<DOC>
[107th Congress House Hearings]
[From the U.S. Government Printing Office via GPO Access]
[DOCID: f:84601.wais]
COMBATING TERRORISM: PROTECTING THE UNITED STATES, PARTS I AND II
=======================================================================
HEARINGS
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY,
VETERANS AFFAIRS AND INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS
of the
COMMITTEE ON
GOVERNMENT REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
MARCH 12 AND 21, 2002
__________
Serial No. 107-156
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Government Reform
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpo.gov/congress/house
http://www.house.gov/reform
-------
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WASHINGTON : 2003
____________________________________________________________________________
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COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM
DAN BURTON, Indiana, Chairman
BENJAMIN A. GILMAN, New York HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
CONSTANCE A. MORELLA, Maryland TOM LANTOS, California
CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut MAJOR R. OWENS, New York
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania
STEPHEN HORN, California PATSY T. MINK, Hawaii
JOHN L. MICA, Florida CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York
THOMAS M. DAVIS, Virginia ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, Washington,
MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana DC
STEVEN C. LaTOURETTE, Ohio ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland
BOB BARR, Georgia DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio
DAN MILLER, Florida ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois
DOUG OSE, California DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois
RON LEWIS, Kentucky JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts
JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia JIM TURNER, Texas
TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania THOMAS H. ALLEN, Maine
DAVE WELDON, Florida JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois
CHRIS CANNON, Utah WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri
ADAM H. PUTNAM, Florida DIANE E. WATSON, California
C.L. ``BUTCH'' OTTER, Idaho STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts
EDWARD L. SCHROCK, Virginia ------
JOHN J. DUNCAN, Jr., Tennessee BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont
------ ------ (Independent)
Kevin Binger, Staff Director
Daniel R. Moll, Deputy Staff Director
James C. Wilson, Chief Counsel
Robert A. Briggs, Chief Clerk
Phil Schiliro, Minority Staff Director
Subcommittee on National Security, Veterans Affairs and International
Relations
CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut, Chairman
ADAM H. PUTNAM, Florida DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio
BENJAMIN A. GILMAN, New York BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida THOMAS H. ALLEN, Maine
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York TOM LANTOS, California
STEVEN C. LaTOURETTE, Ohio JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts
RON LEWIS, Kentucky JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois
TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri
DAVE WELDON, Florida DIANE E. WATSON, California
C.L. ``BUTCH'' OTTER, Idaho STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts
EDWARD L. SCHROCK, Virginia
Ex Officio
DAN BURTON, Indiana HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
Lawrence J. Halloran, Staff Director and Counsel
R. Nicholas Palarino, Senior Policy Analyst
Jason Chung, Clerk
David Rapallo, Minority Counsel
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
Hearing held on:
March 12, 2002............................................... 1
March 21, 2002............................................... 107
Statement of:
Bremer, Ambassador L. Paul, III, chairman, National
Commission on Terrorism, Marsh Crisis Consulting; Randall
J. Larsen, director, ANSER Institute for Homeland Security;
Joseph Cirincione, Director, Nonproliferation Project,
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and Henry L.
Hinton, managing director, Defense Capabilities and
Management, General Accounting Office...................... 44
Keating, Frank, former Governor of Oklahoma; and Edwin Meese
III, former Attorney General, co-chairman, Homeland
Security Task Force, the Heritage Foundation............... 7
Verga, Peter, Special Assistant for Homeland Security Office
of the Secretary of Defense; Stephen McHale, Deputy, Under
Secretary, Transportation Security, Transportation Security
Administration, Department of Transportation; William Raub,
Deputy Director, Office of Public Health Preparedness,
Department of Health and Human Services; Kenneth O. Burris,
Director of Region IV, Atlanta, Federal Emergency
Management Agency; James Caruso, Deputy Assistant Director
for Counter Terrorism, Federal Bureau of Investigation; and
Joseph R. Green, Deputy Executive Associate Commissioner
for Field Operations, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service.................................................... 115
Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:
Burris, Kenneth O., Director of Region IV, Atlanta, Federal
Emergency Management Agency, prepared statement of......... 146
Caruso, James, Deputy Assistant Director for Counter
Terrorism, Federal Bureau of Investigation, prepared
statement of............................................... 155
Cirincione, Joseph, Director, Nonproliferation Project,
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, prepared
statement of............................................... 61
Green, Joseph R., Deputy Executive Associate Commissioner for
Field Operations, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service, prepared statement of............................. 170
Hinton, Henry L., managing director, Defense Capabilities and
Management, General Accounting Office, prepared statement
of......................................................... 70
Keating, Frank, former Governor of Oklahoma, prepared
statement of............................................... 12
Larsen, Randall J., director, ANSER Institute for Homeland
Security, prepared statement of............................ 49
McHale, Stephen, Deputy, Under Secretary, Transportation
Security, Transportation Security Administration,
Department of Transportation, prepared statement of........ 127
Meese, Edwin, III, former Attorney General, co-chairman,
Homeland Security Task Force, the Heritage Foundation,
prepared statement of...................................... 21
Raub, William, Deputy Director, Office of Public Health
Preparedness, Department of Health and Human Services,
prepared statement of...................................... 135
Shays, Hon. Christopher, a Representative in Congress from
the State of Connecticut, prepared statements of
<SUP><INF>ing augmented. The President created the Office of Homeland Security, and Governor Ridge has as his first priority formulation of a national strategy framework for domestic preparedness and consequence management.
