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Fareed Zakaria GPS

Interview with NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly; Impact of Boston Bombings

Aired April 21, 2013 - 10:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

FAREED ZAKARIA, HOST: This is GPS, the Global Public Square. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria.

It's been an extraordinary six days since two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Today, the lone surviving suspect in that attack lies in a hospital bed unable to speak, unable to explain the destruction he and his brother are alleged to have wrought.

In this hour, we will try to get to the bottom of the key issues around the attack. We'll start with an exclusive interview with Ray Kelly, the commissioner of the New York Police Department. He runs one of the largest counterterrorism teams outside of the federal government and we will get his key insights.

Then soft targets, IEDs, high value interrogation, Chechnya and more. We'll dig deep into some of these crucial aspects of the case with a true all-star GPS panel.

Also on the show we'll take a few breaks from terror to look at gold which isn't quite as glittery as it used to be and what the congress could learn from these lilting legislators.

But first, here's my take. We're learning a great deal about the two men who planted bombs at the Boston Marathon. The brother Tsarnaev. And we will learn more, including on this program today and in the weeks ahead and better understand a terrible story of alienation, radicalization and brutal murder.

Were these men an unusual case, loners, or are they part of something larger? How and when did they turn?

In one important sense, however, this was textbook terrorism. The plan was to frighten us. Terrorism is an unusual tactic in that it depends for its success on response of the onlooker, that's why people have often said about terrorists they want a few people dead and a lot of people watching.

But if we who watch are not terrorized, then almost by definition it didn't work.

On that count, how did we do? Pretty well. The people of Boston handled the crisis with calm and determination. The authorities did shut down most of the city on Friday for the manhunt, a decision that could be debated, but the people of Boston stayed steady and are already getting back to normal.

I spent seven years living in Boston. And I was always struck by the city and its people's strength of character. They have a tough New England spirit, a Puritan ethic that prizes doing one's job and not making a fuss.

But beyond Boston, we Americans may have come to realize, finally, that the most important counterterrorism program out there is resilience. Things were different after 9/11, that was a much larger attack raising much larger concerns. Many of the things that followed: security measures, the overthrow of the Taliban, were necessary. But others in retrospect were not. The vast new homeland security bureaucracy, shutting down travel, turning counterterrorism it into an ill-defined and ever expanding war on terror. Osama bin Laden saw the rational for 9/11 in precisely the overreaction it produced among Americans and he said so on several occasions.

Resilience is partly a matter of character, but it's also one of public policy. Steven Flynn, a scholar at Northeastern University who has written widely about this, argues that despite the billions spent, we never made it a priority. In written testimony given last July to the Senate committee on homeland security and governmental affairs, Flynn predicted that small attacks carried out by one to three operatives particularly if they reside in the U.S. can be carried out with little planning and on relatively short notice. As such, they are unlikely to attract the attention of the national intelligence community and the attacks once underway are almost impossible for the federal law enforcement community to stop.

So how to make ourselves more resilient? The steps we need to take are not that sexy. We need to upgrade our transit systems and infrastructure so as to make them less vulnerable to attacks. For example, Flynn notes, the U.S. Navy has invested more in protecting the single port of San Diego that is home to the Pacific fleet than the Department of Homeland Security has invested in the ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Francisco, Oakland, Seattle, and Tacoma combined, upon which a bulk of the U.S. economy relies.

We must strengthen public health rapid recovery in the event of a biological attack, which is still the most worrying threat out there.

We need to make sure that the public understands the nature of these threats and how it can help identify and respond to them.

Above all, it needs to understand how not to respond to them. When bad things happen, it's easy to react out of fear, emotion and anger. Let's hope that in Boston this week we begin to chart a different course.

For more on this, you can read my column in a special edition of Time magazine on the tragedy in Boston.

Let's get started.

Joining me now the man who runs the biggest police force in America and one of the country's best intelligence divisions, Ray Kelly, the commissioner of New York.

RAY KELLY, NEW YORK POLICE COMMISSIONER: Good morning. Good to be with you, Fareed.

ZAKARIA: What do you have to tell us in the aftermath of this? Is there a heightened sense of danger? Are you seeing threats proliferate?

KELLY: No, we haven't seen an increase in threats, but our operating assumption is that we're always at risk. We're a city that obviously had two horrific attacks here: 1993, 2001. We have had 16 plots against the city since then. So we are on alert all the time. We'd see no -- there's no recourse, but to be on alert.

