Opinion

DEFYING THE ‘INEVITABLE’

THE New York City Police Department commemo rates 9/11 every day by working hard to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Yes, our officers will be well represented in ceremonies at Ground Zero today, in music tonight at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and in scores of memorial services across the city and around the world. But as far as the NYPD is concerned, the most fitting tribute to the memories of the fallen is also the most practical one. That’s keeping our guard up; keeping at bay terrorists who want to strike the nation’s biggest city and financial center again.

Over the last six years, the department has undergone a fundamental restructuring so that it is now well equipped to succeed in our principal mission of suppressing conventional crime, while simultaneously combating the ongoing terror threat to the city.

After the second attack on the World Trade Center destroyed it, the NYPD could no longer cede that responsibility to our federal partners alone, or limit the NYPD’s role to staffing the Joint Terrorist Task Force (JTTF) with just 17 or 18 detectives, as we once did.

Starting in 2002, we looked at the NYPD’s mission in an entirely new way. We established a new counter-terrorism bureau, and directed an eight-fold increase in our staffing of the JTTF with the FBI. We recruited highly qualified individuals, with relevant experience to run the bureau; at the outset, former Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Frank Libutti, and more recently former White House homeland-security deputy and Brookings Institution scholar Richard Falkenrath.

The NYPD’s Counter Terrorism Bureau also makes certain our officers get the proper training and equipment for our new mission. It works closely with other police agencies in the metro area on terrorism-related matters through Operation Sentry, and it spearheads the regional “Securing the Cities” initiative. In that Department of Homeland Security-funded program, law-enforcement agencies within a 50-mile radius of New York City work together to detect any attempt to smuggle a nuclear device into New York City.

Were such a plot to succeed, the consequences are so dire that the effort to intercept a device must be made. At the same time, we recognize that good intelligence is our best hope in defeating another attack. We prefer to know what’s happening long before a nuclear device is loaded onto a truck and sent our way.

To restructure the police department’s Intelligence Bureau, we turned to David Cohen, a 35-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency. Assigning detectives to our counterpart police agencies in London, Paris, Madrid, Singapore, Amman, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Montreal and Santo Domingo, and at Interpol Headquarters in Lyon, has proved invaluable.

The presence of NYPD detectives within hours at the scenes of terrorist attacks in London, Madrid, Mumbai, Moscow, Tel Aviv and Amman has allowed the NYPD to adjust its counterterrorist posture very quickly – in time for the morning rush hour in New York, in some instances – just in case the attacks we had seen overseas were curtain-raisers for coordinated strikes that included New York.

We have also recruited some of the nation’s best young minds to serve as civilian analysts. Like our detectives overseas, our analysts always ask “the New York question.” That is, they examine as much information as possible to provide greater understanding and context to terrorism events around the world, and any implications they may have for New York City. (Two of our analysts recently published a thoughtful, groundbreaking analysis about home-grown terrorists – those otherwise unremarkable individuals who elected to take a path to radicalism, and became willing to kill innocent civilians in the process.)

We assigned over 1,000 police a day to counterterrorism duties, including high-visibility drills, inspection of packages entering the subway and daily monitoring against radiological and other potential weapons. We’re also building a system to provide greater protection to Lower Manhattan as the Freedom Tower, the new transit hub and other iconic structures move toward completion.

I’m often asked why al Qaeda or its acolytes have not tried to attack New York again since 9/11. They haven’t succeeded, but they have certainly tried.

Since 9/11, we’ve seen: plots to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge and to attack the subway system with cyanide gas; reconnaissance by Iranian intelligence agents of potential New York City targets; a plot to bomb the Herald Square subway station; a plan to attack the New York Stock Exchange and Citigroup headquarters in Midtown; a scheme to attack the PATH subway linking New Jersey to Lower Manhattan and to blow up the retaining wall at Ground Zero in order to flood lower Manhattan. And, of course, earlier this year, the plot to bomb the JFK Airport pipeline and fuel storage tanks was uncovered.

Many say that emergence of a reconstituted al Qaeda and homegrown terrorists in Western democracies, including our own, make another attack on New York inevitable. The NYPD rejects that view. We’re realistic – we know our enemies will keep trying. But we also know that they are not fated to succeed.

That’s why the NYPD is commemorating 9/11 the way we did yesterday, and the way we will tomorrow: By doing everything we reasonably can do to deny terrorists their purported “inevitability.”

Raymond W. Kelly is New York City’s police commissioner.