I21But there are signs the passage of time and pictures of a war being fought on the other side of the world may be inducing a false sense of security here at home. All checked baggage on airlines is not yet being screened. Seaports remain avoidably vulnerable. Proposals to merge border security functions have met stubborn resistance.
I21Medical surge capacity to treat mass casualties is not available in most communities. Inconsistency and blind spots continue to plague disease surveillance efforts. Comprehensive long-range strategy to discipline spending decisions will not take hold before the beginning of the 2004 fiscal year, 24 months after the World Trade Center towers fell.
I21In the war against terrorism, time is not our ally. As we speak, a clock ticks down toward the all but certain hour a chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapon will be used against us. We are in a race with terrorists to shut them down before that happens. Complacency, fragmentation, bureaucratic inf
<SUP><INF> last year, air travel has been made somewhat safer, border security strengthened, and medical stockpiles are being augmented. The President created the Office of Homeland Security, and Governor Ridge has as his first priority formulation of a national strategy framework for domestic preparedness and consequence management.
I21But there are signs the passage of time and pictures of a war being fought on the other side of the world may be inducing a false sense of security here at home. All checked baggage on airlines is not yet being screened. Seaports remain avoidably vulnerable. Proposals to merge border security functions have met stubborn resistance.
I21Medical surge capacity to treat mass casualties is not available in most communities. Inconsistency and blind spots continue to plague disease surveillance efforts. Comprehensive long-range strategy to discipline spending decisions will not take hold before the beginning of the 2004 fiscal year, 24 months after the World Trade Center towers fell.
I21In the war against terrorism, time is not our ally. As we speak, a clock ticks down toward the all but certain hour a chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapon will be used against us. We are in a race with terrorists to shut them down before that happens. Complacency, fragmentation, bureaucratic inf
ral departments and agencies. Governors and mayors joined the call for better first responder training and improved public health systems.
I21In the wake of the airline and anthrax attacks last year, air travel has been made somewhat safer, border security strengthened, and medical stockpiles are being augmented. The President created the Office of Homeland Security, and Governor Ridge has as his first priority formulation of a national strategy framework for domestic preparedness and consequence management.
I21But there are signs the passage of time and pictures of a war being fought on the other side of the world may be inducing a false sense of security here at home. All checked baggage on airlines is not yet being screened. Seaports remain avoidably vulnerable. Proposals to merge border security functions have met stubborn resistance.
I21Medical surge capacity to treat mass casualties is not available in most communities. Inconsistency and blind spots continue to plague disease surveillance efforts. Comprehensive long-range strategy to discipline spending decisions will not take hold before the beginning of the 2004 fiscal year, 24 months after the World Trade Center towers fell.
I21In the war against terrorism, time is not our ally. As we speak, a clock ticks down toward the all but certain hour a chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapon will be used against us. We are in a race with terrorists to shut them down before that happens. Complacency, fragmentation, bureaucratic inf
<SUP><INF>d, and medical stockpiles are being augmented. The President created the Office of Homeland Security, and Governor Ridge has as his first priority formulation of a national strategy framework for domestic preparedness and consequence management.
I21But there are signs the passage of time and pictures of a war being fought on the other side of the world may be inducing a false sense of security here at home. All checked baggage on airlines is not yet being screened. Seaports remain avoidably vulnerable. Proposals to merge border security functions have met stubborn resistance.
I21Medical surge capacity to treat mass casualties is not available in most communities. Inconsistency and blind spots continue to plague disease surveillance efforts. Comprehensive long-range strategy to discipline spending decisions will not take hold before the beginning of the 2004 fiscal year, 24 months after the World Trade Center towers fell.
I21In the war against terrorism, time is not our ally. As we speak, a clock ticks down toward the all but certain hour a chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapon will be used against us. We are in a race with terrorists to shut them down before that happens. Complacency, fragmentation, bureaucratic inf
<SUP><INF>rity strengthened, and medical stockpiles are being augmented. The President created the Office of Homeland Security, and Governor Ridge has as his first priority formulation of a national strategy framework for domestic preparedness and consequence management.
