 |
HOME |  |
SCHEDULE | |
PROGRAMS | |
KIDS & FAMILY | |
LOCAL | |
SUPPORT KCET | |
ABOUT US | |
SHOP KCET |  |
| About Us | Contact Us | |
 |
|
 |
          |
|
|
 |
 |
||
|
|
Life & Times Transcript
9/11/07 This program is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department. Announcer>> Tonight on Life and Times -- Selling special license plates to fund homeland security seemed like a good plan. Why isn't it working? Herb Wesson>> They bought these license plates in record numbers and that money is still sitting in a lockbox. Lou Baglietto>> And I was just absolutely surprised because, if there's anything that Sacramento is good at doing, it's spending money. Announcer>> And then, we talked with artist George Herms about poetry, music, film, theater and knowing when to stop. It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times. Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education. And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg. Val Zavala>> You may have noticed those special 9/11 commemorative license plates. Did you realize that people pay extra for those and the money goes into a special anti-terrorism fund? But you may not realize that, although they're pretty popular and they've raised nearly eight million dollars, hardly any of it has been spent. Why is that? Roger Cooper has our story. [Film Clip] Roger Cooper>> Even after six years, images of the 9/11 attacks can be painful. [Film Clip] Roger Cooper>> But after the shock came the many efforts that brought the nation together. One of the responses came from the California Assembly where Democrat Herb Wesson joined Republican Dave Cox to introduce a bill. They created a special 9/11 license plate in California. Herb Wesson>> He and I were a little frustrated with the fact that people wanted to show their patriotism, but didn't have a substitute way in which to do it. So this idea, believe it or not, was given to me by a young lady named Brenda who worked with my wife. Roger Cooper>> The bill offered Californians an opportunity to pay an extra fifty to ninety dollars for a 9/11 memorial plate. Some of the proceeds would then go to scholarships for families of California victims killed in the attack. But most of it, eighty-five percent, was to be used to help fight terrorism. Herb Wesson>> It's the fastest growing license plate in the country. Roger Cooper>> But fast-forward six years and you'll find people who are upset. People like Lou Baglietto. Lou is one of the nearly seventy thousand Californians who bought a 9/11 license plate. Now he's learning that, after all this time, the vast majority of the money has not yet been spent. That's right. Of more than eight million dollars raised to fight terrorism, seven million of it still sits idle. Lou Baglietto>> I was actually very surprised. I was talking to Assemblywoman Karnette's staff and I was just absolutely surprised because, if there's anything Sacramento is good at doing, it's spending money. Terrorism and homeland security is probably one of the top issues in the public mind right now. You think they would be doing everything possible to try to prevent the next 9/11. Roger Cooper>> For Lou, this issue of funding to fight terrorism is a little more than academic. He comes to work each day here in San Pedro. His firm is right in the heart of the Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex, always on the list of potential terrorist targets. Lou Baglietto>> We know that the ports are one of the major terrorist targets out there right now, so anything that could be done to kind of help contribute to that effort is important. Roger Cooper>> So why is the plate money going unused? Well, over the years, lawmakers and the governor have put suggestions forward, but they haven't been able to agree on how to spend it. Herb Wesson>> My last year in the Assembly, I tried to spend what we had collected up to that point. So I had devised a plan to give money to law enforcement throughout the state of California. Unfortunately, the bill was vetoed by the governor at that point. Roger Cooper>> In his veto, Governor Schwarzenegger said Wesson's bill would have allocated the anti-terrorist funds to certain cities and counties arbitrarily without determining the areas of greatest need. The delay and the disagreements don't surprise this motorist waiting at the DMV. Kathleen McMahonschmitt>> That sounds about right for the state of California. What can I say? We allot it and we don't spend it correctly, or we misspend it when it's not even allotted (laughter). Roger Cooper>> But Republican Assembly member, Chuck Devore of Irvine, says there's good reason to proceed cautiously. He told the Sacramento Bee that he doesn't believe people who bought the plates wanted to see teeny, tiny amounts of money going to communities all over the place. He says that would have wasted the funds before enough accumulated to make a real difference. Still, Wesson, the sponsor of the bill, thinks it should have been spent by now. Herb Wesson>> What good is it to sit on a pot of seven million, ten million, twenty