1:00 P.M. EDT
MS. NISBET: Good afternoon. I'd like to welcome John Miller, Assistant Director of Public Affairs for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I think many of you are familiar with Assistant Director Miller as he was also head of the Los Angeles Police Department's Counterterrorism Office, the New York Police Department's Public Information Office as well as anchoring for ABC News.
Today he is with us to address the FBI's work with international crime and terrorism. We're glad to have him here during this important time. After his opening remarks we'll go ahead into questions and answers. If you'd please state your name and affiliation before asking a question, we'd appreciate it. Thank you.
MR. MILLER: Well, thank you all for taking the time to join us today. I know it's been a busy news weekend and it looks like it's shaping up into a busy news week, so I appreciate your joining me.
Just to give a brief overview of the FBI as it has changed as world crime and the world threat from terrorism has evolved, as you probably all know, counterterrorism is the FBI's top priority. Preventing a terrorist attack before it happens is really our number one job and function.
Our second priority is counterintelligence, which is to protect the United States from other threats to national security, including espionage.
Our third highest priority has been cybercrime because it is a field that is relatively new in the scope of crime but also a field that knows no borders and can complement other crimes, from financial frauds to terrorists. It is something that is very high on our list.
Our fourth priority is our top criminal priority, away from issues involving spies or terrorists or international cybercrimes, and that's public corruption. We have made it our top criminal priority because we have found that the FBI is uniquely suited across all other agencies to deal with it, not just because of our capabilities to use undercover tools, electronic surveillance with court orders and other things, but also because of the independence from political pressure that we have always enjoyed in our nearly hundred year history.
Let's get back to the top priority because I think from the standpoint of the foreign press it's probably the thing of greatest shared interest to all of us, and that's the counterterrorism role. We have created the National Security Branch. Based on input, suggestions and insights from both the 9/11 Commission and the Commission on Weapons of Mass Destructions, we have taken the counterintelligence side, the counterterrorism side and our intelligence directorate, the people who literally connect the dots all day, and brought them together under one branch that addresses national security, because there is always the crossover or the potential for crossover in these three fields and to have them operate under one umbrella actually makes a lot of sense. So we have launched that and implemented it so that we can work better and in better coordination with not just the obvious partners like the CIA or the Defense Intelligence Agency, but also new entities like the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, who is supposed to coordinate the efforts of all agencies.
In terms of transformation, we have doubled the number of intelligence analysts, hiring 1,000 since September 11th. We recently reached our hiring goal for the second year, which means we have almost another 1,000 on the way in the process of going through background checks and training. We have hired many more language specialists, particularly in languages that will be very useful in the current trend of the latest investigations.
Another thing I wanted to touch on, and I think based on this weekend's events it's a salient point to make, is we have changed the shape of the threat of terrorism. Working with our partners around the world, we have taken the key threat which was al-Qaida from being a strong, stable, hierarchical organization and by destroying its camps, by putting its leaders on the run, by capturing through the efforts of the military and coalition partners most of al-Qaida's most effective operators, by interdicting the steady flow of funds that went to fuel the multimillion dollar cost it accrued each year to run al-Qaida, by making it more difficult for al-Qaida leaders to communicate with cells and affiliates around the world, we have changed the shape of that organization from being one that had command and control and financial ability, the ability to run institutional training camps, really to one that is steeped more in many ways in propaganda. We still see the video messages from bin Laden, as we saw right before the U.S. election. We see the video and audio messages from Zawahiri. But we don't see the level of ability that once existed for them to actually run operations.
What we instead see is the shape of the new threat, which is the homegrown terror cell. And this I think you see by example in the Madrid train bombings of March 11th, 2003, where a group that was indigenous to Madrid put that plot together on their own, financed it through routine crimes and then launched it, probably with the strategy of affecting the election which occurred within 48 hours, certainly with the strategy of affecting Spain's role in the coalition, and achieved some level of effectiveness there. I think if you move on from there you see the London bombings of July 7th, 2005, and the attempted bombings that followed on July 21st, again you see people who were indigenous to the country, in some case second-generation Britons who conceived the plot, launched the plot, funded the plot, without any connection to al-Qaida's front office, if you will, without any money or training coming direct from the organization.
