to say we have
fixed these problems, but we haven't. We have very
real vulnerabilities. We have not diminished in any
way the fervor and ideology of our enemy. We are
fighting them in many areas of the world, and I
must say with much better awareness of the issues
and their nature. We're fighting with better
tools. But I cannot say we are now safe from the
kind of attack we saw on 9/11. I think we are much safer than we were on 9/11;
the ability of our enemies to launch a concerted,
sophisticated attack is much less than it was then.
Still, we're totally vulnerable to the kinds of
attacks we've seen in Madrid, for instance. We face a very sophisticated and intelligent
enemy who has been trained, in many cases, in our
universities and gone to school on our methods,
learned from their mistakes, and continued to use
the very nature of our free society and its
aversion to intrusion in privacy and discrimination
to their benefit. For example, today it is still a prohibited
offense for an airline to have two people of the
same ethnic background interviewed at one time,
because that is discrimination. Our airline
security is still full of holes. Our ability to
carry out covert operations abroad is only
marginally better than it was at the time of
9/11. A huge amount of fundamental cultural and
institutional change must be carried out in the
United States before we can effectively deal with
the nature of the threat. Today, probably 50 or
more states have schools that are teaching jihad,
preaching, recruiting, and training. We have
absolutely no successful programs even begun to
remediate against those efforts. It's very important that people understand the
complexity of this threat. We have had to institute
new approaches to protecting our civil liberties
the way we authorize surveillance, the way we
conduct our immigration and naturalization
policies, and the way we issue passports. That's
only the beginning. The beginning of wisdom is to
recognize the problem, to recognize that for every
jihadist we kill or capture as we carry out an
aggressive and positive policy in Afghanistan and
elsewhere another 50 are being trained in schools
and mosques around the world. This problem goes back a long way. We have been
asleep. Just by chance about six months ago, I
picked up a book by V. S. Naipaul, one of the great
English prose writers. I love to read his short
stories and travelogues. The book was titled Among
the Believers (New York: Vintage, 1982) and was an
account of his travels in Indonesia, where he found
that Saudi-funded schools and mosques were
transforming Indonesian society from a very
relaxed, syncretist Islam to a jihadist
fundamentalist fanatical society, all paid for with
Saudi Arabian funding. Nobody paid attention.
Presidents in four administrations put their arms
around Saudi ambassadors, ignored the Wahhabi
jihadism, and said these are our eternal
friends. We have seen throughout the last 20 years a kind
of head-in-the-sand approach to national security
in the Pentagon. We were comfortable with the
existing concept of what the threat was, what
threat analysis was, and how we derived our
requirements, still using the same old tools we all
grew up with. We paid no attention to the real
nature of this emerging threat, even though there
were warning signs. Many will recall with pain what we went through
in the Reagan administration in 1983, when the
Marine barracks were bombed in Beirut 241 Marines
and Navy corpsmen were killed. We immediately got
an intercept from NSA [National Security
Agency], a total smoking gun from the foreign
ministry of Iran, ordering the murder of our
Marines. Nothing was done to retaliate. Instead, we
did exactly what the terrorists wanted us to do,
which was to withdraw. Osama bin Laden has cited
this as one of his dawning moments. The vaunted
United States is a paper tiger; Americans are
afraid of casualties; they run like cowards when
attacked; and they don't even bother to take their
dead with them. This was a seminal moment for
Osama. After that, we had our CIA station chief
kidnapped and tortured to death. Nothing was done.
Then, we had our Marine Colonel [William
R.] Higgins kidnapped and publicly hanged.
Nothing was done. We fueled and made these people
aware of the tremendous effectiveness of terrorism
as a tool of jihad. It worked. They chased us out
of one place after another, because we would not
retaliate. The Secretary of Defense at the time has said he
never received those intercepts. That's an example
of one of the huge problems our commission has
uncovered. We have allowed the intelligence
community to evolve into a bureaucratic archipelago
of baronies in the Defense Department, the CIA, and
95 other different intelligence units in our
government. None of them talked to one another in
the same computerized system. There was no systemic
sharing. Some will recall the Phoenix memo and the
fact that there were people in the FBI saying,
"Hey, there are young Arabs learning to fly and
they don't want to learn how to take off or land.