ZAKARIA: I notice that the most of the plots that you talked about, the 16 that you thwarted, these were against big, symbolic targets often. What happened here in Boston was an event. Is that a difference that is meaningful?

KELLY: Well, all terrorism is theater. This event was a major event certainly in the life of Boston. It was a holiday, it's the end of the marathon, it was timed to go off when probably the maximum number of people would be there crossing the finish line. So clearly it was meant to put on a show. So, it was very significant.

We had plots here against the subway system, against the Brooklyn Bridge. I see this sort of in the same ballpark, if you will.

ZAKARIA: In 2007, you commissioned a report that I read on radicalization in the Islamic community. And what strikes me about it is these guys seem to be straight out of that report. They are unremarkable men, that's a term used in that report. They are self- radicalized by -- it appears to be. And what that leads me to wonder is what do you do about it? Because these are almost by definition, people who have no history that suggests much.

KELLY: Right. This report was done by two of our analysts Mitch Silver and Evan Bach (ph). It is a very thoughtful piece. It brought together a lot of the thinking about this phenomena where you take, as you said, unremarkable young people, obviously men in the cases that we looked at, and men here, who become radicalized in some fashion. Usually with the mentor of some sort. And they decide to kill people in their own country.

It's a phenomena that I don't think we have totally gotten our arms around, but we see it again and again. We have seen it here on several occasions. We had Najibullah Zazi who came here with his two high school companions that went to school here, Flushing High School, decided to blow themselves up on the subway system in New York.

ZAKARIA: Do you think the FBI should have made more of the trip to Russia, that should have been more of a tip off? KELLY: You know, hindsight is 20/20 now. I mean, it didn't seem to be anything of significance, apparently the Russian authorities asked them to do that. They did it and nothing jumped out. I mean, it seems to me that they could not have done anything more reasonably.

So, we're going to -- we being the government I guess at every level, is going to take a look at that and the history of these young men, but they certainly didn't stand out in a dramatic way.

ZAKARIA: I look at the manhunt, 9,000 people going after these two untrained kids. Many different agencies involved, it turned out well, but I wonder for a city like New York, this would be such a gargantuan undertaking. Do you have a game plan for a manhunt in New York were something like this to happen?

KELLY: Well, I think ultimately, it worked out well up there. They were able to mass resources. You have a lot of different jurisdictions. You had the FBI involved, the state police involved. It seemed to me that it went well.

In New York City we have the biggest police force in the country. We have 35,000 uniformed officers. We're able to mass officers in significant numbers if we had to. So sure, we do variations of things much more almost on a daily basis in the city of this size, 8.4 million people.

So I mean if something like this happened in New York, god forbid, we would have our own resources, I think, that would enable us to do a comprehensive search.

ZAKARIA: Stick with us. Stay with me, lots more to discuss with Ray Kelly, Islamic radicalism, how to deal with it. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: And we're back with Ray Kelly, the NYPD commissioner, the man who must protect America's number one city and number one target.

Peter King -- Congressman Peter King says that what we need, what this Boston marathon attack proves is we need a more aggressive and explicit targeting, or targeting investigation of America's Muslim communities. Would you agree with that?

KELLY: Well, I certainly wouldn't single out a -- a community, but what we do is follow leads wherever those leads take us. As I said, we've been targeted 16 times, a combination of good work on the part of the federal government, NYPD, and sheer luck we haven't -- haven't been attacked. But we will follow leads wherever those leads take us, irrespective of the community that we're talking about.

ZAKARIA: But the vast majority of those attacks did come from people who would have been Muslim radicals, Islamic radicals?

KELLY: That's correct, yes. ZAKARIA: And as a result of that, presumably, the NYPD had a program of listening in on mosques, infiltrating communities. And last August, in court testimony, however, your department asserted or acknowledged that, in six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloging mosques, you did not -- it did not generate a single lead. Do you...

KELLY: That -- that's incorrect information. Basically, and I know this is somewhat detailed, but we have a stipulation, the Handschu agreement, that's been in place since 1984, which limits our ability to investigate political entities.

In 2002 we petitioned the court to change that so we could do a more effective job in investigating terrorism. And in fact the court did that. And it said, particularly, we could do three things. We could go to any public meeting that the public is invited to. We can go to any website the public has access to. And we can do reports and analysis that will enable us to have context as to what's going on in a particular area, particular neighborhood. And that -- that's precisely what was done with our reports.

