E-mail a friendTaye Diggs
airdate July 19, 2004
Actor Taye Diggs had a love of performing even in high school in Rochester, NY. He's since gone from being a cast member at Tokyo Disneyland to stardom on stage, TV and the big screen. He earned his Broadway chops in the Tony Award-winning productions of Carousel and Rent. Diggs won his debut film role in How Stella Got Her Groove Back even though the casting directors wanted a tall Black man with dreads. Diggs says he never takes his success for granted.
Taye Diggs
Tavis: How is it possible that so little is being done, after all that's been said, so little is being done? How is that possible?
Flynn: Well, I think there's a couple of big reasons for it. One is that it's very complicated to accomplish. You know, we spent almost two centuries in this country living in the most peaceful corner of the planet. We had friendly neighbors to the north and south, big oceans east and west, and the extent to which we had to think about security was something we dealt with overseas.
So, obviously, that was especially the case in the twentieth century. We had this forward defense. We put our troops overseas in bases in the soil of our allies. We contained our enemies. And so, we basically have been seduced into believing that we can protect our security as an away game.
Now, 9/11 happened, the terrorists were here. They used our own infrastructure against us, in this case commercial airliners; and a lot of the fallout, the expense and cost were things that we inflicted on ourselves post the event. Those struck me as the things we should be focusing on in part.
It's not an either/or, defense or offense. But we still seem to be seduced into believing that if we just get it right, we can take the terrorists out at the source as if there were a central front, or if we can somehow just shape the international environment and make people...make them like us more, that this will all go away.
The core reality is that we are dependent upon a critical infrastructure, the systems that underpin our modern life that are wide open and attractive for terrorists who are intent on causing mass disruption and inflicting real pain on the United States. And we haven't addressed that agenda.
Tavis: I want to move on here. Before I do, though, since you used the word seduced a couple of times, if we're being seduced, it seems to me we're being seduced by something or somebody. Who's the seducer?
Flynn: Well, I think in this case it's just that we haven't changed our mindset, that, having sort of got into this habit of viewing security as an out-of-body experience managed for us by a federal government, it's been very hard for both the federal government to change its spots on this and hard for the people to adjust to the fact that this is a new reality as well. And you pick up some of the burden that goes with that.
So, it's--I really say it's a failure across the board. The 9/11 Commission's gonna come out this week and say that 9/11 was a national failure. You know, I'm arguing we're continuing to fail. And I do squarely put our government collectively--and this is both sides of the aisle that haven't really been confronting this reality of addressing our vulnerability-- that this has somehow been lost, and I think we've gotta get it right. I say we're living on borrowed time, and we're squandering it.
Tavis: What's the impact, you think, going to be, or the fallout, as it were, from this 9/11 Commission report later this week? I mean, we've been reading already that this commission is determined not to just let this be another report that ends up on the desk of members of Congress and the White House, but they in fact are lobbying. They're gonna go on the offensive here, speaking of offense, to actually get these changes made in the law. What's your sense of what the fallout, the impact, is going to be of this commission's report?
Flynn: Well, I think the commission obviously took its job very seriously. I think it's great that it sounds like they've achieved bipartisan consensus. And I think it certainly was vital that they did the job they did, which was to go back and look at, 'Why did this happen, how did it happen, what could've been done differently, and what do we need to do today?' And every evidence is that this commission did that job with great seriousness. And so I hope we do take their lessons very seriously.
I think where I might differ a little bit, as it steps forward, is their focus, the primary recommendation. I have not seen the report, just, as many others, the preliminaries that they released. But they're calling for this intelligence focus. I'm all for getting the intelligence house in order, but I'm here to say that that's gonna be another 10 years before we get intelligence right, that we get good intelligence about the kind of threat we're facing. I worry that we get focused on the intelligence issue and, again, distracted from the fact that part of the reason why terrorism is the new warfare-- And I suggest to you that's what we're talking about. The United States this year will spend more than the next 30 nations combined on conventional military power. There's no parallel for that in history.
That says to me about three possibilities about the future of warfare: one, you have very dumb adversaries who take that stuff on; two, war is obsolete; or three, war changes. What we saw in 9/11 was war changing, going after the nonmilitary elements of our power--the infrastructure, the civil society. And that's where we're not adapting to. And so, yes, by all means, it would've been nice to prevent 9/11. It would be nice to have our intelligence in order. It'd be better to have our military more adaptive to deal with this kind of threat, but we have to walk and chew gum at the same time. We have to deal with what we can shape in the international environment, and we also have to deal with our core vulnerability here at home as well.
Tavis: I wonder whether or not some of the futility that we feel as Americans--indeed, the futility that the government apparently must feel on some level--has to do with the fact, to your earlier point, this is such an awesome task, such an awesome responsibility we have to protect our shores and that maybe the difficulty, Dr. Flynn, is that the country is just too big to ever ensure that we're not going to be hit from the outside. It's just too big a place.