Maybe we should look into them." It went
nowhere. We had watch lists with 65,000 terrorists' names
on them, created by a very sophisticated system in
the State Department called Tip-Off. That existed
before 9/11, but nobody in the FAA [Federal
Aviation Administration] bothered to look at
it. The FAA had 12 names on its no-fly list. The
State Department had a guy on its list named Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed. He was already under indictment
for his role in planning the 1993 attack on the
World Trade Center. The State Department issued him
a visa. I could go on and on. Two big lessons glare out from what our
investigations have discovered so far. Number one,
in our government bureaucracy today there is no
accountability. Since 9/11the greatest failure of
American defenses in the history of our country, at
least since the burning of Washington in 1814 only
one person has been fired. He is a hero, in my
judgment: [retired Vice] Admiral John
Poindexter. He got fired because of an excessive
zeal to catch these bastards. But he was the only
one fired. Not any of the 19 officers lost their
jobs at Immigration for allowing the 19 terrorists
who presented grossly falsified passports to enter
the country. One Customs Service officer stopped
the 20th terrorist, at risk to his own career Do
you think he's been promoted? Not a chance. That is the culture we've allowed to develop,
except in the Navy. We've all felt the pain over
the last year of the number of skippers who have
been relieved in the U.S. Navy: two on one cruiser
in one year. That's a problem for us. It's also
something we should be mightily proud of, because
it stands out in stark contrast to the rest of the
U.S. government. In the United States Navy, we
still have accountability. It's bred into our
culture. And what we stand for here has to be
respread into our government and our nation. Actions have consequences, and people must be
held accountable. Customs officer Jose
Melendez-Perez stopped the 20th terrorist, who was
supposed to be on Flight 93 that crashed in
Pennsylvania. Probably because of the shorthanded
muscle on that team, the passengers were able to
overcome the terrorists. Melendez-Perez did this at
great personal risk, because his colleagues and his
supervisors told him, "You can't do this. This guy
is an Arab ethnic. You're racially profiling.
You're going to get in real trouble, because it's
against Department of Transportation policy to
racially profile." He said, "I don't care. This
guy's a bad guy. I can see it in his eyes." As he
sent this guy back out of the United States, the
guy turned around to him and said, "I'll be back."
You know, he is back. He's in Guantanamo. We
captured him in Afghanistan. Do you think Melendez-Perez got a promotion? Do
you think he got any recognition? Do you think he
is doing any better than the 19 of his
time-serving, unaccountable colleagues? Don't think
any bit of it. We have no accountability, but we're
going to restore it. The other glaring lack that has been discovered
throughout the investigation is in leadership.
Leadership is the willingness to accept the burdens
and the risks, the potentialembarrassment, and the
occasional failure of leading men and women. It is
saying: We will do it this way. I won't let that
guy in. I will do this and I'll take the
consequences. That's what we stand for here. That's
what the crucible of the U.S. Naval Academy has
carried on now since 1845, and what the U.S. Naval
Institute has carried on for 130 years and hasn't
compromised. We all should be very proud of it. We
need leadership now more than ever. We need to
respread this culture, which is so rare today, into
the way we conduct our government business, let
alone our private business. Having said all this, I'm very optimistic. We
have seen come forward in this investigation people
from every part of our bureaucracy to say they
screwed up and to tell what went wrong and what
we've got to do to change it. We have an agenda for
change. I think we're going to see a very
fundamental shift in the culture of our government
as a result of this. I certainly hope so. This should be a true wake-up call. We cannot
let this be swept under the rug, put on the shelf
like one more of the hundreds of other commissions
that have gone right into the memory hole. This
time, I truly believe it's going to be
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