So this is the most diverse city in the world, which, by the way, we have the most diverse police department in the world, too. It's something that I'm very proud of. But it's a complex environment, 8.4 million people. We wanted to know more about the neighborhoods that we were policing. And that's the report that we did.

The so-called Demographics Unit -- since changed the name, Area Survey Unit, but that's what you're reporting about. And it was never put in place to generate leads. It was put in place for us to have contextual information about what's going on in the city. So it just -- and people will say that, well, you have these people -- you know, it's not generating leads. Believe me, we generate leads in a lot of other ways, but not from that particular unit.

ZAKARIA: How important is it to have the -- the cooperation of the Muslim community?

Because one thing I'm struck by, in so many of these cases, it is citizen activism, or citizens who report things. So the Times Square bomber, the police was a block away, but it was a local vender who tips you off. In this case, it appears that Jeff Bauman, this guy who got his legs blown off, immediately said "I want to tell you something, I saw this guy dropping a bag off."

So is it -- is it really important that there be a cooperative relationship between a police department or federal law authorities and these communities that you're looking at?

KELLY: Sure. And I think we have a very strong working relationship with, certainly, the Muslim community. I have a group that I meet with on a regular basis of opinion-formers in the Muslim community. We have back-and-forth, give-and-take. I go to many community meetings. We have very strong working relationships in the communities that -- throughout the city. This is a complex environment, a complex city. And I would say our commanders, our community officers are -- and I've been in the police department a long time. Our relationships are better now, in my judgment, than they have ever been.

You'll always have some tension, some friction. It's the nature of police work that you're going to have some -- you know, some give- and-take. But we have strong working relationships. And, you know, we -- we are proud of that, and we work to -- to foster that.

ZAKARIA: Final thought: You have alienated young men, radicalized young men. Is the easy accessibility of guns and other instruments of destruction something that worries you?

KELLY: Yes, absolutely. You know, we're concerned. We sent a team to Mumbai and we got very granular information very quickly. And that's what we do with officers that we have assigned throughout the world, go to the scenes of terrorist events, bring back information to help us better protect the city.

But if you look at the events in Mumbai, they were done with very, very simple weapons. And clearly, we know, in this country, the proliferation of weapons. We have about 300 million guns that are abroad in our country. So, yes, it's -- it's a concern. If you look at the bombs that were used in Boston, very simple to make. Inspire magazine, as you know, (inaudible), put out in 2010 -- that information is all over the Internet, very easy to find out how to build a pretty effective bomb.

So the proliferation of weapons, handguns, rifles and certainly bomb-making and bomb-making materials, made out of ordinary even household items is very much a concern for us.

ZAKARIA: Ray Kelly, a pleasure to have you on, sir.

KELLY: Thank you, sir.

ZAKARIA: We have more on the Boston terror attacks with a special panel in just a few moments. But up first, something a little different. What in the world? Why bad economic news can sometimes be good economic news. I will explain.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: Now for our what in the world segment. We have been watching one of the world's key economic indexes collapse. It dropped 13 percent in two days. Over the last two years, it's down 20 percent. And here's the strangest part, this might be good news for the global economy.

What is it that's falling? Gold.

For much of the last decade, the whole world has been a gilded shopping spree. Hedge funds poured money into it, Indians and Chinese hoarded it. You could even find ATMs dispensing gold.

To give you a sense of the hysteria, consider that if you had invested $100 in gold in 2001 it would be worth $700 in 2011, a seven- fold increase, a stunning return.

So why the sell off this week and what does it mean? One theory goes that prices fell because of a slowdown in China and India. But consumers there are taking advantage of the drop in prices to buy more gold.

Another theory runs that the recent drop is simply a market correction. That's fair, look at a graph of gold prices over the last 30 years. The 20 percent drop follows a 700 percent rise.

But what is it that precipitated the fall? There does seem to be a method to the market's madness. Investors like gold because they see it as a hedge against inflation. They also think it's a safe haven in a climate of uncertainty.

The strongest proponent of gold, gold bugs they're sometimes called, believe that central banks have been pumping money into the global economy for decades and that this will make money worthless. The only safe investment, in this view is gold, which has been valued for thousands of years and exists in limited supply.

The total amount of gold in the world would actually fit into two large swimming pools. But gold prices are falling and that's probably because neither of the doomsday scenarios seems likely. High inflation or a total economic collapse.