I think if you look at the cases we've experienced recently in the United States, from Torrance, California, where a terror cell was born out of a group that put itself together in prison and then waited for members to get out of prison to recruit others on the street and attempted to launch terrorist attacks in the streets of Los Angeles; to Toledo, Ohio, where a group of individuals found each other, started to engage in military training and ultimately had a plan to go to Iraq to attack U.S. forces; to the recent events surrounding the arrests in Atlanta and New York where individuals were conspiring with others, according to the complaint, in Canada to attack oil refineries and to disable equipment that was used to provide GPS system guidance to commercial and military aircraft; again, you see a number of places where al-Qaida, through bin Laden, through Zawahiri, through internet websites, through a number of means, puts out the call and counts on people wherever they are who are likeminded individuals who have gone from being radicalized, if you will, to operational, meaning they're willing to step across the line and take some kind of violent action. They count on them to answer those calls and I think the events we've seen this weekend kind of underscore that that is going on in the United States, in Great Britain, in Spain, in Canada and other places.
So that is kind of an overview of where we have come from since 9/11, how we have succeeded to some degree and how the face of the new challenge is largely as a result of our success but something that is a very different challenge to face and certainly something that I think given the number of plots that we have disrupted that would have had horrific consequences, it's good to reflect on that success but I think it's also cautionary because the ability of these smaller groups with less connection to a terrorist hub to fly under the radar screen is going to be difficult to track.
I think I'll wrap it up there and open it up to your questions, but I thought for the sake of perspective that might be helpful.
QUESTION: Elena Molinari with Avvenire an Italian daily newspaper. I was wondering what is then the best tool to counter this new threat you were mentioning? And not just from the FBI perspective but in general. Is it intercepting their communications? How do you identify them?
MR. MILLER: Well, I think the very best tool is to increase our cooperation between international agencies. I think if you look at the recent events with the extreme cooperation that's gone on between Great Britain, the United States, the Canadians, the Pakistanis, a number of other countries, you see the results of pooling those efforts and that information to stop things that would have gone forward.
But there's another piece to that, which is under the old model, I think if you just focused on the terrorist base and leadership, the idea was if your intelligence was good enough you would be able to glean from that where the next plot would be, who the next players would be. This is in many ways more difficult. It means that you not only have to rely on your international partners but also very much on your local law enforcement partners.
I'll give you the case in Torrance as an example. Here was a case where they were robbing gasoline stations to raise money for their terrorist attack. Had the local police not been successful in the investigation of the string of gasoline robberies, we wouldn't have gotten that piece of information that they found during a search that allowed us to prevent a series of planned terrorist attacks. If the local police didn't have the level of awareness and training that made them recognize those clues and bring in the experts, that might have not gone as well.
The last piece of that is maybe the most important piece, which is community relations cannot be looked on as a feel-food piece anymore. It's not just about community policing or making friends for the sake of making friends. In the current shape of terrorism, we really have to take seriously doubling our efforts at outreach to the community. And that's why you have seen in the case of the Los Angeles Field Division of the FBI a town meeting that was put together with the Muslim Public Affairs Council and a number of other groups involved in their Cultural Diversity Advisory Board that reports right to the Assistant Director in Charge of the LA Field Division of the FBI. In New York you saw a recent town meeting just a couple of months ago where they brought a large group of the Pakistani community together in a restaurant. It was standing room only, despite the heat, and it was broadcast live on Pakistani television here. In Buffalo they've done town meetings that have been broadcast across Bridges TV, which is an English-language Arab American station, set of cable stations.
From the headquarters standpoint, my office has launched a pilot program called CREST, which is the Community Relations Executive Seminar Training, where we bring in community leaders from the Muslim community, across all nationalities, the Sikh community and other communities where we really need to make inroads because we've got to do three things. And I'm sorry for making my answer so long, but you asked the most important question of the day.
The three things are: We've got to bridge the gap in trust. A lot of these communities, frankly, look on the FBI and the federal government writ large with a great deal of suspicion. We need to bridge that gap. If we can get past the trust gap through these repeated meetings where we develop some kind of bond, then maybe we can get to the level that you would call confidence, where we believe in each other.
If we can get through confidence, we may end up rounding third base and have an honest and lasting friendship. And that's what it's going to take, I think, to have the kind of insurance, the kind of trip wires, if you will, that will make community members, even from communities that hold the FBI or the federal government with some level of suspicion cross the line and come forward and say I've seen something, I've heard something, I've picked up on something that I'm not comfortable with that may be something you need to know about. Because we can't just count on the idea that some satellite will intercept it, that some piece of pocket litter found in some safe house, you know, three continents away is going to be the key to stopping the attack. We've got to have that community piece because if the threat is now homegrown to a large extent, we have to be looking for it at home.
Yes, sir.
