Vulnerability to Terrorist Attacks

Former Homeland Security Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin identifies ways the U.S. remains open to terrorist attacks.

Clark Kent Ervin: People say we haven't been attacked in five years, and there's a Department of Homeland Security. Therefore, the Department of Homeland Security has kept us safe from attack. I think the fact that we have a Department of Homeland Security has very little to do with the fact that we haven't been attacked.

If anything, I think it made us more vulnerable to attack, because we have been led to believe that we're safer than we really are. The fact that we haven't been attacked I think simply means that the terrorists are working overtime to make sure that the next attack is even bigger than the last one. And it takes a lot of time to plan those spectacular attacks.

Tavis: Let me make sure I heard what I just heard. The first part of your statement, I could take as an indictment on the Homeland Security department. Did you mean that deliberately?

Ervin: I did mean that deliberately, and the book really is a catalogue of the failures of the department in everything from aviation security to port security to mass transit security, emergency preparedness. It is - it takes more to secure the homeland than a department called Homeland Security.

Tavis: You make, I think, an interesting distinction in this book, which I had not been exposed to in the way that I was when I started reading the text. The distinction you make between homeland security and defending America. You make a very distinct difference between homeland security and defending America.

I think in the minds of most of us, we assume and think and believe and certainly hope that homeland security is about the business of defending America. And yet, you make the distinction between those two things. Explain.

Ervin: Well, actually, what I do is I point out that our leaders in Washington are making that distinction. There are people in the administration, there are people in Congress, who think there's a difference between homeland security and national defense. That's why our Pentagon budget is almost exactly 10 times the budget of the Department of Homeland Security.

Four hundred to $500 billion for the Pentagon, versus about $40 billion for the Department of Homeland Security. I think that they are part and parcel the same thing. In fact, I think we're far more vulnerable at home than we are abroad. So if anything, I would devote considerably more resources to protecting the homeland than I would to protecting our interests abroad.

Tavis: How does that get understood by those in Washington?

Ervin: Well, the question is whether it can be understood now, before another terror attack, or whether it takes, God forbid, another terror attack before our leaders put significantly more resources into homeland security. Just to give you one quick example, we've spent somewhere between $18 to $20 billion to secure the aviation sector.

And yet, as I point out in the book, we're not nearly as safe in the aviation sector as we can be. But we spent only a fraction of that to secure mass transit, some $250 million, even though 33 times the number of people take mass transit every day as take airplanes.

So, I'm a conservative. I'm a Republican. I typically don't argue for greater government spending. But you can't do homeland security on the cheap. Part of the reason why we're in the fix that we're in is because the government has under-funded the Department of Homeland Security from the beginning.

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