Reported as flying at low levels around the urban areas to demonstrate a show of force. Thats politically difficult for the host government because, as you know, the drone strikes have created some domestic tension. So in terms of being able to demonstrate to the u. S. That they are serious, those are steps that are confidence building measures. Ted jada cople has coppel has written, americas chronic overreaction to terrorism, we had excerpts. But the countrys capacity for selfinflicted damage must astounded even Osama Bin Laden. There is always the nightmare of acquiring, terrorists acquiring weapons of mass destruction, but nothing would give the terrorists enemies greater satisfaction than that we focus obsessively on the remote possibility and restrict our lives and our liberties accordingly. Guest this is always a difficult debate. I think that if we step back d look at it since 9 11, the United States, even though were one of the most open and free countries has remained, frankly, open and free. We have continued to have super bowls. We continue to have our people travel abroad. We have robust trade with our allies around the world. So this type of limited action, i would use an analogy of its like a hurricane. We have some weather forecasting that says will is going to be a potential storm. Were battening down the hatches in a few limiting places. If the storm passes, great, but this administration is leaning forward in a way that i think is professionally responsible and theyre being advised by not just their political advisors, but also by the c. I. A. , one of the old agencies, this is an example of a limited response. Its broader than many other actions we have taken, but to be honest, its temporary and well see here it becomes perpetual, koppel has a point. If its a short term battening down the hatches before a activity hurricane, thats the proper action. Host chad worked on wall street from Goldman Sachs and morgan stanley. I want to go back to the issue of the chatter that we have these references to. Some had indicated including a senator from georgia on sundays meet the press, it was reminiscent of the chatter pre9 11. A lot has changed from then to today. Can you explain . Guest a couple of things have changed. One is, what is similar that we have been receiving a number of indications, a number of signs and part of the intelligence world is you never get perfect information. Youre looking for patterns that give you early indications and warnings. If we step back, not only to 9 11 but just a year ago before benghazi, you look for and you see patterns. On 9 11 we had indications indicating method of attack. There were reports specifically of planes flying into building. Just over a year ago, we had repeated protests out of multiple countries, egypt, libya, syria, leading up to and crescendoing into the death of our ambassador in benghazi unfortunately on the anniversary of 9 11 of last year. This year were seeing a similar pattern. Were seeing a confluence of prison breaks in libya, britain breaks in syria, britain breaks in iraq, all of which have totaled over 2,000 hard core terrorists back on the playing battlefield. That signature combined with the intelligence that were receiving including direct communications between al qaeda headquarters instructing al qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to attack, that confluence of patterns certainly suggests that the u. S. Needs to be taking a more aggressive security possess ewe. Thats what were seeing now. Host let get your reaction, the charges have been filed, one libya mitchia leader has hilitia, how stoont is this . What it enables us to do is now th criminal prosecution in place, we have plenty to go with the libyans and ask for extradition of individuals that we are tracking and now that we believe have committed a crime. To have a did cooperate. Host you can join the conversation on twitter and facebook. Bob is joining us from carson city, nevada. Ood morning. Caller hello . Host youre on the air. Caller the terrorists have done nothing compared to the terrorists in washington, d. C. The only thing that is going to start making sense is having a constitutional amendment limiting corporations, political contributions to 2,000 apiece. Host ok. A little bit off topic unless you want to respond to that. Lets go next to rico joining us from michigan. Renteria line, good morning. Caller hi. I think the American People are idiots. You say that we can go to super bowls and travel overseas and yet you have the t. S. A. Looking up our ass at the airports. Youre reaction to the t. S. A. Part . First of all, i certainly appreciate that sometimes security somebody creates limited inconvenience. Our colleagues at the t. S. A. Fulfill a very Important Mission and i would just ask rico the question that when i was at d. H. S. When people complained about t. S. A. , we have to do our best to make them better. They have consistently improved in the overall professionalism. When you think about it, their mission is to keep you and me safe. If i asked you the hypothetical question, what if we had two airlines. One is called no Security Airlines and one is called t. S. A. , you have a choice of which one you want to fly. You can take whatever risk you want. Which one are you going to put your children on . I think at the end of the day, most people are going to say that they would prefer the peace of mind of knowing that after terrorists have devastated over and over and over again that airlines are one of their primarily targets, most people will appreciate that the mission of the t. S. A. Is important and that they would elect to go on that airlines. Every time i get on, i turn to them and say as long as theyre respectful, and 99 of them are, our response to the t. S. Folks should be thanks for protecting us. Our guest is chad sweet, cofounder and ceo of the chertoff group. I want to get are your reaction to this story based on the reporting of abc news that al qaeda may have developed a new form of explosion, a liquid explosives and essentially the technique allows you to dip clothes into a liquid that would make the textile explosive upon