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Life & Times Transcript
10/8/07 Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times -- It's hard to think about a nuclear attack on a sunny southern California day, but don’t we want someone to be thinking about it? Michael Intriligator>> We often say the big one is coming referring to a possible earthquake here, which could happen. But I think the big one is coming, but it's not an earthquake. It's a terrorist strike. Val Zavala>> And then, we talk 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>> A nuclear attack on southern California? It's so hard to imagine that most of us just don't. But there are people whose job is not just to imagine a nuclear attack, but to devise a response to it. And as Toni Guinyard tells us, just figuring out who should be in charge is a challenge. Toni Guinyard>> Imagine a city like Los Angeles becoming the target of a terrorist attack, specifically a nuclear attack. In some ways, it seems so over the top. Internet blast maps show the devastation that the hypothetical disaster could cause. You might think it irresponsible even to discuss it, but that's exactly what's being done by economists -- Michael Intriligator>> We often say the big one is coming referring to a possible earthquake here, which could happen. But I think the big one is coming, but it's not an earthquake. It's a terrorist strike. Toni Guinyard>> Scientists -- Dr. Richard Turco>> That would be a very grim scenario indeed, very grim scenario indeed. It's one that we absolutely have to avoid. Toni Guinyard>> And law enforcement officials -- Lieutenant John P. Sullivan>> Remember that all attacks are designed as political speech, a type of theater, to push an idea out. Attacks aren't merely done to kill people. Attacks are done as an instrumental act of violence to influence the political equation here or someplace else. Toni Guinyard>> Los Angeles County Sheriff's Lieutenant John P. Sullivan is one of the first responders who will man these positions in the Los Angeles County Emergency Operations Center when and if disaster strikes. Lieutenant John P. Sullivan>> This Emergency Operation Center serves the Los Angeles County operational area which is roughly four thousand eight hundred square miles of Los Angeles, ten million people within eighty-eight cities. Toni Guinyard>> Sullivan is co-founder of the Terrorism Early Warning group. The TEW, as it's called, has a seat at the table. Formed in 1996, the task force of first responders is devoted to identifying, monitoring, analyzing and developing responses to emerging threats in Los Angeles County. Lieutenant John P. Sullivan>> We're not the only target in the United States. Clearly Washington, D.C., New York City, other major cities are also at risk. But Los Angeles by virtue of its global stature is perhaps in the top two. Toni Guinyard>> And for that reason, teams of experts sit in buildings not unlike the Emergency Operation Center and play out worst case scenarios. One such Day After Workshop hosted by the nonpartisan Preventive Defense Project at Harvard and Stanford Universities posed a question. "What would we actually do on the day after a nuclear attack?" Michael Intriligator>> Well, if there's a nuclear strike, and I think it could happen and particularly could happen here in Los Angeles, if it did happen, it would be the worst disaster we've ever had, but far beyond 9/11, Pearl Harbor or anything else like that. It would take us years to recuperate from that. Toni Guinyard>> Michael Intriligator is a Senior Fellow at The Milken Institute and a Professor of Economics, Political Science and Public Policy at UCLA. He did not participate in the Preventive Defense Project Workshop, but agrees with some of its findings detailed in a report titled "The Day After: Action in the Twenty-Four Hours Following a Nuclear Blast in an American City". Among the findings and recommendations? Assume there will be additional attacks. Make provisions to restore communications among the response team and to Washington, the media and to the public. Develop a realistic response plan and make the federal government responsible for all aspects of the response or risk a repeat of the chaos we witnessed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Michael Intriligator>> People will say, "Isn't this terrible. We're coming to help you. We'll help get things back on track", which never happened, of course. But it's going to be a repeat of that. It's going to be a disaster with no mitigation. We really don't have an effective plan in place. Toni Guinyard>> The report also suggests utilizing fallout shelters rather than immediately trying to evacuate people, which may lead to mass chaos when radiation levels are at a peak. Michael Intriligator>> Bomb shelters are a very good idea. People tend to dismiss them. They think it goes back to the 1950s, which it does, but for the same reason they were valuable back then dealing with fallout, there's very little you can do if you're directly under a nuclear blast. Narrator>> "You know the places marked with the "S" sign? They're safe places to go when you hear the alarm." Toni Guinyard>> The fallout shelters are a throwback to the Cold War era and appear during which the Civil Defense film, "Duck and Cover" was produced. Narrator>> "Duck and cover. This family knows what to do." Toni Guinyard>> The report acknowledged the shelter program was ridiculed for being unrealistic, but suggests a very different and much more practical program be used to minimize exposure to radiation. Michael Intriligator>> It's the fallout that occurs from a nuclear blast that's lethal. If you're in a shelter for a while or a few days or a week, a lot of the problem dissipates. Dr. Richard Turco>> What people really need to understand is that the world today is a different place than it was twenty or thirty years ago. Although the threat we faced then was in magnitude much greater, the threat we faced today is perhaps more of a reality because nuclear weapons are proliferating. Toni Guinyard>> Dr. Richard Turco is a Professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at UCLA. He is part of a research team that examined the potential global environmental consequences of a nuclear attack. Dr. Richard Turco>> Some years ago, my colleagues and I, including Carl Sagan, coined the phrase "nuclear winter" when we did a study of the effects of nuclear warfare on the environment and society. Today we're looking at a more modern update of what might happen in the world as a structure today. Toni Guinyard>> And what might happen? Dr. Richard Turco>> Well, it would be rather devastating. Toni Guinyard>> In their recent study, the scientists examined what would happen if bombs the size of those dropped on Hiroshima were detonated during a regional war. Dr. Richard Turco>> We found rather remarkable effects from even relatively small numbers of nuclear detonations. We were talking about changes in the climate. There would be frost conditions affecting agricultural productivity worldwide, depletions of the stratospheric ozone layer because of chemical effects of smoke lofted into the atmosphere. Toni Guinyard>> Results that will undoubtedly be scrutinized, debated and discussed as will the recommendations and finding of the Day After Workshop, work done to encourage discussion and planning, not fear. Lieutenant John P. Sullivan>> I think why people are fearful of terrorism is there is uncertainty. We don't know what would happen. It's not familiar in the modern American political landscape, therefore the unknown causes disproportionate fear. Dr. Richard Turco>> A nuclear detonation in the city would probably close down not just the entire city itself, but perhaps our entire nation's economy would suffer for decades. Michael Intriligator>> The two ports, Los Angeles and Long Beach ports together, are by far the biggest port in the country that control over forty percent of our trade with the world. Lieutenant John P. Sullivan>> So if you were interested in doing economic targeting, the port could become attractive. Michael Intriligator>> Another major target would be LAX, one of the largest airports in the world. We're living on a potential volcano here, a terrorist strike, and they've avowed that they want to strike Los Angeles. People don't want to think about it. They put it out of their mind. It's a big problem. Toni Guinyard>> What is it that we should be talking about that we aren't talking about? Dr. Richard Turco>> Well, the problem really gets to the issue of diplomacy and the prevention of the spread of nuclear weapons. Lieutenant John P. Sullivan>> I actually think I'm most concerned that we'll take the threat out of balance. We will mis-calibrate the threat and overreact and trade off liberty for security. Toni Guinyard>> It's another conversation to be had while work continues focused on imagining the unimaginable and planning how to respond. I'm Toni Guinyard 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?" 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 they even wore different colored shirts so that you could clearly label the us versus them. Who were the special agents, who were 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 crap; 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 local 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 where. 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. Sponsored in part by:  | |
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