Larry Johnson on “Larry King Live”

Below you’ll find the three videos [NOW IN CORRECT ORDER] and transcript from Larry’s appearance last night (December 28, 2009) on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” The one word I’ve heard most to describe Larry’s appearances, in the past two days, on TV news programs is “brilliant.” Larry’s current knowledge of U.S. operations that fight terrorism, along with his decades-long experience in counterterrorism combine with his gift for providing clear explanations that anyone can understand. [Update: Larry was on CNN again today, and we'll have the video clip shortly.]

In a post at his blog, “Janet Napolitano Should Listen to Larry Johnson,” Larry Doyle wrote:

The mission of Sense on Cents is to help people navigate the economic landscape. Proper navigation requires a full understanding of risk. What are the risks in our economy, political process, investments, the world?

Make no mistake, the global risks of terrorism have an enormous impact on our global economy. No individual today understands the risks of terrorism more than my friend Larry Johnson, who runs the political blog No Quarter USA. Larry has appeared on several radio and television news shows over the last couple of days to speak about the attempted Christmas Day bombing of Northwest Flight # 253. Given Larry’s extensive background in counterterrorism (he was Deputy Director of Counterterrorism for the State Department), I strongly encourage everyone to listen to his comments.

Thank you Larry for providing such expert professional opinions. Janet Napolitano, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, would do well to follow your lead. … (Read all.)

The transcript of the 12/28/09 segment involving the panel:

KING: We have an outstanding panel to take this all in. Peter Bergen is in Washington, CNN National Security analyst. Also in Washington is Jack Rice, former CIA officer, now journalist and syndicated talk radio host. In New York is Harvey Kushner. Dr. Kushner is a terrorism expert as well Chairman of the Department of Criminal Justice at Long Island University and author of “Holy War on the Home Front, the Secret Islamic Terror Network in the United States.” Finally in Washington, Larry C. Johnson. He served as deputy director of the U.S. State Department’s office of counterterrorism, former CIA analyst, and CEO and founder and co- founder of Berg Associates. Peter Bergen, was the president’s statement today satisfactory?

PETER BERGEN, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Yes, I mean, I think it was satisfactory. I think the statement would have been — if the plane would have blown up obviously, he would have made a statement earlier. I think so, yes.

KING: What do you think, Jack?

JACK RICE, FORMER CIA OFFICER: Well, obviously, there’s been enough problems here, but he had to address this. I think it was sufficient that Napolitano and then Robert Gibbs ultimately stepped up early. Thankfully, because there were no deaths here, we didn’t see the president’s necessity to actually speak. On the other hand, I think it’s beneficial for the American people to realize that he’s watching this and he’s also being briefed on this regularly. I think that’s a positive step for all Americans to know.

KING: Harvey, CNN has obtained U.S. government photos of what remains of the device, which the suspect tried to blow up Flight 253. They show singed underwear with a pack of powder zoned into the crack. Your thoughts on this device, would you class this as sophisticated?

HARVEY KUSHNER, TERROR EXPERT: It’s seems to be a new type of device peculiar to that region. Yemen seems to work with PETN. This type of device, they made a statement that as you know today they were experimenting with this. It certainly had enough explosive power to take down that a-330 airbus and kill all 278 passengers and 11 crew members aboard.

Quite frankly the machinery we have in place, the technology could not detect that, except possibly a scanning machine. Certainly a puffer might have picked up some of the trace elements of it. It’s frightening, Larry, that eight years after 9/11 somebody could board a plane regardless of all the mistakes with that type of sophisticated weapon and look what we deal with today.

KING: What do you make of the news, Larry, that first al-Qaeda takes credit and second, the two former Gitmo detainees both released during the Bush administration are among the leadership of al-Qaeda?

LARRY C. JOHNSON, FORMER DEP. DIR., OFFICE OF COUNTERTERRORISM: I’m glad they’ve taken credit, because if nothing else it boosts the United States position with the government of Yemen to go on and continue to launch military strikes against what remains of the al- Qaeda camps.

These guys are not terribly bright. When they step up and they create that kind of profile, it makes it easier to follow them and identify them and kill them. All in favor of that, the Gitmo detainees, when you threw them back in the water, they decided to get back in the fight are fair game.

