No Government Takeover of Public Safety!

You remember Richard Clarke. He was the counter-terrorism adviser to Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and (briefly) George W. Bush. He’s the guy who implored the second Bush Administration in January of 2001 to keep a close eye on Al Qaeda, and move forward with measures to that effect which were still in place from the recently departed Clinton administration. In response, the Bush administration blew off Clarke’s warnings and demoted him to non-cabinet level status.

photo: Aude/Wikimedia Commons

He was later made Special Adviser to the President on cybersecurity, but resigned from the G.W. Bush administration in 2003. A year later Clarke testified before the 9/11 Commission; the Bush White House, knowing that his testimony would reveal their fuck-ups, undertook one of their trademark Karl Rove-style campaigns of character assassination. Some would disagree, but I believe an objective eye would conclude that the smear tactics damaged the Bush administration’s credibility far more than Clarke’s.

These days, Clarke runs a security consulting firm and serves as an adjunct lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. This past Monday he was interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air, principally about his new book Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It.¹ After describing the serious threat posed by internet-based attacks, Clarke had this to say about the present state of our defenses against such attacks:

CLARKE: …Now, who’s defending us? Who’s defending those pipelines and those railroads and the banks? The Obama Administration’s answer pretty much is, “You’re on your own.” [The Pentagon's] Cyber Command will defend our military. Homeland Security will someday have the capability to defend the rest of the civilian government — it doesn’t today. But everybody else will have to do their own defense.

That is a formula that will not work in the face of sophisticated threats.

GROSS: When you’re saying everybody else is on their own, does that include the electricity grid, the power grid, banking…?

CLARKE: Yes. What the Obama Administration is saying, and what the Bush people said before that, is, “The private sector doesn’t want the government defending it. The private sector doesn’t want the government telling it what to do. Therefore we will have, sort of, vague guidelines that suggest what the electric power grid should do, but we won’t really go out and do anything.” And if an attack happens, the government has no ability to stand up and do anything about saving the power grid.

GROSS: Why not?

CLARKE: Because of this philosophy that the government shouldn’t be defending the private sector, and a belief that the private sector doesn’t want to be defended by the government. Now, I think that belief is wrong. When I talk to CEO’s in the private sector, they say, “Heck, this is why I pay my taxes!” No one would have said in World War II, to U.S. Steel, “You’ve got some big steel factories in Pittsburgh. If the Nazi bombers come over, you’d better have some of your own guns to shoot them down.”

Sure, the CEO’s want their systems to be protected by the government — hell, I want our infrastructure protected by the government. Clarke’s only mistake here is to whom he ascribes the belief in this ludicrous no-defense philosophy: that mindset comes from the knee-jerk conservative teabaggers and the politicians on that bandwagon. The Obama White House is apparently too scared of being called “Big Government” or being accused of “taking over” private industry by crowds of morons carrying misspelled signs with Lipton teabags stapled to them.

photo: Flickr/Pargon

Terry Gross finished out the interview with a further query to Clarke regarding the current foaming-at-the-mouth political atmosphere. She pointed out that the day they were taping the interview (April 19) was the anniversary of the starting of the American Revolution with the battles of Lexington and Concord, but more ominously, also the anniversary of the end of the siege at Waco and of the Oklahoma City bombing. She asked Clarke what his feelings were about there being, as they spoke, several well-publicized anti-government rallies taking place, including one in Virginia with a pro-second-amendment emphasis to which attendees were urged to bring their guns.

CLARKE: Most of us who own guns are perfectly normal human beings who have those guns for legitimate reasons. But there is a small percentage of people who own guns that I find very scary, and they are the ideological remnants of the Ku Klux Klan, and the ideological remnants of the John Birch Society.

Throughout our history we’ve had right-wing people who say they don’t like the U.S. Government, they want to take down the U.S. Government, they think violence against the U.S. Government is OK. Since the election of Barack Obama these people have grown in volume, and I think they’ve grown in number. We have to remember, when we worry about Al-Qaida and foreign threats, that the second-largest and second-most destructive terrorist attack in our history, inside our borders, was done by these people. American, extreme right-wing, anti-government, violent people.

I think the United States has a serious threat today from those people, because legitimate public officials are egging them on. Legitimate public officials who are conservative, and who are Republican, aren’t criticizing them, or aren’t criticizing them enough. We need to de-legitimize these people, or we will have another Oklahoma City.