I21But there are signs the passage of time and pictures of a war being fought on the other side of the world may be inducing a false sense of security here at home. All checked baggage on airlines is not yet being screened. Seaports remain avoidably vulnerable. Proposals to merge border security functions have met stubborn resistance.
I21Medical surge capacity to treat mass casualties is not available in most communities. Inconsistency and blind spots continue to plague disease surveillance efforts. Comprehensive long-range strategy to discipline spending decisions will not take hold before the beginning of the 2004 fiscal year, 24 months after the World Trade Center towers fell.
I21In the war against terrorism, time is not our ally. As we speak, a clock ticks down toward the all but certain hour a chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapon will be used against us. We are in a race with terrorists to shut them down before that happens. Complacency, fragmentation, bureaucratic inf
<SUP><INF>his first priority formulation of a national strategy framework for domestic preparedness and consequence management.
I21But there are signs the passage of time and pictures of a war being fought on the other side of the world may be inducing a false sense of security here at home. All checked baggage on airlines is not yet being screened. Seaports remain avoidably vulnerable. Proposals to merge border security functions have met stubborn resistance.
I21Medical surge capacity to treat mass casualties is not available in most communities. Inconsistency and blind spots continue to plague disease surveillance efforts. Comprehensive long-range strategy to discipline spending decisions will not take hold before the beginning of the 2004 fiscal year, 24 months after the World Trade Center towers fell.
I21In the war against terrorism, time is not our ally. As we speak, a clock ticks down toward the all but certain hour a chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapon will be used against us. We are in a race with terrorists to shut them down before that happens. Complacency, fragmentation, bureaucratic inf
Verga, Peter, Special Assistant for Homeland Security Office
of the Secretary of Defense, prepared statement of......... 118
COMBATING TERRORISM: PROTECTING THE UNITED STATES, PART I
----------
TUESDAY, MARCH 12, 2002
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on National Security, Veterans Affairs
and International Relations,
Committee on Government Reform,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:05 a.m., in
room 2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Christopher
Shays (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Shay, Otter, Kucinich and Tierney.
Staff present: Lawrence J. Halloran, staff director and
counsel; Dr. R. Nicholas Palarino, senior policy advisor;
Thomas Costa, professional staff member; Sherrill Gardner,
detailee-fellow; Jason M. Chung, clerk; David Rapallo, minority
counsel; and Earley Green, minority assistant clerk.
Mr. Shays. I would like to call this hearing on,
``Combating Terrorism: Protecting the United States, Part I,''
to order and welcome our witnesses and our guests.
Yesterday, we paused to remember all of those lost 6 months
ago in the deadliest terrorist attack to date within our
borders. In the unimaginable horror of those events, we are
reminded of another harsh reality, the World Trade Center, the
Pentagon, and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, were not
the first and will not be the last plots of American ground
sanctified by innocent civilian blood.
How prepared are we for the next act of terrorism? Long
before the events of September 11, 2001, panels of experts and
special commissions identified critically needed actions to
improve counterterrorism preparedness and response.
The General Accounting Office, GAO and others, called for
timely, integrated threat assessments and a comprehensive
national strategy to combat terrorism as early as 1998.
The U.S. Commission on National Security, 21st Century,
also called the Hart-Rudman Commission, proposed creation of a
cabinet level homeland security department to streamline and
consolidate counterterrorism programs spread across more than
40 Federal departments and agencies. Governors and mayors
joined the call for better first responder training and
improved public health systems.
In the wake of the airline and anthrax attacks last year,
air travel has been made somewhat safer, border security
strengthened, and medical stockpiles are being augmented. The
President created the Office of Homeland Security, and Governor
Ridge has as his first priority formulation of a national
strategy framework for domestic preparedness and consequence
management.
But there are signs the passage of time and pictures of a
war being fought on the other side of the world may be inducing
a false sense of security here at home. All checked baggage on
airlines is not yet being screened. Seaports remain avoidably
vulnerable. Proposals to merge border security functions have
met stubborn resistance.
Medical surge capacity to treat mass casualties is not
available in most communities. Inconsistency and blind spots
continue to plague disease surveillance efforts. Comprehensive
long-range strategy to discipline spending decisions will not
take hold before the beginning of the 2004 fiscal year, 24
months after the World Trade Center towers fell.
In the war against terrorism, time is not our ally. As we
speak, a clock ticks down toward the all but certain hour a
chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapon will be
used against us. We are in a race with terrorists to shut them
down before that happens. Complacency, fragmentation,
bureaucratic infighting, any short-sighted attachments to the
status quo only increase the likelihood and depth of the next
attack, the deadliness of the next attack. This is the first of
two hearings to assess what has been done, what needs to be
done, and what impedes faster progress in defending the United
States against the menace of global terrorism.