drawing and one official calling it ingenious. Guest its a great place where we cant underestimate our enemy. Al qaeda, whenever we create a measure, they do a countermeasure its this back and forth between them. The group when we were in government, we invested in technologies and procedures to try to foil explosives and outside of government we do, are actively involved with people in that sector. What ill tell you is that right now, what we saw after the underwear bomber in 2009 was finally it took that incident, which was unfortunate where almost 300 americans died over the city of detroit, only then was it political well to see we need to use 21st Century Technology which we have against the terrorists. So if you look at it right now in a world where they only have to be right 1 of the time, we have to right 100 of time on defense, we should use one of our few advantages which is technology. The vast majority of explosive detection systems in place today arent capable of detecting either this type of clothing soaked in liquid explosives nor are they capable of detecting even a bottom in the body, the surgically implanted ones or even something as basic as the underwear bomber. Why is that . Most of these magnetometers, they detect metal. That is not the explosive itself. Its usually the only metal involved is the detonator. So if youre able to design explosives with no metal detector, metal detonator, you effectively invade that system. So were living in the stone ages on most of the technology were using. We need to use our wide advantage which is to bring forward this modern advanced Imaging Technology to allow us to level the playing field. The last thing i would say in response to your last caller, i know that the invasiveness that t. S. A. Sometimes hard to do during patdowns, much of that could be avoided, much of the inconvenience could be avoided if we embraced and used more robustly the best technology we have available. For you personally when you think about this topic, whether its implanting a device inside your body, liquid explosives, where do they come up with these ideas . Who is behind it . Well, they are very creative. What is challenging is theyre not just tapping the minds of one crazy person in one part of the world. They have developed a network. One of the dark sides of the internet is you are able to through the internet gather and Exchange Ideas with each other over vast areas. So the mastermind of most of the bombs that we have been tracking is a gentleman who was e architect of the underwear bombs, we believe he was also the architect of the bomb in body bomb that was used in 2007 to attempt to assassinate the inistry of interior of saudi arabias head. So they are the leading edge of bombmaking in the world and we set up all over the globe, its a combined explosives exploitation cell. s a way for us, whenever an i. E. D. Goes off if the world, we have a joint task force to get the forensic off that sites. We were able to track a variety of different things. Each bomb, there are elements of the bomb that reveal signatures of who made it. So at the end of the day, to answer your question, the creativity that is being driven here, they got a network that theyre using among many people, we got a network to do things with our own collaboration with our allies. Thats how were going to win this fight, a network to beat a network. You have to have the full value and experience of all of the network that we can bring to bear. Host this program is carried live on cspan radio heard coast to coast. We welcome the audience on radio. Our guest is chad sweet, cofounder and ceo of the chertoff group. He worked at the department of Homeland Security and also the chief of staff there and the director of operations at the c. I. A. Susan is joining us from fort myers, florida, thanks for waiting. Caller am i confused that the emen government did send the president directly, mr. Clinton a wire of some sorts saying they had a highvalue target there. He cannot act on it because of our relationship with the yemen government. There were basically, in a way asking them to come get him . Guest think you for your question. I am not aware of that specific cable. I do know that Osama Bin Laden was in a different neighboring country. After evaluation of options, president clinton did elect to send a Cruise Missile into sudan which did take care of the facility where it was believed to be hold up. He was not aware there. Im not aware of that particular cable from the yemeni government. Host comment on our twitter page guest a great point jim is making. Basically, you are right. In many ways it is. T has now been revealed we were listening in on the communications between the eader of the team. What that unfortunately showed is its revealed that most likely we had their cell phone or email communications that enabled us to do that. The revelation of that, not only the method but the specific individuals talking means we have now burned that source. You could imagine how tough it is to get the direct communication of the top leaders of your adversary and in our world of the c. I. A. , that would be the gold mine. Anyone that close to getting that close to the top leadership would be commended and is a gold mine. Unfortunately we have just shut off that gold minute and burnt that source. We will no longer be able to use them in future operations. They are going quiet on those lines and move to different sources. Very damaging revelation that the communication, if its true, was these two individuals. The second point is it is disconcerting because if you look at the sensitive side the exploitation that we got out of the compound when we took down bin laden, what you will see is two college like of thumb drives and computers with data that came out of that compound. You see a correspondence and a dialogue between bin laden and his lieutenants. This represents 1. 