For Immediate Release

January 2, 2000

TRANSCRIPT
Fox News Sunday Interview

        Interviewers:
        TONY SNOW, HOST,
        BILL O'REILLY, FOX NEWS

        Guests:
        U.S. REP. NORM DICKS (D-WA),
        NEIL C. LIVINGSTONE, TERRORISM EXPERT
        MICHAEL LEDEEN, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE

WASHINGTON, D.C. – [Intro]  TONY SNOW: Boris Yeltsin rings in the new year by saying, ``I quit.'' Is that good news or bad news for an apprehensive world?   We'll ask foreign policy whiz Senator Richard Lugar.    Our new year's fireworks didn't include terrorist bombings. Did our security agencies come through, or was the threat just a bunch of hype? We'll discuss the future of terrorism with experts Neil Livingston, Representative Norm Dicks and Michael Ledeen.

        [COMMERCIAL BREAK -- Followed by interview of Senator Lugar]

        TONY SNOW: Despite dire predictions and fears, terrorists did not go berserk on Y2K. But what about the future? Are our fears of terrorism real or just hype? Here with answers are Representative Norm Dicks, terrorism expert Neil Livingstone, and Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute.   All right, Norm Dicks, let's begin with Seattle. Did the mayor of Seattle overreact?

        NORM DICKS: Well, I give it kind of a mixed review. I wish they had gone ahead with the celebrations. But I worried whether we had adequate security. After the fiasco with the WTO, I think the mayor and the city council made a wise judgment. I think the people out there support what he did.   However, I do want to commend the Customs Service people at Port Angeles, Washington, who were alert and captured Mr. Ressam. That stopped a very substantial amount of highly explosive material from getting into the United States. So that was a success.

        TONY SNOW: Mike Ledeen, there was a lot of speculation before this that there would be terrorists incidents: New York, Washington, Los Angeles, all around the world, and we got bupkis. Now is this a tribute to the skill of security forces around the world?

        MICHAEL LEDEEN: Well, we do have a tendency to underrate the talents of our security people. I mean FBI, CIA do a much better job than they're generally credited with. But the fact is that there is a much less of a risk of terrorism today than there was 15, 20 years ago. I mean 15, 20 years ago we had the Soviet empire. It was financing, training, arming, smuggling, equipping terrorists all over the world, plus all the satellite countries, plus rich Iraq, rich Libya and Iran and so forth.  And today the Soviet empire is gone. Iraq is a shadow of what it was. Iran has less money to spend. Libya actually looks like it's in fear of terrorism itself.   So there's less terrorism today. And we're less at risk today than we were in the past. And I found frankly all the rhetoric and all the fear talk and all the how-to-do-it shows on the media forecasting scenarios of chemical weapons attacks in Washington and so forth to be a bit irresponsible and quite overblown.

        TONY SNOW: So are we better off now than we were 10 years ago, Neil?

        NEIL LIVINGSTONE:  Well, I think in some ways we are, but in other ways we're not.  It's the good news-bad news story.  The players have changed.  There is less state sponsorship, as Michael says, than there used to be.  But we have new governments emerging and providing safe haven for terrorists like Osama bin Laden, the fellow that we believe was the mastermind behind the bombings of our embassies in East Africa.  He has safe haven in Afghanistan today.   And we persist with this list of State Department, if you will, the usual suspects. The list of countries that support terrorism. A lot of those -- there are a number of those countries that shouldn't on the list anymore. And we've got some new state sponsors emerging.

        TONY SNOW: So is it your sense that it's state sponsorship, or is terrorism becoming more of a private enterprise these days?

        NEIL LIVINGSTONE: It's becoming more of a private enterprise, but they still need safe haven, they still need governments, they still need some place to retire to and to train and things like that. So we're seeing more individual players, guys like bin Laden who have enormous fortunes, who can pursue whatever private vendetta they have.

        TONY SNOW: Norm Dicks, on the day Monica testified, we were trying to strike Osama bin Laden. We missed him. Is it naive to think that American forces could come in and wipe out somebody like that? Or is that something we can and should think about doing?

        NORM DICKS: Well, we could do it. I mean, covert action is one possibility against certain terrorist organizations. And we have -- since the failure in the desert during the Carter administration, we have substantially enhanced our capability to use military force. But you've got to have the cooperation of the other countries.   And I want to second the notion that we're moving now to a era in which you have small entities coming up to do terrorist actions. We found the group in New York that was going to go after the subway, by a wiretap -- a legal wiretap. This was a group that was an individual effort. This may well have been the same thing with this Algerian thing.