QUESTION: Alex Berezhkov, ITAR-TASS Russian News Agency. And can you explain a little bit on the international side of cooperation? So in Moscow there are -- you have representative in Washington, D.C. What's the level of -- your assessment of the level of cooperation between Russia and the United States in this field?
MR. MILLER: I think it's very good. I also think it's growing all the time. We have, right now, approximately 56 what we call legal attachés stationed in embassies around the world, representing the interests of the FBI as the liaison with local law enforcement and intelligence agencies. And they do everything from taking leads that are -- that need to be run overseas and investigating them by going to the local authorities and saying, "I need help running this down," to taking information from the local authorities or intelligence service and saying, "This needs to be passed back to the United States."
We expect very soon to have that number up to 60 legal attaché offices around the world. Obviously, there has been one for a long time in Moscow and the cooperation with the government there, as well as a number of the other governments in the region, has been extremely good. It's not just about terrorism. It's about transnational crime, it's about cybercrime, it's about the kind of crimes that bridge continents that used to require getting on a plane and going there. Of course, now, you can hop on the internet and commit crimes without having to leave the house. So that cooperation has been very good from Russia and we hope to continue that. In fact, I can only see it getting better.
QUESTION: Any examples of -- I don't know --
MR. MILLER: Well, I think, without getting into specific cases -- to speak in general terms, the material that was shared with us on the Beslan school attacks was something that really opened a window into our ability to look, from a tactical standpoint, about what would we do if an attack like that happened here. So lessons learned from that were very important and the cooperation there was very good. There are cases involving potential terrorist finances using everything from counterfeit CD-ROMs to stolen cars being shipped overseas, where FBI personnel have been able to travel into those areas and countries and receive very welcome cooperation to really become a part of the team and coordinate arrests overseas and in the United States on the same case. That's the general examples I can give.
QUESTION: Okay.
MR. MILLER: So everything from sharing intelligence to actually getting out and making arrests.
Yes, sir.
QUESTION: Azim Mian from GEO-TV, Pakistan. You just talked about Al-Zawahiri's and OBL's tape flowing in off and on. And as you know, most of these are done through non-particular television. It's, you know, in Arabic. So how come FBI -- what kind of difficulties FBI has been encountering to stop this flow, because Qatar is a small place, and it features right into the Qatar headquarter of the television where CENTCOM is next door to us.
MR. MILLER: I'm not certain that stopping it would make a big difference, meaning if you -- and I want to make sure I understand the question, because I don't want to run far afield. If you attempt to stop Al-Jazeera -- is that what you're referring to?
QUESTION: No, stopping the flow of the tapes from OBL and the al-Zawahiri to that television. At least that will help us to track down both sides who is playing the game.
MR. MILLER: Well, it's certainly not something we haven't considered -- or that's a terrible way to make a sentence -- it's certainly something we've considered, which is if the tape has Bin Laden on it and it's coming from Bin Laden -- you know, tracing the tape backwards could certainly lead to Bin Laden. So it's not something we haven't given a lot of thought to, but in terms of the message itself, if it didn't come through Qatar and go out that way, it would go out another way.
You will note that in some cases, the Bin Laden tapes have gone directly to people working for ABC News and that's when he has a particular message that's focused for America. So you see the tapes come from different places, depending on what his intended audience is. Still, a tape from Bin Laden or Zawahiri will make enough news that no matter what their intended audience is, all audiences will see it over time. But you see some turn up on the internet, you see some delivered to Al-Jazeera, you see some handed to ABC News. So what I'm really saying is if you stop one source from delivering them or airing them, they'll simply find another source.
Yes, sir.
QUESTION: Hassan Abuzaitoun from Al Hurra TV. You note the federal government last week, they cut their funding for New York City to fight the terrorism. Does this mean we are safe enough now, especially what happened last week in Canada? Does this mean we're still far away from -- at least to be safe and stable here?
MR. MILLER: I can't address that question because the issues of funding and the specific issues you're talking about belong to the Department of Homeland Security. And as much as I appreciate them not talking about FBI responsibilities, I would respect them, in turn, and not get into their bailiwick. I mean, I understand the question and it's an interesting discussion, but I'm the wrong public official.
QUESTION: Well, the risk of terrorists still -- it could happen any minute.
MR. MILLER: Well, I don't think that anybody disagrees that New York is a significant terrorist target. I don't think anybody in the Department of Homeland Security disagrees with that either. I think the question that's on the table is, how much is enough money, and that is the subject of a spirited debate between New York and the Department of Homeland Security that, from the FBI's standpoint, we don't have any responsibility in.