Consider the first, inflation. I saw an interesting chart in the IMF's latest world economic outlook. It looks at the change in inflation and unemployment during recessions. In the 1970s, inflation fell along with the rise in unemployment. That's the usual pattern. The same happened in the recessions of the 1980s, '90s and early 2000s.

But that correlation changed with the most recent crisis. This time steep jumps in unemployment with very limit impact on inflation. Part of the reason why this happened is that central banks have taken on an unusually activist role in the last few years. The Federal Reserve, the ECB and other central banks have pumped vast sums of money into the global financial system. Under normal market circumstances, that could lead to hyperinflation, but in the current scenario with very slow growth, with wage deflation in rich countries, it has actually led to stability.

U.S. inflation has held roughly steady at 2 percent, lower than the global average. This is a significant policy success and what it means is that despite the usual risk of inflation, governments still have room to be aggressive in stimulating growth. Good news for the economy if we'll take it.

Human beings love gold. We covet it beyond all rationality. And that's fine if we want to use it for jewelry. But as an investment, the market is telling us to be cautious which is very good news.

When we come back, the Boston terror attacks again. The Chechen connection, the use of IEDs, can we truly protect soft targets? I have a great panel of experts who have worked at the CIA, Homeland Security, the National Security Council, stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Live from the CNN news room in Atlanta. "Fareed Zakaria: GPS" is just ahead, but I want to give you the headlines here.

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick said today that authorities believe there is no longer any imminent threat related to the Boston bombings case. In the meantime, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee says the suspected bomber who was killed, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, may have become radicalized by Islamic extremists when he went to Russia last year.

Rebels in the Russian republic of Dagestan deny any link to the bombings, by the way.

Let's go to West, Texas, now, where residents are beginning to pick up the pieces here. They are returning home for the first time since that massive fertilizer plant explosion leveled parts of their small town. Wednesday's blast destroyed buildings, took the lives of 14 people, and another 200 people were injured.

In China, rescue workers are searching for at least two dozen people who are still missing after Saturday's devastating earthquake. That death toll now stands at 181. More than 11,000 people are injured.

Now, the U.S. geological survey put that earthquake's magnitude at 6.6. Look at how it's shaking there. It was so strong, in fact, it actually sheared off huge chunks of mountains in the region, making rescue work really difficult. But you can see the panic that it caused.

All right, "Fareed Zakaria: GPS" continues for you right now.

ZAKARIA: Around the world more than 140 people have been reported killed in terror-related attacks since last Sunday, and many hundreds more wounded. In Iraq alone, at least 77 dead and 328 wounded in four attacks, at least 30 killed in Somalia. Two NGO workers, 16 policemen, six civilians and a district governor were among those killed in multiple attacks in Afghanistan. Nine dead at a political rally in Pakistan, 16 injured near a political office in India, eight shot dead by a gunman in Kenya. Let's remember those victims, too, as we continue to focus on the Boston bombings.

Joining me now, a very intelligent panel on intelligence and terror. In Washington, Philip Mudd, former deputy director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. He's now at the New America Foundation. Stephen Flynn has been an advisor to Barack Obama and George W. Bush. He's now director of Homeland Security Institute at Northeastern University. Jessica Stern served on President Clinton's National Security Council staff and is now at the Harvard School of Public Health. And Bret Stephens won a Pulitzer Prize this week for his excellent columns in The Wall Street Journal.

Thank you all.

Stephen, when you watched the -- the response to what happened in Boston, what were your thoughts in terms of our ability to handle these kinds of attacks?

FLYNN: I thought it was enormously impressive, and it drove home a core realism about the nature of dealing with terrorism attacks when they manifest themselves. And it is all response are local. It's the bystanders, the neighbors, supported by the local fire department, local police, public safety, emergency management folks.

And there's little question, I think, that Americans took some great solace in the competence and the compassion, the selflessness of people's response. And that's a very important message when we're dealing with this threat, that we can handle it and we can bounce back quickly.

And that's also something that happened. I came into Boston. I teach at Northeastern University, just a mile from where the attacks went off in Copley Square, near the finish line. And what was extraordinary for me was that the city was back up on Monday. The trains were moving. Our students were going to classes. I went to do some interviews and the taxi dropped me right off on the corner. Free coffee was given out by Starbucks. The city was -- even though there was tremendous uncertainty about what happened, what the motives were, the city was insistent on getting back up on its feet.