0. Basically communicating to the lieutenants, dont attempt these low level attacks. You need to focus on more of what i did, more of the iconic igh level attacks like 9 11. Basically folks in yemen said, no, no, we need to get points on the board. We need to show the world were still around. There was a heated debate between the older generation and Younger Generation. As long as bin laden was there, he had a hold over there and ironically as a governor on their behavior. Now that he is gone, this communication that just happened represents a significant shift. The replacement for bin laden is more or less conceding that the Younger Generation is right, that he is going to go ahead and use al qaeda in the pen anyone sewella as one of his primary operational arms and basically rewarding them for these more low level attacks like the underwear bomber, like the printer cartridges and like potentially the attempted assassination of the minister of interior in audi arabia. Host were you aware of this n. S. A. Phone data collection, the metta data operation . Uest i was not. Caller my comment is everyone is mad about the tsa, but i love them. Yes, it is an inconvenience but would you rather be in the air at 10,000 feet, 5,000 feet, whatever it is and your plane blow up . Yes, they need an overhaul of the system, but we need them. Guest think you for that point. You are exactly right. We all have to have certain things to keep us safe. Some people might not like to stop at red light and an intersection, but we recognize if youre mature that we need some way of coordinating car traffic at an intersection. Some tradeoffs in convenience are necessary for Public Safety. Your point is exactly right, which is very few people would want a complete no security approach to the most repeated threat factors of al qaeda. The question isnt whether we should have some security. Its how can we make it better. You said it very well. Theres an opportunity to make a better in terms of continued investment and professionals, and also, an opportunity to make the check points of the future better. There are ways that technology can be used so you dont have to take off your shoes. You dont have to take off your jacket. You can go through with mascara or a coat if youre a man. Those technologies are there, but we have to be willing to embrace and deploy them. Bringing us back to todays discussion, one of the reasons i think this administration leaned forward on closing down temporarily some of these embassies is they dont have some of those technicalologist today configured into all of those facilities. If the threat stream that were getting is that there is a surgically implanted bomb, what they need time to do is what we did after the underwear bomber is forward deploy more of those advanced imaging technicalologist that in fact either do trace detection of the explosive or actually do the imaging below the clothing and into the body to see if there is an explosive on a erson. Host lets give a 10year comparison of the department of Homeland Security. It essentially put together 22 federal agencies, an estimateded 180,000 employees of budget back in 2003 36 billion. Today 240,000 employees in the budget of nearly 60 billion. This is a huge department. Guest it is. What is a little bit not understood, though. It wasnt that those were just growing. Those were actually separated into different agencies. It was a little bit frightening. If i can use the analogy, i played football in southeast texas. Its almost like we had a team of Football Players running around on the field with no coach. What the 9 11 commission identified was because we did not have the agencies on the home team coordinated, we needed a quarterback. That is the whole role of the the department of Homeland Security is. It brings together all of the different agencies that have equities in defending the homeland into one team and under one coach. The size of the organization candidly shouldnt be shocking. All it was taking the existing pieces, every one of those pieces was there already. We brought them together for better coordination. Host independent line with chad sweet, formerly with the department of Homeland Security and the c. I. A. Go ahead, eddie. Caller i have a question about the tsa stuff. They keep saying we need this. The problem is you stop one or two things, but youre taking and putting the whole country you keep referring to people going through an intersection at a stop sign, they have a choice. Go to a different street. And you do not have that on an airplane. We dont have two airlines like you suggested. If we did, i would take the other one. You make it too much trouble to go through and get on an airplane. You are not at war against us, you are at war against the people over there. Thats what you all have to realize. Thats the only comment i have. Host thanks for the call. Guest again, i appreciate his perspective. I fundamentally disagree. If you use the street intersection and the street lights, it is not the option in your town if you go to a streetlight and did not like it, you can drive around and go to another intersection. That may have a stop sign. The fundamental issue around Public Safety is there. They are not there to inconvenience you or me. They are there to protect us. I will agree with you on, though, is we want to make it at least inconvenient as possible. There are means, as i mentioned before, that we can do that. Another thing if you will see is director pistol has introduced the precheck. I would highly encourage you to consider signing up. It is voluntary. No one has to do it. It enables us to bring in additional tools that we have that are riskbased screening. If you are willing to provide more information about yourself, you could be essentially it like a trusted traveler program. That type of 21st Century Technology and process is exactly the way we can make the airport safe and more convenient. Host another screening question from one of our viewers. With all of the information that is collected, you still need to have american shoes, referring to the shoes coming off as you go through that Screening Office at airports . Guest that is right. Today there are technologies that can help detect explosives in shoes, right now those technologies have not been deployed. It is not an easy challenge to fix. We saw the bomber in the regional incident. When reed did it the first time, that is what