Flynn: Yeah, one of the things I really tried to do in the book, though, is to give us some, 'Take a deep breath. There are things that we can do that can make a big difference.' We can't eliminate the terrorist threat. We can't eliminate crime. We can't eliminate disease. But we can manage these things.
What I get concerned about is we've got this very simplistic argument on the one hand, a sort of 'security at any cost' school: 'If we have to make ourselves a nation of moats and castles to protect us, by golly, that's what we should do.' On the other hand, anything we do that's different from the way we were pre-9/11, 'The terrorists have won.' Now, we gotta get a little more mature than that.
I go harking back to the safety paradigm. If you went 100 years ago and you talked to captains of industry and you said, 'You have to deal with the fact that a lot of people are being hurt in your workplace, and you're spilling lots of stuff in the environment,' the scream was, 'The free market will implode. This is all very hard and difficult and expensive. Can't be done.' What we knew is that we were able to do was to protect workers' rights, protect the environment at the same time and not kill capitalism. That's the same kind of thinking we need to bring in place here.
Layering security into our systems is something that is achievable and can provide dual benefits. Let me give you an example: public health. We have a real concern right now--we should--about this Asiatic flu. Now that's not something terrorists are doing to us, but there's also a bio-terror threat. Both require a functioning public health service to be able to deal with that in a publicly held system. Building the things up that help us deal with disease, and not just that but disease-resistant tuberculosis and so forth, is giving us some tools that'll help us deal with the terror threat as well. There's a lot of things that we could be doing, in other words, that address security issues that have benefit for other public goods. And some of the things you do for helping firefighters and policemen talk to each other to deal with a terrorist assault are things they need to do to death with in a disaster, which we have from time to time. And so making these prudent investments, and a nation as wealthy as ours should be able to afford to do, is where I think we could go a long ways and we've hardly begun.
Tavis: My time is running here very quickly. Let me ask you whether or not the war in Iraq has made us any safer. Are we safer as a result of what happened in Baghdad and around the country of Iraq?
Flynn: Well, I say overall the terrorism threat continues to be out there alive and well, and I think there's little question that Iraq has not put the terrorist genie in a bottle. It may have in fact encouraged it further. But again what I harken back to is what we saw on 9/11, is how all our future enemies are gonna conduct war against the United States. There's no other way to do it, and unless we believe that war is obsolete and America's never gonna be a target we should begin to deal with our core vulnerabilities and address that, and not just in a domestic context but in a globalized as well.
Tavis: You provide some interesting stats and other numbers about a variety of things in this book. One of the stats that most fascinated me was that 90%--you argue that 90%, in one poll at least--90% of Americans polled said that they would not in a time of crisis evacuate their home if the word came singularly from the government. The point being of course that most folk wouldn't trust the U.S. government enough to get out of their houses, to evacuate, if that source was singularly the government. That's scary to me. What do you make of it? Do we distrust the government that much? And if we do, in a time of crisis what do we do?
Flynn: Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things I find scary about that finding is the fact that the time that we most need to trust our government is in time of crisis. If we have to deal with a public health issue that requires quarantine or mass vaccination, we gotta have the public feeling like they can trust what's coming at them. One of the big reasons why the public is-- The public is distrustful of the officials they meet but they also are not sure the government is looking out for all their needs, and so they feel like they have to take matters into their own hand. Protect their family, protect their--get more information, those kind of things.
A big argument I make in the book is that we have to come clean. We've fallen into this trap of a paternalistic view of security, that we the people are supposed to shop and travel and the government's gonna take care of us. And what I'm now making the case for is that's not gonna work in a democracy. What we need is to come clean about our vulnerabilities, the limit about what we can do as a government to protect us and talk about how much risk are we willing to live with and how much resources we're willing to invest to manage that risk. You have to have a mature conversation, but we can't do this under this sort of cone of silence or cloak of secrecy approach that fuels distrust. And so it's a lose-lose for the government to say, 'We gotta keep you from not being panicked by sharing with you information that would worry you,' when we end up not trusting our government anyways. It's a lose-lose.
Tavis: I've got 30 seconds here. Very quickly let me ask you, um, what can the American public do, what can I do?
Flynn: I think the most important thing they can do is make sure that both these presidential candidates talk about what the plan is for dealing with America's vulnerability. The reality of 9/11, that our infrastructure and our society remains wide open for catastrophic attacks that have cascading effects, and they should basically say, 'What's the plan?'
Tavis: Are you hopeful that that conversation is going to happen between these two candidates between now and November?
Flynn: Well, I guess that's the aspiration of the book is to hopefully jump-start it and give people by hopefully reading through it not just the questions to ask but some of the solutions that they could query saying, 'Would you support some of these things?'
Tavis: Dr. Stephen Flynn is the author of the new book 'America the Vulnerable: How Our Government Is Failing to Protect Us from Terrorism.' Dr. Flynn, nice to have you on. All the best to you, sir.
Flynn: Thank you very much.
Tavis: My pleasure. Up next on this program actor Taye Diggs. Taye Diggs going to the small screen now on a new UPN series called 'Kevin Hill.' A conversation with Taye Diggs coming up in just a moment. Stay with us.
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