Yes, sir.
QUESTION: Emmanuel Saint-Martin from Le Point French weekly news magazine. In terms of reaching the different communities here, would you say that recruitment -- recruiting people from these communities is a way to -- for the FBI to reach these communities? And do you have any -- I don't talk about undercover agent, but do you have any figures about maskings or people from --
MR. MILLER: I don't have the figures you're looking for, although I could get them and maybe that'll be useful for me to email you those numbers later. But I think you have seen, on the part of the FBI, a significant outreach to those communities for recruiting. Some of the town meetings I discussed have -- you know, come with full-page newspaper ads in the newspapers in those communities, particularly the newspapers that spoke the languages of those communities, which is in only Arabic, and that outreach is going on.
I have to be candid and honest about that, which is, the longest part about getting hired in the FBI or another agency that deals in classified intelligence is the background investigation. It becomes longer and more difficult when you have to run many of those leads out of country, even using those legal attachés that I talked about before. You also have to engage with the host government if you're going to question people there about somebody's background. And it sometimes takes a long time and can be frustrating to the candidate who, of course, is seeing other jobs come and go. It's a challenge. It's not one that we're not trying to address, but it's not happening as fast as anyone would like it to because of the logistical concerns.
Now there are people from those communities who have been in America, who were born here, whose families are here, and, of course, that's a lot easier. So it's not simple, but we're trying to get it done. We certainly have had a marked increase in the number of people from those communities who speak, particularly, the languages that we need to do critical translations since September 11th.
QUESTION: Lillian Lin, Central News Agency. I have a question about undocumented immigrant. Is it a problem for the counterterrorism work?
MR. MILLER: Well, I think the subject of undocumented immigrants is, again, a subject for DHS, not the FBI. Immigration is not our responsibility. To answer you in the context of what does it mean in counterterrorism, if you look back through the suspects who have emerged in terrorist attacks in the United States, from Ali Mohamed of Northern California, who was Bin Laden's chief logistical and training officer, he was an American citizen. Wadih el-Hage, who was the originator of the embassy bombing plot in August of 1997 in Nairobi, Kenya and Daresalam, Tanzania, was an American citizen. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11th plot, went to college in the United States and studied engineering and was here legally. The September 11th hijackers came in on various legal and student visas and remained in the country legally. Most of our terrorist attacks that we have seen that touch on U.S. soil have not involved, necessarily, undocumented aliens. So that's just to set the context of history.
Now I think when you look at everything, from the situation on the Mexican border, the amount of alien smuggling, the amount of narcotics smuggling, and the steps that the United States is taking to address those, you see that there is a concern that terrorists could use the vulnerabilities of those borders to bring people in illegally to do an operation. You certainly would have to focus on that on the Canadian side, in light of this latest case, because of its proximity to the United States; although, just to be clear, there's no indication that anybody charged in the Canadian part of that case had any plans to attack a U.S. target.
So the answer is, it's certainly something we have to consider, but if you go through the pattern of people who have been big-league operators, they've always taken that into account and found a way to get into the country legally.
QUESTION: How about human trafficking?
MR. MILLER: Human trafficking is a great concern. It's certainly the primary concern of the Department of Homeland Security because they have the Customs and Border Patrol. But it is also a concern of the FBI's from a transnational crime standpoint and we do have many investigations involving human trafficking going on at any one time.
Yes.
QUESTION: My question is sort of related. The FBI is also focusing a lot on child exploitation crimes and could you explain the link between that and, perhaps, national security and counterterrorism?
MR. MILLER: Well, there's no real link between child exploitation and national security and counterterrorism, per se. We focus on the child exploitation crimes largely because it involves, in many cases, the crossing of state lines, which is a federal offense under the FBI's jurisdiction. And in many cases, many more cases than any time in our history before, simply because I think you can look to the internet and say it has removed a great deal of the inhibitions that stopped people from doing this in the past.
Before, to get involved in a child exploitation model, you had to actually go out and make contact with a child. That's why you saw some in the clergy, boy scout leaders, schoolteachers, because they put themselves in places where they had regular contact with children and they could target those they considered vulnerable and commit a sexual crime against a child.
The internet, of course, has allowed people to go online into these various chat rooms and other places and not have to have that role in life, to be somebody whose job put them into contact with a child or go to a park and stalk them. It has allowed this open field that gives you a level of anonymity that allows you to hide behind this computer and make contact with large numbers of children till you can find one that you can exploit. And that has, I think, increased the problem exponentially and has given the FBI very good reason to work with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children by stationing agents there to work on this problem, by having the cyber division have a child exploitation unit that is busy on those sites, surfing all the time, looking for those predators.
