LIEBERMAN
LAUNCHES HOMELAND SECURITY DEBATE
LEGISLATION WOULD FILL INTELLIGENCE, SECURITY GAPS EXPOSED BY
SEPTEMBER 11
September 3, 2002
WASHINGTON - Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman
Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., launched the Senate debate Tuesday on
creating a new Department of Homeland Security, seizing an
historic opportunity to reform government to combat terrorism
against Americans on home soil.
Under discussion was legislation
- introduced in different form by Lieberman last fall -
that would coordinate and consolidate more than two
dozen disparate federal agencies, offices, and programs into a
focused and accountable department.
Federal homeland security efforts
today are “dispersed, disorganized, and dysfunctional when
they need to become coherent, consolidated, and coordinated to
rise to the complex challenge of defeating domestic
terrorism,” Lieberman said.
The legislation, endorsed by a
bipartisan vote of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee
in July is the result of 18 hearings, and of more than 11
months of collaboration, refinement, and negotiation.
The department would be led by a
presidentially-appointed secretary and divided into six major
divisions: border and transportation protection, intelligence
analysis, critical infrastructure protection, emergency
preparedness and response, immigration, and science and
technology. The
legislation also establishes a White House Office for
Combating Terrorism, which will work with the department
secretary to develop and implement a government-wide strategy
for combating terrorism.
Following are excerpts from the
chairman’s statement:
Mr. President, a week from tomorrow we will be
commemorating for the first time the one-year anniversary of
the savage and cunning attacks of
September 11, 2001
, on the American people. September 11 is now one of the
darkest days in American history because of the almost 3,000
innocent lives that were taken and because of the way in which
the American people were jarred from the dream that we would
experience a time of extended peace after our victory in the
cold war.
The attacks made against us on
September 11 were not just vicious in their inhumanity, in the
lives that were taken, and in their tragic consequences, but
also in the assault made by the terrorists on our very way of
life and on our values. We are a nation whose founders stated
right in the original American document, the Declaration of
Independence, that every citizen has the right to life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And that right is the
endowment of our creator...
What this bill is about, what
this proposal is about, stated in the most direct way, is to
diminish and hopefully eliminate the vulnerabilities that the
terrorists took advantage of.
I am not one who views another
September 11 type attack as inevitable. We are united by our
shared values. We are a patriotic and innovative people. And
if we marshal these strengths of ours, we can make another
September 11 type attack impossible, and that is the aim of
the legislation that our Committee puts before the Senate
today.
The urgent purpose of all three
versions of the homeland security legislation on the table
today—whether we're talking about what's been proposed by
the President, what's been passed by the House, or what's been
endorsed by the Governmental Affairs Committee—is to meet
America's post-September 11 security challenge by
consolidating disparate federal agencies and offices that deal
with homeland security into a single cabinet department, under
a strong, accountable Secretary.
The mission of this department will be spearheading the
federal government's effort to defend the American people
against terrorism on our home soil, while working with states,
counties, cities, towns, and Native-American tribes across the
country—as well as the private sector—to improve their
preparedness and response capabilities.
The department will also be committed in statute to
carrying out the many other vital missions of the consolidated
agencies and offices...
Both Congress and the President
have made real progress since September 11th: leading a
successful military campaign in
Afghanistan
, creating the current Office of Homeland Security, passing
the USA-Patriot Act, creating the Transportation Security
Administration, and beginning to reform the FBI, among other
things. Federal
workers are making a valiant effort in cooperation with the
lead actors in this fight, our state and local workers, to
keep us safe.
But we have to be honest.
Our progress will hit a wall if we don't reform the
federal government's homeland security capabilities.
The gains that we've made in keeping
America
safe since September 11th have been and will continue to be
despite the system, not because of it.
It's dispersed, disorganized, and more than a little
dysfunctional. It
needs to become coherent, consolidated, and coordinated to
rise to the complex challenge of defeating 21st Century
terrorism in our homeland.
The 18 hearings we in the
Governmental Affairs Committee have held since September 11th
on this issue, and countless other hearings by other
committees, have made the scope and depth of the dysfunction
clear to me. To
sum it up in the words of Stephen Flynn, Senior Fellow of
National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations,
who testified before us on October 21st, "We have built
our defense and intelligence communities to fight an away
game."
Across our government, we
are dividing our strengths when we desperately need to be
multiplying them—and, as the President himself acknowledged
on June 6, the Office for Homeland Security ably headed by
Governor Ridge just doesn't have the structural power to get
the job done. Indeed,
the release on July 16 of the President's National Strategy
for Homeland Security underlined the importance of creating a
department that can orchestrate the huge task ahead.
