Notable Speech

Responding to Terrorism

By FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III

Director Mueller delivered this speech at the Mayors Emergency, Safety, and Security Summit, U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington, D.C., on October 24, 2001.

As Mayor Marc Morial indicated, I started as FBI director on September 4. More than one person has come up to me and said, “You had a relatively short honeymoon.’’ That would be accurate.

Before I go further, I thank you for your leadership—Mayor Morial of New Orleans, Louisiana; Mayor Menino of Boston, Massachusetts; Mayor Garner of Hempstead, New York; and Executive Director Cochran of the U.S. Conference of May-ors—for having the foresight and the wisdom to call this important meeting and for giving me the opportunity to join with you today.

I thank all of you for the outstanding leadership that you are providing to your cities and to our country. At this pivotal—I think it is fair to say—moment in history, you have been towers of strength in your communities. Particularly, I thank you for the extraor-dinary support, cooperation, and guidance that you have provided to the FBI during these past 6 weeks.

This morning, I want to let you know how deeply committed the FBI is to working with you to ensure the safety and security of your communities now and in the future. The FBI is pouring its heart and soul into the investigation of the September 11 attacks. Every resource that can be deployed is being deployed. Every person who can be utilized is being utilized. We now have well over 7,000 FBI personnel involved, and that’s about 1 in 4 of our employees. We are examining every scrap of evidence. In fact, we have gathered, sometimes working on hands and knees in the rubble and mud of crash sites, more than 3,700 separate pieces of evidence. This is easily the largest and most comprehensive investigation in our history. Beyond the investigation itself, our overriding priority right now is prevention, making sure that terrorists do not succeed in striking America and America’s cities again. Now, it may well be overly optimistic to think that every single attack can be prevented. But, we can certainly give it everything we have got, and that is exactly what we are doing. We at the FBI are not new to prevention. With your help, over the last few years, we have had successes. An example, perhaps, would be 2 years ago when we foiled a plot to blow up a gas tank in Sacramento, perhaps saving as many as 12,000 lives. But, historically, we have been better at tracking down terrorists after the fact than at stopping them in their tracks before they strike. We have, in the past, not always aligned our resources, our strategies, and our skills specifically toward prevention, to the degree that they are now so aligned.

A few weeks ago, we established at FBI headquarters a terrorist prevention task force made up of representatives of a dozen different agencies. Its goal is to identify and stop future terrorists acts with proactive investigations and to attempt to predict and to prevent future scenarios. The work of this group, for example, led us to heighten sensitivities on crop dusters in the latter part of September. We have had in the past and do today have 35 joint terrorist task forces located in your cities and in other cities across the country. Those task forces are working hard to gather intelligence and pursue any hint of a lead that might help us identify terrorists or their associates. We also have beefed up our resources overseas, where many of the leads have taken us and where we’re getting some outstanding cooperation from Great Britain, Germany, France, Spain, and a number of other countries.

We also are working with you and other colleagues at the federal, state, and local level to shore up