It's funny; when you watch them do their demonstrations -- I don't mean it's funny, it's remarkable; when you watch them do their demonstrations, how quickly they can log on as a 14-year-old girl and have somebody pounce on them right away and say, you know, "Let's start talking, let's make contact, let's get together." It takes a matter of seconds. So it's a key part of what we do.
MS. NISBET: If you wouldn't mind just looking -- I don't know if you can see straight ahead at the monitor, we have a question from Washington.
MR. MILLER: Okay.
MS. NISBET: Go ahead.
QUESTION: My name is Bilal Elkramech, Almustaqbal Alarabi , Lebanon. What I understand is that the FBI has successfully changed ways toward tracking terrorism since 9/11, but has the FBI managed to deal with the privacy issue?
MR. MILLER: The privacy issue will be a continuing challenge and that is something that we work very closely with the Department of Justice with and through the Department of Justice with Congress to address those difficult questions. It's because of the fast pace of changing technology that technology is changing at a faster pace than we can actually address those issues. Every time we think we've found a comfortable zone, of course, technology moves by leaps and bounds and we have to find another way to do it.
It's something that we look at with attention to the Department of Justice guidelines, the FBI's own rules, and, of course, law. But ultimately, it comes down to relying on the Department of Justice and their legal opinions and that of the courts and Congress to find a comfortable middle ground and one that is proper and lawful.
QUESTION: Choongo Moonga from Incisive Media in the UK. How much of this local threat is being supported by the former channels that we might think are well-guarded at the moment, like the banking industry?
MR. MILLER: Not much as far as I can see. When you look at the idea that the Madrid bombers had to sell counterfeit CD-ROMS and small amounts of hashish to get together the money to buy their explosives, you don't see a real outside funding source there. Now there are exceptions to that. You see, in the case of Zarqawi's network, or what he now refers to as al-Qaida of Iraq, there seems to be a certain level of financing there to support operations. But as far as the pure homegrown threat, what we've seen so far is very suggestive of the idea that they've been cut off from the al-Qaida money pipeline and they have to get the money together themselves.
What it means is you're less likely to see a heavily financed plot. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's less likely from the homegrown cells to see a 9/11 type plot that cost in excess of half a million dollars in flight training alone, but much more likely to see things of the shape of Madrid, London and the plans that were hatched in southern California.
Yes.
QUESTION: Talking about money as well, (inaudible) the recent current investigation in Brazil right now saying that possibly South America could be actually a route for the money comes from the United States and going to support al-Qaida. And Brazil was, I think, surprised because it's unlikely the country being involved in this kind of terrorism. Is FBI aware that this unlikely place in the world could be potentially because it's not in the (inaudible) right now, potentially a place to money laundering or (inaudible)?
MR. MILLER: Well, without getting into any specific country, it's something we focus on all the time, which is: Is there money coming in from overseas to support terrorist operations, is there money going out from the United States to support terrorist operations? We've seen cases that are in the public record that involve down south in the United States, the use of counterfeit or untaxed cigarette sales and counterfeit goods to raise money for Hezbollah. We've seen fundraising cases involving Hamas. And we are certainly cogent of the presence of certain fundraising entities in South America in general and we work with those governments with a good degree of cooperation in most cases to keep on top of that.
QUESTION: (Y. Castro, SBT) Is there any movement with drug dealers, for example, (inaudible)?
MR. MILLER: What we've seen is in a couple of cases, one notably in California, where you see drug dealers supplying weapons to terrorist groups in return for money. But we haven't seen necessarily drug dealers working with what we would consider Middle Eastern terrorist groups where there's an ideological connection. Usually it's just been for the cash.
Now, there are other groups that are on the list of designated terrorist groups, FARC for instance, where terrorism, narcotics and the money flow join quite naturally. There is certainly the consideration of the increase in heroin from certain regions of Afghanistan where a profit may go into terrorism. So there is those nexuses there.
QUESTION: Is there any specific action to try to avoid this?
MR. MILLER: I mean, when it comes to terrorism, we treat all these elements the same, which is as soon as we become aware of them we take steps either on our own if they're here or through the cooperation of the host government to interdict them. Because one of the things we have done very well is to -- and this is the entire intelligence community and all our international partners together -- is to cut the terrorists off from the big money that they used to receive with alacrity. But I know that as long as they are operating they will look for the source that will replace that big money. It used to be from individual donors and laundered through a number of charities, but if narcotics becomes the answer to that, certainly that's where we'll turn our focus.