million dollars and then all of a sudden there's some terrorist outbreak? Whereas, if you could take a portion of this money and help train some of our cops so that they could be a little more perceptive to pick up acts of terrorism, I would spend the money now. Roger Cooper>> And that's just what a new bill by Democratic Assembly member, Betty Karnette of Long Beach, would do. Betty Karnette>> I think it should be spent on first responder training for firefighters and for law enforcement. Roger Cooper>> Karnette's bill would spend two million dollars on anti-terrorism training for local firefighters and another two million to train local police. The bill has cleared the Assembly and awaits action in the State Senate. Betty Karnette>> And that's what I think we should be looking at. We should be training people in the local areas because they're the ones we're going to depend on in any emergency. Lou Baglietto>> There are unmet needs for homeland security everywhere. Roger Cooper>> Lou agrees that the money should go to local responders. Lou Baglietto>> My sister has served on several committees on medical response to bio-terrorism in Orange County and I know funding is one of their major issues. Betty Karnette>> There are other funds. The federal government gives us money, the state has other money going into other funds for homeland security, and this money for training first responders. There's no other source. Roger Cooper>> The design for California's memorial plate was chosen in a competition among high school students. Students also came up with the slogan, "We Will Never Forget", and people haven't. Herb Wesson>> I was just told to turn on the television, turn on the television. So it just stunned me. Roger Cooper>> Herb Wesson says it's the sense of unity of six years ago that officials need to keep in mind when deciding how to use this money. Herb Wesson>> The slogan during our campaign was, "Be a Patriot. Help Your State". They rallied to that cry. They bought these license plates in record numbers and that money is still sitting in a lockbox doing nothing, so I think we owe it to them. Roger Cooper>> And Lou feels that time is of the essence. Lou Baglietto>> Essentially, we have until the next terrorist incident in the United States to spend that money and I hope it's not soon. Roger Cooper>> Meanwhile, California's 9/11 memorial license plates continue to sell briskly. The DMV says about five hundred people a month still sign up for them, adding more and more to the millions in anti-terrorism funds that have yet to be spent. I'm Roger Cooper for Life and Times. Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times". Saul Gonzalez>> We, of course, remember 9/11 as a national tragedy. However, the successful attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon also represented one of the worst Intelligence failures in American history. Six years after the attacks, what have the CIA and the FBI really learned about their past mistakes and do they now have what it takes to stop future attacks? These are questions that UCLA Professor and Intelligence expert, Amy Zegart, explores in her new book, "Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI and the Origins of 9/11". Professor, if we could, let's go back about six years ago to 9/11 itself. What was dysfunctional about our Intelligence agencies at that time? Amy Zegart>> Well, just about everything was dysfunctional about our Intelligence agencies. But the big problems in Intelligence were, number one, we had about a dozen different agencies. The CIA is just one of them. They didn't act as a unified team. They never have, even when the CIA was created in 1947. So we had this big split between the CIA and the FBI, in particular, the CIA being responsible for getting intelligence about bad guys abroad; the FBI responsible for tracking them here at home, but they didn't coordinate their activities very well. That's probably the biggest problem before 9/11. Saul Gonzalez>> You write a great deal in your book about the difference between change in the Intelligence agencies and adaptation. You argue that they've been very good at changing, but they haven't been very good at adapting from the Cold War mindset to the age of terrorism mindset. Talk about that. Amy Zegart>> Well, it's not just academic nitpicking to talk about the difference between change and adaptation. What we saw after 9/11 was then CIA Director, George Tenet, and FBI Director, Louie Freeh, at the time came out and talked about all the different things they had done, all the new initiatives to try to combat terrorism during the 1990s. Well, that's all well and good, but the real challenge and the appropriate question to ask is not "Are you doing anything differently today?", but "Are you doing enough differently today to confront the changing threat that we face?" The answer was clearly no. So they did a lot of new things. Saul Gonzalez>> Why? Why wasn't that the case? Amy Zegart>> Well, that's the sixty-four thousand dollar question. I often say that, while the 9/11 Commission did a great job of explaining