ADM. James Loy on 9/11 Anniversary, Threats to the U.S.

The following are excerpted quotes from an interview with ADM. James Loy on the September 11th, 2014 edition of Secure Freedom Radio. ADM. Loy is the former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, the second Administrator of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and former Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard. The entire interview may be found here.

On memories of 9/11/01 and the government’s response:

The day causes—especially for all of us who were sort of in the belly of the beast on that particular day and the weeks and months that followed, and the years that have now followed—that we treat this day like so many of those days of infamy. “Where were you then and what were you doing?” The recollections come back fast and furious on a day like today. And [especially on] this particular day, the 13^th anniversary, especially in the immediate aftermath of the President’s speech to the nation last night with regards to his strategic plan regarding ISIL.

…

I think we were then in a mode of never having had the first shoe drop on our country in the depth and terror-driven nature that it did on 9/11. We’d certainly had embassy events in Africa, we had certainly had the first World Trade Center event before, but to lose 3000 lives in the extraordinarily public and horrible nature that occurred that day jarred us as literally a global civilization into the reality the new nightmare on the horizon is something called “terrorists” and “terrorism,” and that we all had to take it quite, quite seriously. And, of course, all the organizational aftermath that followed—not only the 9/11 Commission Report, but the Executive Branch and Legislative Branch activity that generated the TSA and generated new jobs for so many different agencies, and then eventually put together the new Department of Homeland Security—was sort of an organizational aftermath to a nightmare like that.”

On America’s War on Terror:

In [2001], Al Qaeda was the “enemy,” and Osama Bin Laden was its head. In the change window between then and thirteen years later, we have done, in my mind, an excellent job of taking down the “front office,” if you will, of Al Qaeda, only to find that–in the same manner when you take down a drug cartel leader, all of a sudden the five lieutenants that were part of the organization start five new cartels, and along that same pathway–having taken down the leading lights of Al Qaeda, now we find ourselves with at least five or six named versions of Al Qaeda of the same persuasion, ISIL being one of them. But what holds it all together is the Caliphate kind of talk that seems to be the common denominator.

On cyber threats to the U.S. homeland:

Today I think we must extrapolate the notion of what constitutes this thing called a “border,” and therefore the challenge called “border security,” to include the cyber implications of electronic opportunities that the enemy has to bring this country to its knees with regards to electrical grids, power dams, [and] SCADA systems that control those kinds of manifestly foundational parts of our economy and parts of our way of life.