Stay updated with breaking news from Beyond boston. Get real-time updates on events, politics, business, and more. Visit us for reliable news and exclusive interviews.
>> a last thought on how we engage citizens. how do we better protect ourselves and use the virtues of a free society? >> two things i think about. one that's happening already. first, the engagement with especially immigrant communities can't come at the back end of the investigation. the front end has to be law enforcement going to talk to people. in community centers, making people understand that the security services they see here are not like the security services they saw at home. the second, and this may sound radical, i would be considering calling the mother of those terrorists. there's four grieving parents in boston who lost children. there's a fifth in chechnya. i'm not saying this because it represents a velvet glove. it's a steel fist. to tell anybody who wants to do this, we're going to bring everybody into the tent, including the mother who lost one kid and might lose another, who were terrorists, and we're going to tell them we all grieve together as a family. >> jessica, what would you ask this young man?
you're going to have some give and take. but we have strong working relationships. and we are proud of that. we work to have that. >> alienated young men, is the easy accessibility of guns and other instruments of destruction something that worries you? >> absolutely. we are concerned -- we sent a team to mumbai and we got very granule information very quickly. that's what we do with our officers assigned throughout the world. go to the scenes of terrorist events and go to bring us information that may better protect the city. if you look at the events in mumbai they were done with simple weapons and clearly we know in this country, the proliferation of weapons we have 300 million guns that are abroad in our country. yes, it's a concern. if you look at the bombs that were used in boston, very simple to make.
doing one's job and not making a fuss. but beyond boston, we americans may have come to realize, finally, that the most important counterterrorism program out there is resilience. things were different after 9/11. that was a much larger attack raising much larger concerns. many of the things that followed, security measures, the overthrow of the taliban, were necessary. but others in retrospect were not. the homeland security bureaucracy shutting down travel, turning it into an expanding war on terror. osama bin laden saw the rational from 9/11 in precisely the overreaction it produced among americans and he said so on several occasions. resilience is partly a matter of character, but it's also one of public policy. steven flynn, a scholar at northeastern university who has written widely about this,
but as an investment the market is telling us to be cautious which is very good news. when we come back, the boston terror attacks again. the chechen connection, the use of ieds. can we truly protect soft targets? i have a great panel of experts who have worked at the cia, homeland security, the national security council. stay with us. everybody has different investment objectives, ideas, goals, appetite for risk. you can't say 'one size fits all'. it doesn't. that's crazy. we're all totally different. ishares core. etf building blocks for your personalized portfolio. find out why 9 out of 10 large professional investors
bulk of the u.s. economy relies. we must strengthen recovery in the event of a biological attack which is the most worrying threat out there. we need to make sure the public understands the nature of these threats and how it can help identify and respond to them. above all, it needs to understand how not to respond to them. when bad things happen, it is easy to react out of fear, emotion and anger. let's hope in boston this week we begin to chart a different course. for more on this, you can read my column in a special edition of "time" on the tragedy in boston. let's get started. joining me now the man who runs the biggest police force in america and one of the country's best terror counterterror and intelligence division. ray kelly the commissioner of
don't have to fight them here. >> clearly now with the recognition that these kinds of attacks are so much more difficult to prevent and the response is inevitably local, investing in local to deal with it seems to be key. we put national treasure into the war overseas. we now have to think about reallocated that to some capability here at home. >> when all is said and done, the way events played out in boston, as tragic as they are, are really a model in terms of the way the people of boston reacted, in the way that the agencies of government, local and federal, did. these were two guys with a bunch of extra pipe bombs and extra one of these extra types of explosives, grenades, and they tragically killed another police officer, nearly killed another one, but it ended about as well as we'd like. that has to say something about the quality of our responses. it's very easy in hindsight to say we could have done this and this differently. it was a model for how something like this should go down.
beyond boston we americans may have come to realize finally that the most important counterterrorism program out there is resilience. things were different after 9/11. it was a much larger attack, raising larger concerns. many things that followed, security measures, overthrow of the taliban were necessary. but others in retrospect were not. the vast homeland security bureaucracy, shutting down travel, turning counterterrorism in to ill-defined and ever expanding war on terror. osama bin laden show saw rationale from 9/11 and the reaction it produced from american hurricanes said so on several occasions. resilience is hardly a matter of character but it is also one of public policy. stephen flynn who was written widely about this argues despite the billions spent we never made it a priority.
let's remember those victims, too as we continue to focus on the boston bombings. joining me now a very intelligent panel on intelligence and terror. in washington philip mudd, former director of the krais's counterterrorism center and stephen flynn has been anned a vief to barack obama and george w. bush. jessica stern served 0 president clinton's national security council staff and is now at the harvard school of public health and bret stevens won a pulitzer prize for thiz excellent columns in the "wall street journal." thank you all. >> when you watched the response to what happened in boston, what were your thoughts in terms of our ability to handle these kinds of attacks. >> it was impressive and it drove home a core realism about the nature of dealing with terrorism attack when they manifest themselves. it is the bystanders, neighbors,
however, this was text book terrorism. the plan was to frighten us. terrorism is an unusual tactic in that it depends for its success on the response of the onlooker. that's why people have often said about terrorists they want a few people dead and a lot of people watching. if we who watch are not terrorized, then almost by definition it didn't work. on that count, how did we do? pretty well. the people of boston handled the crisis with calm and determination. the authorities did shut down most of the city on friday for the manhunt. a decision that could be debated, but the people of boston stayed steady and are already getting back to normal. i spent seven years living in boston and i was struck by the city and the people's strength of character. they have a tough new england spirit. a that comprises doing one's job and not making a fuss.