what went wrong in the run-up to 9/11, the Commission never really gave us a satisfactory explanation of why these things went wrong. I'll give you two basic answers. The first is that these organizations, like all organizations, had a terrible time changing from within. I'll give you a concrete example. George Tenet wanted to try to get one security badge for all the different Intelligence agencies to use so that people could physically work in buildings outside their own home agency. Good idea, so that you can actually collaborate. But that initiative, just a simple initiative of getting everyone to carry a blue badge, was met with terrible resistance across these different agencies. People said, "I don't work for George Tenet. I work for the National Security Agency" or "I work for this other agency." Saul Gonzalez>> The Defense Intelligence Agency, or -- Amy Zegart>> -- exactly. So even George Tenet's own senior staff physically often didn't have access to these buildings. And there are many more serious initiatives that he tried to undertake too, all of which met with defeat. He tried to improve the Counter-Terrorist Center in the CIA, trying to improve its ability to look at the big picture, what we call strategic analysis, and he failed to do that. So on 9/11, there were only five analysts looking at Osama bin Laden. There were a range of internal initiatives that really went down to defeat. The FBI, the same story. I was really amazed in doing this research at how much the FBI understood the need to combat terrorism before 9/11. Three years before 9/11, the FBI declared in its own strategic plan that terrorism was job one. Saul Gonzalez>> And yet 9/11 happened despite the fact that a lot of individual FBI agents seemed to be ringing the warning alarms. Amy Zegart>> Right. So what you see is, here too, a few senior officials had the idea to try to transform the bureau and they didn't get anywhere. I'll give you a couple of indicators. On 9/11, ninety-four percent of FBI personnel were working on other issues than terrorism. Probably the most explosive thing that I found in doing this research was that there was an internal FBI review of every single field office's counter-terrorism capabilities before 9/11. All fifty-six field offices. Weeks before 9/11, that review concluded that every office should receive a failing grade. Saul Gonzalez>> What's changed for good or bad in our Intelligence communities? Amy Zegart>> Well, I think Intelligence officials are quick, again, to point out all the changes that have been made. But if you look at the three or four major problems that we saw that led to 9/11, all of them are still here. So problem number one, there's nobody still in charge of all the different agencies in the federal Intelligence system. Saul Gonzalez>> I thought we have a new office, the Director of National Intelligence, a czar of intelligence? Amy Zegart>> Czars are never very powerful. That's a pretty good indicator that we're not doing very well. So, yes, we have a new Director of National Intelligence, but he's been relatively unable to ride herd over the other Intelligence agencies. There have been turf wars galore even since the first Director and there's been terrible turnover in that office. We've already had two Directors of National Intelligence in just the past three years. So there's nobody in charge. A second huge problem: information-sharing. If you look at now what is the state of the art poster child for information-sharing and intelligence, it's a place called the National Counter-Terrorism Center. Well, the joke at the National Counter-Terrorism Center is that analysts there have warm ankles because, in order to get the information from all the different incompatible systems, they have to have literally half a dozen computers stacked underneath their desks. So information-sharing has a long way to go. That's the best that we have in information-sharing. A third huge problem was strategic intelligence, our inability to see the big picture. What are the threats over the horizon? What are al Qaeda's intentions about attacking the United States homeland? We had terrible strategic intelligence before 9/11 and, just last year, the CIA Director, Mike Hayden, at his confirmation hearings worried aloud that we still have terrible strategic intelligence. Then finally, there's the FBI which is a crucial piece of this puzzle. Trying to transform this bureau from a crime-fighting organization to a domestic intelligence agency is an uphill slog and we have not gotten as far as we need to go. Saul Gonzalez>> You know, I must admit one frustration I had reading your book is that you don't assign blame or responsibility to individuals saying that that person had something to do with the foul-up of 9/11 or this person did. Why is that? You spend much more time dismantling organizations and organizational flowcharts than assigning blame. Amy Zegart>> Well, I wish it were easy enough that we could assign blame because what that means is that Intelligence problems would be easy to fix. We just fire the old guys and then