I think we need to correct one statement and my friend, Harvey Kushner, he wasn’t incorrect. But we’re not talking eight years, Larry, we’re talking 15 years. Remember it was December 1994 when, Ramzi Yousef, the bomber of the first World Trade Center boarded a plane in Cebu, in the southern Philippines, he built a device in the air that was made of TATP, gun cotton, cotton balls, left it on the plane and got off and it blew up.

This was a precursor for their plan, Bojinka, to blow up 12 jumbo jets over the Pacific. So we’ve been dealing with this now for 15 years, and the reality, the sad reality is we still have not taken any firm measures to protect passengers in terms of installing detection systems at passenger screening check points.

Secretary Ridge, when he was in place, he did an excellent job of professionalizing TSA, putting screeners there. He did an excellent job of requiring explosive detection systems for checked baggage. But they did not address the issue of how do you screen passengers and prevent them from carrying explosives on board.

KING: Well said. Peter Bergen, what’s the story with Yemen. How do you read this, al-Qaeda and Yemen? How deeply rooted?

BERGEN: Well, I take the same that they’re behind this completely at face value. It accords with previous operations. They try to kill the deputy minister with a PETN bomb on August 28th. The guy hid it in his underwear. He got through metal detectors. He almost killed the prince and killed himself in the attack.

They learned from that attack that it was possible to get it past metal detectors and they did exactly the same thing with the Detroit plot. So – and also by the way, PETN is rarely used in terrorist attacks. The only ones are all ones done by al-Qaeda, including Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber.

Richard Reid by the way had a colleague who had a case of cold feet and didn’t go through with his shoe bomb attack. He had a shoe bomb in his house in the United Kingdom. He’s now in prison. The reason I mentioned that is it would be very naive to presume that’s this is the only person out there. That would be wishful thinking.

It was unsuccessful as Larry points out, it was operator error or maybe the bomb wasn’t made correctly. They have demonstrated they can get it through. That’s a problem that we’re unfortunately going to deal with in the future.

KING: The security reviews the president has ordered, will they do any good? We’ll talk about it right after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KING: Jake Rice, the new security reviews the president has implemented, are they going to work?

RICE: We certainly hope so. Obviously, look, the fact is there’s accessibility out there. When the capability is in place in some of these areas — if we had simply taken the intelligence that was available in this case — sometimes what people are saying now is that if we profiled this guy — I mean, in the negative sense, I don’t think that’s necessary, based on the information that was available, not just the fact that he was on a watch list, admittedly a massive one, but also that he was paying cash, that he was flying one way, that his father said we have issues here. Just for those reasons alone — I’ve been stopped in multiple airports based upon some of the things that I may have done or place I have come from.

The fact that this has happened to me and many other people, it’s somewhat shocking this wasn’t done in Lagos, this wasn’t done in Amsterdam, or anyplace else. That is a failure. That’s with everything we have in place right now.

KING: Harvey, do you agree with Tom Ridge that we get a little lax.

KUSHNER: I certainly agree with him. More importantly, what this former secretary said, which I think is key, he talked about culture. I could tell you this, Larry, that there are different cultures even within the different agencies that need to cooperate with each other, and get data immediately to those who need to know, actionable data.

Look, Larry Johnson, my dear friend, can tell you. He’s worked for the State Department, worked for the CIA. They’re different cultures in those two agencies. We don’t have a unified system with DHS in which we have information. Even if we had 500,000 pieces of information, shifting it back and forth between agencies, then getting it to TSA or to local law enforcement or to state law enforcement is a monumental effort.

I can tell you, Larry, working with local law enforcement, we don’t get real time data quickly enough from so-called Feds. So I think that really is the issue. And I don’t know if whatever the president said is going to rectify that situation.

KING: Larry, do you agree with what Tom Ridge when he said need to know became need to share, and we seem to be going back to need to know?

JOHNSON: Not really. The problems that exist today existed under Tom Ridge and existed under Michael Chertoff. Let me give you a quick example. I was down at McGill Air Force Base two years ago working on preparing a terrorism exercise. We had to come up with who the name of FEMA was that was the point handling the emergency response. So we go on to the secure — the secret classified level computer. We pull up the Department of Energy FEMA website. The photograph of the person in charge was Michael, heck of a job, Brown.