        TONY SNOW: But what would -- kind of signals would the administration send when we talk about terrorism and, yet, the State Department refused repeated requests for greater security in Nairobi, at our embassy there, which was the victim of a bombing, and we let go a group of people that the FBI and our other security agencies say are terrorists?

        NORM DICKS: Well, I think the government actions have been, kind of, mixed. First, I do think that creation of a counter-terrorism office at the FBI is a solid step.   We have an NSC terrorism coordinator. You know, we've passed the Anti-Terrorism Act, which allows us to turn back people at the border if there is suspicion that they are affiliated with a terrorist group, or have been in the past.  So I think we've taken some actions that have been positive. The State Department budget is a disaster. That's one of the reasons why they don't have adequate security, and that's something that we in the Congress have got to correct.

        TONY SNOW: Is that Congress's fault or the administration?

        NORM DICKS: I think it's both. I think the State Department simply has not gotten the support that it should. It has had to dismantle a lot of its organizations around the world. I think that's a serious mistake. And security has been -- has been threatened by that.

        TONY SNOW: How important is defense, Michael Ledeen, that people afraid of us using? If you recall, when the hostage crisis ended at the end of the Carter and begin -- on inauguration day for Ronald Reagan there was fear, by the Ayatollah Khomeini, that Reagan was going to send jets over there. Credible defense, how important is that in suppressing terrorist threats?

        MICHAEL LEDEEN: Well, nothing's changed for 20 years so far as I can tell, except this ghastly terrorism bill that was passed by this administration, which...

        TONY SNOW: Hold on; ghastly why?

        MICHAEL LEDEEN: Because it creates these star chambers where people are accused of things: they never see evidence, they don't know what they're accused of, they're thrown out of the country.  I mean, if we have evidence against people we should introduce it. We shouldn't just say, ``Well, we made a mistake and let you in the country and we're throwing you out, we won't tell you why.''   But on the defense question, I mean, here's an administration that has bombed an aspirin factory in Sudan which turns out to have nothing to do with the price of eggs.   What's wrong here is the same thing that's been wrong all along: Our intelligence capacity stinks, and we still have this insane executive order that forbids us to get involved in active reprisals against the groups that commit terrorist acts. We still can't do it.

        TONY SNOW: Bill?

        BILL O'REILLY: Well, Tony, I wrote a piece in ``The Wall Street Journal'' the other day, and I said that one of the things we really need is to make the cost of terrorism greater. What we've never done is really explicitly say there is a cost for killing any American any place in the world and make sure that we follow through.  We're going through this charade right now in -- where we have two accused Libyan terrorists who were allegedly part of the bombing conspiracy against Pan Am 103, the largest terrorist attack the United States ever suffered. And we're going to allow them to be put on trial in The Hague, rather than continue to punish that government -- if indeed it's the culprit -- and to go after these individual terrorists.

        TONY SNOW: Norm Dicks, I want to get your reaction, first on what Michael Ledeen said about the Anti-Terrorist Act and then to what...

        NORM DICKS: Well, I think we're doing a much better job. Both the CIA and the FBI have an anti-counterterrorism center, which is good. We have enhanced the money and the resources that the administration has.   I think the president would take direct military action, as we did against bin Laden's efforts. And I think that needs to be done. I think we need to have a strong message out there that the United States isn't going to tolerate its citizens, either here or internationally, being targeted. And we need to back that up.

        TONY SNOW: Going back to what Michael Ledeen said at the very beginning, though, if terrorism is not as pronounced a threat, if you don't have as much state-sponsored terrorism, why should we be so worried about this?

        NORM DICKS: Well, the CRS differs with him. I just read a report this morning...

        TONY SNOW: The Congressional Research Service.

        NORM DICKS: ...Yes, CRS -- in that terrorist acts against Americans are up substantially. And the number of killings, the number of incidents are up. So I take this differently than Mike does.  I think this is a growing problem. I think it's going to be -- as far as I'm concerned, I'm not worried about national missile defense; we're going to know when an ICBM is launched. It's terrorism that is more difficult to pursue and to deal with as a government...

        TONY SNOW: So, are you in Congress going to say, we're going to spend more money on defense and forces and people are going to be able to get involved in this?

        NORM DICKS: I think we should. I think we need -- I think terrorism is a growing threat to the United States because of our military force, our superiority in those areas. It gives other countries an asymmetrical opportunity, and we haven't talked much about chemical, biological or nuclear weapons which are the weapons of the future, that if these terrorist groups get, you're talking about mass vulnerability of American citizens. So I think it's serious.

        TONY SNOW: OK. Norm Dicks, Mike Ledeen, Neil Livingstone, thank you so much. We're going to take another break. When we return: the Reverend Billy Graham.

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