Mr. President, the status quo is
unacceptable, and if we are to rise to the occasion, we have
to organize for the occasion.
So what we contemplate today isn't simply a government
reorganization. It's
a movement from disorganization toward organization, from
entropy toward order, and from blur toward focus.
When we pass this legislation, the American people for
the first time will be able to look to a single federal agency
to take the lead in the homeland fight against terrorism, and
to hold that agency accountable for accomplishing what is
government's first and most important responsibility.
The Department we will create, to
be led by a Presidentially-appointed, Senate-confirmed
Secretary, would be comprised of six directorates, that taken
together communicate its missions and goals.
Let me describe them to you briefly:
First, Intelligence.
We can't prevent attacks, nor can we adequately prepare
to protect ourselves or respond, without first detecting
danger. Our
legislation would establish a strong intelligence division to
receive all terrorism-related intelligence from federal, state
and local authorities, human and signal, and closed and open
sources—including foreign intelligence analysis from the
Director of Central Intelligence's Counterterrorism
Center—and then fuse it in a single place.
Indeed, the new Department won't just receive and
analyze intelligence collected from other agencies; it will
collect lots of information in-house—from Customs,
Immigration, the Coast Guard, TSA, and other constituent
agencies. All that
will be fed into the same stream so the Department can detect
patterns and work with law enforcement to prevent attacks
against
America
.
This precise capability exists
nowhere else in government, and would be designed to
complement the Director of Central Intelligence's
Counterterrorism Center and the capabilities of other
intelligence and law enforcement agencies—which themselves
are reforming and improving in the wake of September 11th.
It would mean that all information related to terrorist
threats on American soil would for the first time in our
history be seen by the same eyes and processed by the same
analysts. Call it
"hear all evil, see all evil."
I think this is precisely what we need to prevent the
recurrence of the disastrous disconnects that left the puzzle
pieces of the September 11th plot laying scattered in the box
when they might have been assembled.
Second, Critical Infrastructure.
We can expect terrorists to try to hurt us by
destroying or disrupting our infrastructure, which includes
our water and agriculture delivery systems, energy grids,
information technology networks, and more—85 percent of
which is owned and operated by the private sector.
That's the nervous system, respiratory system, and
circulatory system of our society.
Infrastructure isn't the only terrorist target; indeed,
attacks by weapons of mass destruction are usually designed to
destroy people, not to damage our infrastructure.
But infrastructure is a big, vulnerable, and complex
target, and today, responsibility for working with the private
sector to safeguard our infrastructure is spread thin
throughout the federal bureaucracy.
This directorate would mesh critical infrastructure
protection offices now residing in five different federal
agencies including the Department of Energy, the Department of
Commerce, and the General Services Administration.
Third, Border and Transportation Protection.
Every physical source of danger that's not already
inside our country must come in through our ports and
airports, or over our borders.
And once danger gets inside, it's much harder to root
out. So to effectively interdict, interrupt, and intercept
terrorists and the weapons or toxic materials they seek to
smuggle in, this directorate would bring together our Customs
Service, the border quarantine inspectors of the Animal Plant
Health Inspection Service of the U.S. Department of
Agriculture, the recently created Transportation Security
Administration, and the
Federal
Law
Enforcement
Training
Center
. The Coast Guard
will also be transferred to the new department, reporting
directly to the Secretary of Homeland Security—and will work
very closely with all other authorities on our waterways, in
our ports, and at our borders.
Fourth, Science and Technology.
Terrorists will try to turn chemistry, biology, and
technology against us in untraditional ways, so we must
marshal our talents to preempt them and protect ourselves.
This directorate would leverage
America
's advantage on this front, creating a lean entity to manage
and coordinate innovative homeland security research and
development, and to spearhead rapid technology transition and
deployment. It
would be armed with an array of mechanisms to catalyze and
harness the enormous scientific and technological potential
residing within our government, companies and universities.
One of the key features of this Directorate will be a
homeland security version of the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency, which has sparked the development of
revolutionary war fighting tools for our military—not to
mention impressive commercial technologies like the Internet.
Fifth, Emergency Preparedness and Response.
After September 11th, we all have an obligation to
think about—and prepare ourselves for—the unthinkable,
including attacks with chemical, biological, radiological, and
nuclear weapons. This
directorate, with the Federal Emergency Management Agency at
its core, will combine and integrate the strengths of a number
of federal agencies and offices responsible for dispensing
critical vaccines and medicines, training local and state
officials in emergency readiness, as well as reacting to and
recovering from attacks.
Sixth, Immigration.