Larry, this was three years after the guy had left his job. And that’s under the government computer. So, you know, we can’t blame a new culture from Obama. I’ve been a critic of the Obama administration. But I think it’s a little disingenuous to say, oh yeah, they’re treating it differently than the others. The fact is, under the Obama administration, at least in the last several months, you’ve killed Nob Honn (ph) in Somalia, who was responsible for the bombing of the embassies — one of the culprits for the embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. You’ve gone after the pirates off of the coast of Somalia.

They’ve had some successes. They haven’t let up on going out and doing some capture/kill operations. As you rightly noted earlier, it was two people released during the Bush administration that wound up back on the battlefield in Yemen. We still — the Bush administration didn’t deal with that. And, frankly, the Obama administration is not dealing with that properly.

We wind up with how do we deal with terrorists? Do we treat them according to our rules of law or do we put them in a military tribunal. We’ve got to do something. But just throwing them back on the battlefield to kill us again, that’s not a plan I believe in.

KING: I’m going to ask this panel if we can really win a war against terrorism right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KING: We’re back. Peter Bergen, logically, we can assume a terrorist is born today somewhere. Can we ever win this war?

BERGEN: Look, you can make it and you can manage it so it’s essentially a nuisance, not a major strategic problem. Right now, I do think that the al Qaeda the threat to the United States is not on the strategic level. It’s more on the tactical level. Even if this guy had succeeded on that plane, that would have been a very, very, very big deal. I’m not sure it would have been a 9/11 style event.

Maybe in the post-9/11 world, it would have been, but we’ve had American planes blow up, kill a lot of passengers, Pan Am 103 back in 1988. That didn’t reorient completely American foreign policy. So what we — winning looks like — terrorism is going to be with us forever. The question is, is it our major national strategic problem or is it a second order threat. That’s, I think, a reasonably possible scenario.

KING: Jack, can we preempt it?

RICE: No. I don’t think that you can win this war. I think it’s a false premise, really. In the end, in my mind, this is a whole series of battles, one after the other. And those battles take out the bad guys, in one sense, but it’s also to convince the rest of the Muslim world, 1.2 plus billion people or more, that we’re not there to kill the rest of them. So it’s about motivating them to at least step up for their own benefit, not just our own. It’s one series of battles after another. And to take out their capability is really what’s important.

Peter is absolutely right when it comes to that it’s always reactive.

KING: Harvey, it’s always reactive though, right? They’re the offense. They know where they’re going. We have to react to where they’re going, right?

KUSHNER: That’s absolutely right. To things to extend what Peter and Jack said. I agree with Peter. We should be able to limit it. I agree with Jack when we mentioned identified what he said Muslim — and all 1.5 billion Muslims are not our enemy.

We’re not at war with a concept. We’re not at war with terrorism, just like we were not at war with kamikazes or with blitzkrieg. We have to identify who the enemy is and narrowly define it. In that case, we probably then can peel it away and win that part of it.

But it’s going to be a difficult process, because, unfortunately, most of the people who perform terrorist acts against American assets, both here and abroad, also have a common variable, and that is this Islamic fact. There lies the problem. We’re not at war with Islam, but we’re at war with a certain portion of that. We have to surgically remove that in order to contain it.

KING: Larry, what do you think?

JOHNSON: Well, I think we’re in a better position today than we were on August 1st, 2001. We have a lot of talented men and women, both in the military and the CIA and the FBI, that are working together in some areas, have gone out and debilitated and destroyed key al Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalist targets. That needs to keep up.

Peter is exactly right. I like to think more of managing crabgrass. It may never go away, but you can certainly keep it from taking over your yard and creating a complete danger for everybody. Some of these crazies will always be there. We’ve seen them over- reach. When they tried to kill the Saudis, the Saudis then step up their efforts to against these people. When they go into Pakistan and they kill more Pakistanis, the Pakistani government, which for years was an enabler of some of these people, they helped step up the retaliation. Finally, we’re seeing the same in Yemen.

I think we’re moving in the right direction. It’s important to keep up. Not saying it’s military or law enforcement. This isn’t a light beer commercial. It’s both. Let’s do everything.

KING: We’re going to have all of them back, Peter Bergen, Jack Rice, Harvey Kushner, Dr. Kushner, and Larry C. Johnson. President Obama makes a pledge to Americans. We’ll hear it in 60 seconds.