ZAKARIA: What about the manhunt, 9,000 people, large parts of the city shut down to try and find one person?

FLYNN: Well, one is I think it told about the people, again. Folks complied with the request by the governor, by the mayor and others to stay in place, as, I think, a sense of civic duty. It wasn't because they were terrified to go out of their doors. It was, OK, if this is going to support...

(CROSSTALK)

FLYNN: You know, when we look back at it, I think we're going to learn some lessons learned. One key, I think, is that it's easier to turn things off than it is to turn them back on. And the time, as it went on, clearly there was a struggle. At some point, you can't have a major city all, sort of, stopped like we were for that amount of time.

And you have to be very careful. If these attacks, as I think they are, are likely to happen on a greater level of frequency over time, you've got to be calibrating your response with the need -- the obvious need to be protective and to try to reduce the risk to the public.

ZAKARIA: Philip Mudd, what would you be trying to find out in the aftermath of this particularly from the surviving bomber? What would you be asking him?

MUDD: I think there's a pretty basic question. When you look at what America is focused on, what the media is focused on in recent days, rightly, they're focused on two people, two spiders, in my old world, people who conducted a strike in the United States.

The real question I'd be having, though, would have nothing to do with the spiders. It would be where is the spider web, if one exists?

In the past, when we saw plots like this, 9/11 and beyond, the plot in Madrid, the plot in London that killed so many people on the subway in 2005, there is a spider web around the spiders that includes foreign training. In this case, it's not clear there is that spider web, but I'd be hunting that today.

ZAKARIA: But, as you say, on first impressions, though, Phil, does it appear that this is more like a case of loners self- radicalized or does it look there's -- there's a spider web?

MUDD: This looks very basic to me. Every step of the way, when I was watching this unfold, from the fact that the individual on the surveillance video doesn't use his hoodie; he doesn't use his cap to obscure his face, very basic devices; 52 miles of road, if you take each way, of unsecured road that they placed the bomb on. They didn't have an after-action plan. This looks basic to me.

Just one more point. When I saw this, Americans want to bin (ph) this so that they can understand it very quickly as foreign-inspired terrorism. This looked as much to me like Columbine as it did like Al Qaida.

ZAKARIA: When you looked at -- you've talked to dozens and dozens of terrorists. You've talked to failed suicide bombers. What do you think we should be trying to find out from this young man who survives?

STERN: Well, I think what we often see is somebody who has a very confused identity who gets attracted to a narrative of oppression and humiliation. And, of course, there's a question why; who introduced them to that narrative? Was it on the Internet? Was it actually someone in the neighborhood? Was it actually in Dagestan?

I think Philip's right. Is there a spider web or is it just really like Columbine?

ZAKARIA: Do you -- do you think that self-radicalization can be as strong and as motivating to commit brutal acts of terror as, you know, being -- being trained and tutored by somebody in Pakistan?

I mean, you have been to those camps where you have seen these things. I have always assumed that self-radicalization -- I mean, how radical can reading stuff on the Internet make you?

STERN: Well, unfortunately, I think that reading stuff on the Internet can make you very radical. It doesn't necessarily make you a very accomplished terrorist. And what -- what we see is that people who radicalize themselves, the kind of lone wolf or lone cell that is inspired by a movement but self-trains, they are much harder to catch, but they are also less effective. ZAKARIA: Quick point before we go to break?

STEPHENS: I would say, first of all, I don't think this is Columbine or it's similar to -- these kids are not psychotic schizophrenics. This was clearly, you know, preplanned, carefully meditated. I'm reminded, in all this, of a wonderful novella by Hanif Kureishi, "My Son the Fanatic." The story is what happens particularly to second-generation Muslims who don't feel an identity quite with the home country or with their adopted land. And that's where radicalization tends to take place. That's where we need to devote some real -- some real new thinking to this phenomenon.

ZAKARIA: We're going to talk about precisely that: radicalization, alienation, and how to protect ourselves from all this going forward. Don't go away.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: And we are back with our expert panel: Philip Mudd, Stephen Flynn, Jessica Stern, and Bret Stephens.