Yes, sir.
QUESTION: (Hiroshi, Nakamae, Nihon Keizai Shimbun) I'm just curious. You said the town meeting is very important and I'd like to know how you choose that community where you hold the meeting and also if you conduct, like, background investigating of the kind of leaders in that community.
MR. MILLER: Well, the first part, how do we choose the community? In the case of New York, Los Angeles, Buffalo, Albany, it's not a question of choosing the community per se. Each one of those has a very vibrant and active Muslim community and each one of those places lends itself to outreach.
One of the reasons we're expanding those efforts nationally is because we believe there may be communities -- in fact, we know there are communities that have large Muslim communities, Sikh communities, other communities that would play into the cultural diversity outreach we should be doing -- that aren't that active. So rather than wait for them to come to us, well, for instance, with complaints as they did in some of these other cities, we're going to extend the hand of friendship and say let's begin to talk even though we don't have any particular problem, to again try and achieve that three-step process to get to someplace where there is a level of trust and confidence.
As far as background checks, there's no background check that we conduct with a community leader to conduct outreach. I think from the FBI standpoint it might be a natural thing to think, but I also think it's probably the wrong first step in making friends.
Now let me qualify that. There is a program called the FBI Citizens Academy and the Citizens Academy, because it takes place on FBI premises, which means you're going to be going through buildings where classified material is stored, where investigations are carried out, where undercover people, you know, walk through, everybody who attends and FBI Citizens Academy goes through a minimal background check to make sure that they're not in a major terrorist case or considered to be a spy for a foreign government or have a serious criminal record.
The FBI Citizens Academy runs over -- what is it, is it eight nights? Yeah, about eight nights, usually four hours at a clip, and they really -- they bring in the participants and it's a real introduction to the FBI from the inside. They teach you about the counterterrorism program and the criminal program and the cyberprogram and the counterintelligence program and they take you out on the range and, you know, demonstrate the shooting and some of the other tactics and training. It's a very good program and that requires a background check, but it requires a background check for everybody. It doesn't matter if you're Muslim, if you're Irish, if you're Italian, if you're American or foreign. It's a standard because of access to FBI space.
In the CREST program, for that consideration, what we have agreed to with the community leaders in our discussions is not to have it in FBI space because there are a number of people who said, "I don't want to be called down to the FBI to have them tell me about what the FBI does. I want this to be more of a two-way street." And of course it eliminates the need for a background check. So we go out to them. It can be a mosque, it can be a meeting hall, it can be a neutral site, it can be restaurant. It doesn't really matter the where. The importance is if you're going to be doing what you call outreach, you should go out; otherwise, it's inreach.
Yes, sir.
QUESTION: (A. Mian, Geo TV) You just talked about drugs and within few years again in Afghanistan poppy cultivation is on the rise and definitely that poppy is not being consumed in a vault or in Afghanistan; it must be finding a way out. Do you think it's helping -- you know, it's an obstacle for the FBI and it's helping to the newly organized terrorist groups in Afghanistan?
MR. MILLER: Well, it's certainly part of the underground economy. That certainly gives it a high potential for its profits to go towards terrorism, as in any part of the underground economy. That's certainly nothing that's been lost on the United States. The FBI looks at it from an intelligence standpoint and from a terrorist financing standpoint.
The Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA, which is another arm of the Department of Justice, is looking at it from a direct standpoint in terms of interdiction and bringing the efforts over there, working with the government of President Karzai and obviously the military has a piece of that in cooperation with the Afghan Government also.
It's something we're watching develop and are attempting to work with the host government of President Karzai to make sure that it is interdicted sooner than later. Obviously, it's a challenging terrain, it's a challenging environment, so it's not as simple as just saying we're going to take care of it. It's as challenging for the host government as anybody else, so we have to consider that, too.
QUESTION: I have two questions. My name is Shingo Egi. I work for the Japanese newspaper Ashai Shimbun. First of all, we've been seeing some reports that since you focus much on counterterrorism the number of street gangs or new types of organized crime is on the rise, such as the one from El Salvador and so on. So my first question is how is this focusing on the counterterrorism affecting your other operations outside the priorities that you mentioned?
And my second question is about the -- what you mentioned about -- when you said you succeeded in cutting down the financial abilities of al-Qaida and it's more or less propaganda (inaudible) right now. But how significant is this? If you stop your efforts on some kind of field, then do you suspect that it will grow again into (inaudible) group or do you think you've crushed it?