everything is solved. Saul Gonzalez>> You know, listening to you, I can't say that I come away very heartened as a citizen, as a taxpayer. There seems to have been so much activity over the last six years that's really led to nothing, largely nothing when it comes to reforming our Intelligence agencies. What should Americans take away from this? Amy Zegart>> Well, I think it's not a very optimistic view, but it's an important perspective to have, which is that the big new ideas about how to fix what's broken in our Intelligence agencies have been around for years. What's really hard is actually implementing these ideas. So I have a lot of people ask me all the time, "What should we do?" I have a list of things I would tick off if I were queen of the world for a day to reform Intelligence, but all these things are known. They've been in report after report after report. Saul Gonzalez>> What are one and what are two, queen of the world? Amy Zegart>> Number one queen of the world, we have to align authority and responsibility to have one person in charge of our Intelligence effort in the federal government. We haven't done that yet. Number two, we have to make culture a top priority. You can't change Intelligence if you don't change minds. I think you can get leverage into doing that by changing who you hire, how you train them and how you promote them. I'll give you a story that I just learned from an FBI analyst who went to Quantico where you have to do new training. He said that, when he was at Quantico, he never trained with FBI special agents. They were immediately separated and then even wore different colored shirts so that you could clearly label the us versus them. Who were the special agents, the heroes of the bureau, and who were the analysts who have for years been treated as second-class citizens? You have to change that culture if you want to make analysis work in the FBI. So those are the two areas I would really focus on. Saul Gonzalez>> Is it possible that we have done really too much when it comes to reforming Intelligence and that maybe, by retooling our Intelligence services to fight terrorism, we're not preparing ourselves for other kinds of threats out there? Amy Zegart>> I think that's a great question and I know there's a lot of concern among Intelligence officials in Washington that we're in the midst of so many disruptive changes. They keep asking, "Are we reformed yet?" When there's that much uncertainty about whether the organization you're working for today will be around tomorrow or whether you'll have the same job tomorrow that you have today, that's not good. So it's a tradeoff between making the needed changes and having the kind of stability that enables people to do their job. Saul Gonzalez>> Professor Amy Zegart, thank you very much for your conversation about the past, present and future of American Intelligence. Amy Zegart>> Thank you. Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address: Life and Times 4401 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, California 90027 You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org. Val Zavala>> He makes art out of trash, or put more delicately, found objects, and he's also made a name for himself. He is George Herms and he's a seminal figure in the Los Angeles art world. Now he's part of a major exhibit at LACMA on southern California artists. Vicki Curry visited George Herms to find out how he discovers the essence of an object. George Herms>> These things are thrown away. People say it's scrap; I say it's beautiful. So much has been thrown out, you know, and it has another life. Vicki Curry>> This is the world of George Herms. Trash is treasure and beauty is in the eye of the beholder. For fifty years, Herms has been collecting objects and giving them new life as works of art. George Herms>> Wherever the carousel stops, I get off and I go to work with what is there. Nowhere have I been that I haven't been able to find something beautiful. There are many shrines all over California that are me off in the wilderness and just making sculptures out of things which are just to celebrate the joys of creativity. Vicki Curry>> George Herms' life was originally headed down a different road. He grew up in Woodland, near Sacramento, and went to the College of Engineering at Berkeley. George Herms>> Something wasn't right. I could do the calculus and all that with the mind, but the soul of the poet is what wasn't engaged. Vicki Curry>> Herms dropped out and hit the road, eventually ending up in the middle of Los Angeles's flourishing Beat scene. George Herms>> And then on my twentieth birthday out in Topanga Canyon, Wallace Berman and Bob Alexander, two artist poets, walked into my life. Vicki Curry>> Meeting Wallace Berman changed his life. Berman was a key figure in the Los Angeles art scene in the late 1950s. George Herms>> And he turned a gallery into a temple and knocked my socks off. I decided that's what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Vicki Curry>> Herms started working with found objects, an emerging art form known