Philip Mudd in Washington, I wanted to start with you and pick up what Brett Stevens was talking about. There does seem to be a pattern here which is if you look at the London bombings, they seem to resemble this one in this sense: second generation or first generation or immigrant, but clearly almost always in these cases Muslim immigrants, something goes wrong in their immigrant experience, something goes wrong in the assimilation, and that becomes one of the triggers that puts them on a path to radicalization.

When you were at CIA, you must have been studying these London bombers, for example. Do you think there is something to make of that?

MUDD: Sure, I think a better example in this country in terms of what we saw in London is the Somali community in places in Minneapolis that was energized by what happened including American support for intervention in Somalia and decided they wanted to go become suicide bombers.

I think one thing we have to focus on, and I'm saying this not as an American, but as a law enforcement and intelligence practitioner is inclusiveness in America as a law enforcement tool. I worried all along when I was back in the business that Americans would start to say as a result of events like this that they are real Americans and then there are other Americans. That kind of mentality, if we ever get it, will accelerate I think these cases of radicalization, because kids like this when they take the oath are going to say, I took the oath, but I'm still not accepted.

ZAKARIA: Bret, to what extent is one of the dangers here? One can over read too much, these maybe two cases of a bad situation. To what extent might the assimilation machine in the U.S. might have broken down, or not be functioning as well as it used to? One thing we always prided ourselves on was the idea that in Europe minority communities, particularly Muslim minority communities, were excluded, were marginalized but not in the United States, the polling data suggests all that.

But does this story tell us that maybe we should be paying attention to that?

STEPHENS: Compared to what? The assimilation model in the United States works marvelously compared to the way it works in say, let's face it, France or Germany or Great Britain. And if you look back in history, the Irish, the Jews, all kinds of communities who came to this country faced similar kinds of problems. And by the way, each of them had moments of radicalization. I mean, there was a large contingent of Jewish Americans in the 1920s and 30s who became hard- line Communists. And it was a real problem.

The truth is that all that said and done, you find a pattern where Americans are extraordinarily tolerant and very sensitive to the fact that the acts of a handful of people does not suggest something about the entire community.

Arab Americans, Muslim Americans are better assimilated in the United States than in nearly any other country in the world. It's something actually we should take a great deal of pride in -- more of it.

ZAKARIA: What do we do about the ideology? So, four -- you know, take Bret's point, this happens in every community, but in Muslim communities, if you get alienated, if you go crazy, there is an off-the-shelf ideology you can pick up increasingly on the Internet, of radicalism, violence and jihad.

STERN: Yes, there's definitely an off-the-shelf radicalization narrative. And there's a question why is it that one kid is susceptible to that narrative and not another. And it often is a result of alienation or some form of humiliation.

I think the community needs to band together, but we also need to remember that 35 percent of those who attempt to carry out attacks allegedly in the name of Islam are converts. So, we're not going to find these people in the Muslim community.

ZAKARIA: How do you deal with this issue of looking for people? You know, I mean, the FBI interviewed this guy. There was nothing particularly remarkable. Yes, he seemed to have flirted with radical Islam, but not violence in any way. Should there have been a tip off of some kind?

FLYNN: Well, I think continue to need to work. And there's actually something that I think commissioner Kelly has done particularly well in New York City which is to really engaged communities to have a much more cooperative relationship between the law enforcement and the community itself.

And very interestingly in this case, while there was the house- to-house effort over a series of hours to locate the final bomber, the tip off came once it was OK you can leave your house. And the house owner looked out and saw that plastic tarp on his boat in his driveway was amuck and checked it out and he provided the tip. Citizens are key in engaging the community.

And there's some tension there. Right after the 9/11, the focus was primarily on putting together a more robust national security intelligence apparatus with some involvement with state and local. The engagement of citizens is key

ZAKARIA: And it was fighting the war abroad. I mean, Bush said often we have to fight them over here so we don't have to fight them here.

FLYNN: And clearly now with a recognition that these kinds of attacks are so much more difficult to prevent in that the response is inevitably local, investing some in local capability to deal with it seems to be key.

We put in an enormous amount of our national treasure into the war overseas. We now have to think about reallocating that to some capability here at home.

STEPHENS: When all is said and done, the way events played out in Boston, as tragic as they are, are really a model in terms of the way the people of Boston reacted, in the way that the agencies of government, local and federal, did. I mean, these were two guys with a bunch of -- as we now know -- bunch of extra pipe bombs and extra one of these other types of explosives, grenades, and they tragically killed another police officer, nearly killed another. But it ended about as well as we'd like. And so that has to say something about the quality of our responses.