MR. MILLER: Okay, well, those are two very complicated questions so let me start with the first.
The FBI is a relatively small organization. It's got 12,000 agents. The New York City Police Department has approximately 36,000 police officers. When you add in our civilian professional support staff, we come up closer to 28,000 people, still smaller than the police department for the largest city in the United States. And our jurisdiction is certainly arguably -- well, certainly definitely the United States but arguably in many ways because of the new threat the world in terms of our outreach and liaison with our international partners. So it's a challenge.
The FBI used to -- well, the FBI can still do anything. I've seen them crank up the big machine and point it at a given case, and it is remarkable when you see all the moving parts of the FBI turned towards one incident, as you do, say, in the aftermath of the embassy bombings or September 11th.
So we know that the FBI can do anything. The question that you raise is: Can the FBI do everything? I think that the Director and the special agents in charge of the 56 field offices have been in an ongoing discussion about what things we can still do and what things we need to do less of or maybe do none of. The first step towards divining the answer to that was setting the priorities so that you didn't have 56 managers in the field trying to figure out what the priorities were or setting their own. So we've very clear: counterterrorism is the top priority; counterintelligence is the second; cyber is the third.
What that does is it takes the mystery out of it. If there's a counterterrorism case going in Chicago and they run out of people on the counterterrorism squad, it's the top priority. That means that people from the next priority, whether it's counterintelligence or criminal, have to stop what they're doing and aid the top priority, because prevention of another terrorist attack, that becomes a no-brainer. Granted, if you're working on a crew of people who are knocking off banks, that's very important; but if counterterrorism needs the personnel, it shifts to that. So that's what setting up the priority was about.
You ask about gang interdiction, MS-13, and things like that. Gang conspiracies is probably not an area that the FBI is getting out of. We have in Los Angeles a number of squads that are just dedicated to major gang cases. We have an MS-13 task force that operates around the country and in very close cooperation with international partners.
The questions as you cascade down those priorities and you get to -- I don't want to say the word "lesser" crimes, if you're the victim there are no lesser crimes -- but crimes that other agencies and law enforcement entities are equally or better suited to handle. Those are the ones that in the strategic look for the second half of the director's tenure, because he's about to reach his five-year mark in a tenure term, that he'll be looking at how to reshape that. Even as we speak, 48 percent of the FBI's resources are dedicated at criminal matters. So that's a significant part of our effort that is still targeted towards basic criminal matters.
Now, 40 percent of our resources are directed at one thing, which is the national security arena. But when you take 40 percent of your resources in any organization and point them towards one thing, you're going to have to look at doing less of some of those other things. I don't think that ongoing violent gang conspiracies, which in essence fit into the real of being a form of organized crime, would be one of the things that would be taken off the table though.
Yes, sir.
QUESTION: Among the Muslim communities here, especially after this case in New York of Union Square, there has been a kind of, you know, apprehension that there is every likelihood of entrapment rather than wanting and targeting those who are potentially terrorists and they are hiding in the community. Mostly there can be an entrapment. How do you address this issue if it's being put to you by a common (inaudible) on the street?
MR. MILLER: I understand the concern but it should not be a great worry to any legitimate member of the community. We can argue over the legalistics of entrapment by bringing in a bunch of lawyers and letting them have at it. But speaking in plain terms, if I go to you and say, listen, I've got a great plan that we can blow up a building at 50th and Third and I keep talking to you about it. Your job is to pick up the phone and call the police or the FBI, not to say, yeah, well, what kind of explosives would we use and where would we get them and how would we get the money. You might call that entrapment because it's my idea, and again, that's a discussion for the lawyers.
But when you get down to the bottom line, somebody who has no proclivity towards terrorism or violence can't be sucked into one of these plots without some level of intention. The chief mandate of the FBI moving forward from September 11th was less so to respond to the scene, pick up the pieces and find out who set the bomb, and more so to find out through intelligence who had the wherewithal and the intention to commit these crimes and get between them and acting on those intentions or with those wherewithals. And I think we've been very successful in doing that, from those -- from Lackawanna who saw training to the Lodi case where the jury heard all the arguments and still concluded that that individual was in an active planning role to Torrance, California where they had set the dates for their plot and already chosen the targets. And all they had left to do was to go forward before that case was interdicted to the recent events in Canada.