as assemblage. George Herms>> Somewhere around this time, the Robert Motherwell book, "Dada Painters and Poets", came into my possession. Then there was the example of Berman's work then which was really wonderful. Altoon, Artie Richard, John Reed, Cameron, all of this is like kind of flooding in on me and just what came first, I don't know. It was all these rivulets that fed into the river that just started flowing, and that's the advice. When the old forms are crumbling, which is always the case, and you're hanging onto the bank, what you need to do is push away from the old forms and from the bank and get out into the middle of the river and start seeing who else is out there (laughter). Vicki Curry>> Around this time, Herms was living in Hermosa Beach where he found a ready supply of materials. George Herms>> I think this is normal to everybody. You know, beachcombing is universal. I take things the way they are. It's a work of art. It doesn't matter. It'll still have that beauty. Vicki Curry>> This philosophy put Herms at the forefront of this new movement. He was included in the groundbreaking exhibition, "The Art of Assemblage" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. George Herms>> It was not accepted until the Museum of Modern Art show in 1961. In the 1950s, it was a bastard child. Just my theory is that the background of abstract expressionism being king at that time, there was a need for realism and assemblage kind of brought real objects. I had good friends that told me, "No, don't do it. You have to draw and paint. That's the history of art." I would say that one has to try everything, you know, just to see what you're going to be passionate about, which I did, and then gradually I just come full-circle to the beachcombing and just seeing things on my path in life and picking it up. Vicki Curry>> But unlike other assemblage artists of the period, Herms rarely made political statements with his art. George Herms>> I've always felt that the most subversive thing I could do is to make art that I don't even understand, so how are they going to pass a law against this? [Film Clip] George Herms>> Everything I've made since 1960 has the love stamp on it. Vicki Curry>> This set of stamps? George Herms>> This set of stamps, yeah, and I've done lots of work. If you look through, you'll come across this typeface. The morning, you know, when I wake up and I come out, this is kind of -- I guess some people meditate or they have something they do. This is what I do. That's what art is about. It's something you do every day. I think anything that is worth it is worth just being completely immersed in. I only have one gear (laughter). I can only go all out. I'm like a volcano, you know. This just, you know, pours out until wherever I go after a month, this room is full. When to finish, you know, that's the key. Vicki Curry>> That's probably particularly applicable for your work with all the assemblage and free-form nature of it to know when it's finished. George Herms>> It really is. Also, the other thing is the invitation that there'll be some space. Okay, there's space here, but you don't have to take every invitation. Assemblage seems to attract this almost baroque overflow of accumulation of objects, but I find it most satisfying to make a poetic object out of just, you know, three elements. But the results are fantastic usually. I oftentimes just set things, go do something else, come back and see. Oftentimes, that was the perfect place to stop, you know, the composition of interruptions, and the interruption comes at the right time. [Film Clip] Vicki Curry>> George Herms' experimental nature led him into other art forms, including poetry, music, film and theater, and to collaborate with other artists. He created this sculpture in downtown Los Angeles with United States poet laureate, Charles Simic, and he's always been inspired by improvisational jazz, so he's working on a five-act jazz opera called "The Artist's Life". George Herms>> All of this is really a pleasure to play with these toys in a space like this, to make the sound like that. Then the band kicks in. The free aspect of jazz is what I'm trying to bring into this sculpture studio. I'm curious not just about found objects, but found ideas. The definition of art can't become frozen. It is a celebration. I mean, that's kind of what I insist on. You know, that's really what I think art's about. It's like, you know, we're just making things to celebrate a holiday we haven't come up with yet. [Film Clip] Val Zavala>> You can see George Herms' work along with that of other major southern California artists at LACMA through March 30. For details, go to their website at lacma.org. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education. And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg. This program was made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department. Sponsored in part by:  | |
|
Home | Features | Arts | Health/Science | OC Edition | L&T Blog | Archives | About Us | Contact Us | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use |