You know, it's very easy to say in hindsight we could have done this and this differently. It was a model for how something like this should go down.

ZAKARIA: Philip, a last thought on how we engage citizens. How do we, in a sense, better protect ourselves, and how do we use, you know, the -- the virtues of a free society?

MUDD: I think -- two things I'd think about. One is something that's happening already. First, the engagement with especially immigrant communities can't come at the back end of an investigation. The front end has to be law enforcement going to talk to people in community centers, making people understand that the security services they see here are not like the security services they saw at home.

The second, and this may sound radical, is I would be considering today calling the mother of those terrorists. There's four grieving parents in Boston who lost children. There is a fifth in Chechnya. I'm not saying this because it represents a velvet glove. It's a steel fist to tell anybody who wants to do this, we're going to bring everybody into the tent, including the mother who lost one kid and might lose another who were terrorists, and we're going to tell them we all grieve together as a family.

ZAKARIA: Jessica, what would you ask this -- you know, this young man? What would be the first question you would ask? STERN: Of course, I'd want to know all about how he was radicalized. And I'd want to know all about his life story. But to me, what's very important is to make sure that his story gets out there. Because I think kids sometimes romanticize the life of a mujahid. And if we can get former mujahideen, or -- as they call themselves -- to tell the story of what it's actually like. It's not remotely glamorous. And many of them end up regretting what they did. We need to publicize those stories.

ZAKARIA: What would you say?

STEPHENS: I would hope that he goes off to Florence, Colorado, for life in supermax prison, or whatever...

ZAKARIA: But no death penalty? No death penalty?

STEPHENS: No, I would consider that as well.

You know, I remember seeing up close a suicide bombing in Israel when I was living there. The carnage is unbelievable. What happens when you put nails and ball bearings into -- into a bomb and you slice through flesh is one of the most horrifying sights in the world. People need to understand, before we get to the part about understanding what -- you know, what makes these kids who they are, people have to understand the kind of damage and carnage they inflicted on human beings.

ZAKARIA: Thank you all.

When we come back, Margaret Thatcher's funeral. And we have seen some bipartisanship in Washington this week. Could they take it a step or a note further? I'll explain when we return.

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ZAKARIA: You're looking at the casket of Margaret Thatcher at Saint Paul's Cathedral on Wednesday for her funeral. The casket was draped in the flag of Great Britain, the so-called Union Jack. That brings me to our question this week from the GPS Challenge.

The Union Jack is a combination of the crosses of three saints. Who are these saints? A, Paul, Patrick and John; B, Paul, Patrick and George; C, George, Patrick and Stephen; D, George, Patrick and Andrew. Stay tuned and we'll tell you the correct answer. Go to cnn.com/fareed for more of the GPS Challenge and lots of insight and analysis. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Remember you can go to itunes.com/fareed if you ever miss a show or a special.

This week's book of the week is "The Way of the Knife: The CIA, A Secret Army and a War at the Ends of the Earth." It's by the New York Times reporter Mark Mazzetti; 9/11 changed America, but what it really changed was the CIA, which was tasked with prosecuting the war on terror. Mazzetti tells the story of how the agency went from one focused on intelligence and analysis to interrogations and assassination. It reads like a thriller, well worth getting. Now for the last look. This week lawmakers in New Zealand did something remarkable after a vote. No, there wasn't a mass walkout. No, the place didn't erupt into fisticuffs. No, the members didn't call each other names.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

(UNKNOWN): If he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn't need a motion in the House of Representatives, he needs a mirror.

(APPLAUSE)

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ZAKARIA: Instead, when a measure passed that will make New Zealand the 13th nation to recognize gay marriage, the parliament erupted in song.

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(SINGING "POKAREKARE ANA")

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ZAKARIA: A special song, a Maori love song called "Pokarekare Ana." One solo voice started spontaneously; then almost all joined in. Perhaps it might serve to remind the U.S. Congress of what I think is the most memorable time they all sang together and the unity and sense of purpose they felt on September 11th, 2001.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

(SINGING "GOD BLESS AMERICA")

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ZAKARIA: The correct answer to our GPS Challenge question was D. The Union Jack is emblematic of the joining of England, Scotland and Ireland and thus combines each country's patron saint's cross, George of England, Andrew of Scotland and Patrick of Ireland.

Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week. Stay tuned for "Reliable Sources."