America
's positive heritage of immigration, which is central to our
character as a country of responsibility, opportunity, and
community, must be honored.
But at the same time, post-September 11th we have to
look with new scrutiny at illegal immigration, as well as at
how to better screen those who come to this country legally.
Our proposal would bring the troubled Immigration and
Naturalization Service into the Department of Homeland
Security, and place those functions in their own division.
Then, to undo internal conflicts in the agency and give
each set of functions the concerted attention it deserves,
we'll split that directorate into two distinct but closely
linked bureaus, as called for in the consensus INS
restructuring plan of Senators Kennedy and Brownback.
This is a long-overdue, major reorganization of a very
troubled agency.
On one hand,
a bureau of immigration services and
adjudications—responsible for visa petitions, naturalization
applications, asylum and refugee issues.
And on the other, a bureau of enforcement and border
affairs—responsible for border patrol, detention, removal,
investigations, and intelligence.
As Governor Ridge said to the Senate Judiciary
Committee, "To make the system work, the right hand of
enforcement must know what the left hand… is doing at all
times." I
agree—and our proposal will ensure that they work together,
while giving them better tools to work with.
We also require the Secretary to
establish a border security working group—comprised of the
Undersecretary for Border and Transportation Security and the
Undersecretary for Immigration Affairs.
Our goal is to make passage more efficient and orderly
for most people and goods crossing the border—while at the
same time identifying and apprehending dangerous people and
things.
On this front, the Secretary of
DHS would also have authority to issue regulations on
applications procedures for visas processed by the State
Department's consular officers, and to assign employees of the
Department to diplomatic and consular posts abroad to advise
consular officers on specific security threats.
Those are the six core
directorates, which I see as six spokes of
a wheel. Where
they all meet, at the axis, is where our security comes
together.
There are a few other important pieces of the
legislation I need to describe.
As we need to keep reiterating, this is not a federal
fight. It's a
national fight—with the front lines in our cities and towns
all across
America
. You need only
look at the long list of fallen heroes of September 11th to
understand that. That's
why we in
Washington
must do a far better job of creating and sustaining potent
partnerships with states and localities, which will be
facilitated throughout the new Department through an Office
for State and Local Government Coordination.
This office is designed to assess and advocate for the
resources needed by state and local governments all across the
country. This
office has been strengthened with the help of an amendment by
Senators Carper and Collins providing a number of new
mechanisms—including the creation of liaison positions in
states—to ensure close and constant coordination between the
federal government and the first responders whose sacrifices
keep us safe.
And to meet the pressing need for
well-trained firefighters in our communities, our legislation
includes an amendment by Senators Carnahan and Collins that
would provide federal assistance to local communities
nationwide to hire as many as 10,000 additional fire fighters
per year.
Finally, recognizing the need to
ensure that fundamental American freedoms are not curbed as we
build a more secure society, we've created positions of Civil
Rights Officer and Privacy Officer, as well as a designated
officer under the Inspector General within the new department.
Those positions will provide the Secretary valuable
guidance to help craft effective policies and practices that
don't compromise individual rights, and ensure there is an
effective avenue for receiving complaints and investigating
them.
Outside of this Department,
within the White House, the amendment would create another
critical entity—a National Office for Combating Terrorism (NOCT).
We must not fail to recognize that the fight against
terrorism is by definition much larger even than a robust new
Department of Homeland Security—involving our military and
intelligence communities, diplomatic services, law enforcement
agencies, and others. It's
therefore still in need of a policy architect who can design
and build the overarching anti-terrorism strategy for the
President. The
Director of this Office will work with the Homeland Security
Secretary to develop the National Strategy for Combating
Terrorism and Homeland Security Response.
With budget certification authority, he or she will
make sure that all the budgets that make up our anti-terrorism
strategy fit together smoothly.
And because of the critical nature of the job, the
Director would be confirmed by the Senate, making him or her
accountable to the Congress and to the people.
That's an overview of our
legislation. I'm
proud that we in the Senate are near-unified in this attempt
to form a more perfect Union.
Mr. President, Winston Churchill
said, "A pessimist sees the difficulty in every
opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every
difficulty." There are still some pessimists who want to
derail this legislation, but I believe we have crafted a
fundamentally optimistic—and realistic—answer to the
homeland security challenges we face. And I am confident that
optimism will prevail, as it has over and over again
throughout the history of America.
As we go forward with amendments
and discussion and votes on the remaining differences, I hope
and believe that optimism will prevail, and constructive
action will result - together, united, across party lines, as
we it has over and over again throughout the history of our
great country, which today faces a challenge that is
unprecedented. And
the response that we are called on to give is equally
unprecedented.
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