You can call it entrapment, but I think that's a good defense argument. What we've seen is it's not really playing well in front of the juries that hear all the evidence. And I think that what we've done so far has passed the test. When you sit down 12 people from the community and you say go over all the evidence not just that argument but the rest, and you come up with convictions that's the test that we go by.
QUESTION: (E. Molinari, Avvenire) What makes you say that al-Qaida's capability to strike here in the U.S. has been dramatically disrupted? Isn't there a risk of lowering the guard too much towards outside threats coming in?
MR. MILLER: Well, I say lowered not eliminated. I say al-Qaida's ability to strike in the United States on the level of September 11th has been lowered because again they don't have centralized camps where they are bringing thousands of recruits through, where they're coming out with sophisticated capabilities. I mean, at one time in Afghanistan they ran three major camps full time and a number of smaller camps to a lesser extent. If you look at the time that al-Qaida ran camps from the time it had camps in the Sudan to the time its camps were eliminated in Afghanistan, tens of thousands of people went through those camps.
Now that sends up two important signals. One, it means they had to be eliminated because that would have continued and they had sanctuary. Two, it means that the tens of thousands of people who went through those camps by and large ate still out there with those capabilities they learned.
The difference is the history of al-Qaida shows that they were on a steadily escalating scale of attack. So if you go back to the embassy bombings, it was two massive truck bombs striking two embassies simultaneously in August of 1997. Their next plot was the product of two years of planning was to be the millennium attacks which would be to have truck bombs strike the Radisson Hotel in Jordan, an assault on the Allen B. Bridge connecting Jordan to Israel and then some other assaults on religious sites that were going to have celebrations that had to do with the millennium. They would move on to having a boat bomb. In fact, the USS Sullivan's in the port of Aden, Yemen and use that kind of David and Goliath-like imagery of a small skiff sinking a billion dollar battleship and videotaping it. And then their third plot was to have a couple of hundred pounds of explosive hidden in suitcases to blow up on a New Year's Day of the millennium in the Tom Bradley terminal of Los Angeles International Airport. So they went from two targets in East Africa to three targets over the period of one week both in Yemen, Jordan and the United States with very clear messaging in each one: we'll attack your friends, we'll attack your military, oh, and we'll attack you at home. And all of that was a buildup to 9/11 which was certainly by measure the largest terrorist attack in history.
Their ability to launch those kinds of plots without the multimillion dollar funding they used to raise, without the freedom to train and hone military-style operators and surveillance experts in camps. That is what I mean by their ability has been broken down. But you can't write al-Qaida off as an organization until you have truly dismantled it. And what we have done is we have disabled it. It has become, to some extent, a propaganda machine. But I think we've all seen over the past 20 years the number of blows we have dealt to organized crime and it keeps coming back.
I expect that al-Qaida certainly as long as bin Laden and Zawahiri are around, but I wouldn't rely on them alone, will continue to try to come back. Part of the effort with our worldwide partners, with our coalition partners, with our law enforcement and intelligence partners is to make sure that we keep them as disabled as possible. I still think they're dangerous as a propaganda machine because we've seen the propaganda go out and we've seen people rise up to that challenge.
Now is that al-Qaida or is that the homegrown threat? It's kind of an academic discussion. As long as it's producing either the threat of terrorist plots, or terrorist plots that succeed, it is still a danger by any name.
QUESTION: (H. Nakamae, Nihon Keizai Shimbun) About the United Nations and the Iranian Government and the Iranians and Europeans and also U.S. -- they were discussing about the kind of package to stop the Iranian uranium enrichment. How do you see that problem might affect to the counterterrorism issues? I have no idea.
MR. MILLER: I think when you look toward that issue on the table that's a State Department issue and I'll leave it with them. Suffice it to say that the FBI, as well as all of our partners in the intelligence community led by the Director of National Intelligence is always looking towards how one set of changing events could affect the terrorist threat. It is no secret that Iran has used Hezbollah in terms of terrorist operations in the past. There is obviously a great focus on the part of the FBI and our other agencies on Hezbollah, both internationally and domestically. What we've seen domestically to date and we can document this, there's a number of Hezbollah fundraising operations where that money was going out of seas, overseas.
What we have to continually watch for is if the picture with Iran suddenly changes, are there Hezbollah operations that will be targeted against the United States either here or abroad? So I can't tell you that that threat exists right now in a tangible way. I can tell you -- I can't tell you that for a number of reasons. I can tell you it's something we are focused on for obvious reasons.
MS. NISBET: Thank you. We have a couple of one-on-one requests. If anyone else would like to request an interview, you can speak to his press person to expedite this.
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