Next week representatives of Federal departments and
agencies responsible for key counterterrorism initiatives will
testify. Our witnesses today bring unquestioned expertise and
depth to this discussion of homeland security issues. We are
grateful for their time and their work and their participation
in this hearing.
Our first panel is comprised of the Honorable Frank
Keating, the Governor of Oklahoma, and also the Honorable Ed
Meese, former attorney general, co-chairman, Homeland Security
Task Force and the Heritage Foundation.
And before swearing them in and hearing their testimony, I
invite Mr. Kucinich to make a statement.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Christopher Shays follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T4601.001
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T4601.002
Mr. Kucinich. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Welcome to
our witnesses, Mr. Meese, Governor.
In over 20 hearings on counterterrorism, this subcommittee
has heard a repeated refrain: Priorities, priorities,
priorities. Scores of experts have testified before this
subcommittee that the administration should take three concrete
steps. First, assess and prioritize in a comprehensive way all
of the threats to our country. Second, craft a national
strategy that addresses these priorities in a most effective
manner. And third, align budget decisions according to these
priorities.
The administration has failed to take these essential
steps. No comprehensive threat and risk assessment has been
conducted. The administration has no national strategy. And the
President's budgets proposal fails to address security threats
in an organized fashion. What does this mean in practical
terms? The dangers that the President's budget allocates
funding to programs that are not top national security
priorities, and thereby deprives other programs of needed
funding. Urgent programs are being shortchanged. And the
country's security could be comprised.
After September 11th and in light of the huge infusions of
funding from Congress, there is no longer any excuse for
operating in the dark. We need an organized plan now. We must
assess threats realistically, prioritize them logically, and
deal with them efficiently.
We cannot afford to waste billions of dollars for political
reasons. For these reasons, Chairman Shays and I, along with
Chairman Burton and Ranking Member Waxman, wrote to President
Bush in October when he appointed Governor Ridge as director of
Homeland Security. We urged the President to take these steps:
To analyze all threats side by side. To develop a national
strategy. And to align budget decisions to that strategy. We
joined together in a spirit of bipartisan cooperation because
these issues are some of the most important we will ever face.
I would like to make our letter part of the record.
Mr. Chairman, more than 4 months later we have no response
from the administration, no comprehensive assessment, no
national strategy, and a budget proposal replete with funding
that is not aligned with what are current threats. The
administration's theological fascination with missile defense
is one example.
President Bush is spending $8 billion a year on missile
defense, making it the single largest weapon program in the
Federal budget. Over the next 5 years the administration plans
to spend over $38 billion on missile defense, and the
Congressional Budget Office estimates that the full system
could cost as much as 238 billion. But no threat assessment
exists to justify this spending. In fact, just the opposite is
true. Experts, including U.S. intelligence and military
officials, have concluded that the threat of a rogue state
launching a missile at the United States is not as great as
other threats, particularly since such an attack would invite
immediate and devastating response.
To the contrary, experts warn that the more urgent threat
is from unsecured Russian stockpiles of weapons of mass
destruction, nuclear devices and materials, chemical and
biological weapons, weapons expertise. All of these are urgent
threats because terrorists are actively seeking these materials
and resources.
In testimony before the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence, CIA Director George Tenet said, ``Russia appears
to be the first choice of proliferant states seeking the most
advanced technology and training.''
But the administration is spending only 1.5 billion to help
secure Russian stockpiles. The pressing question is, how did
the administration come up with these two figures? The
president wants to spend $8 billion on missile defense and 1.5
billion on Russian stockpiles. Who decided on these funding
levels? Upon what were these decisions based? What threat
assessments were examined? Were these threats ever analyzed
side by side? And, ultimately, how does the administration
justify spending so much on such an unlikely threat? These are
the questions I hope that we ask in today's heightened security
environment.
And finally, Mr. Chairman, I think it is important that we
deal with the issue of terrorism without ourself being
terrified. Because fear robs us of our capacity to take
rational action. Thank you.
Mr. Shays. Thank the gentleman.
At this time let me get some housekeeping out of the way. I
ask unanimous consent that all members of the subcommittee be
permitted to place an opening statement in the record, and that
the record remain open for 3 days for that purpose. Without
objection, so ordered.
And I ask further unanimous consent that all witnesses be
permitted to include their written statements in the record.
And without objection, so ordered.
We are blessed with two excellent panels. Our first panel
is Frank Keating, who was the former Governor of Oklahoma when
the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed, and
168 precious lives lost. Important lessons were learned from
that catastrophe and the Governor is here to share them with us
today.
And also welcome the Honorable Edwin Meese, III, who is
currently the chairman for the Center for Legal and Judicial
Studies at the Heritage Foundation. He was U.S. Attorney
General during the Reagan administration, and is co-chairman of
the Heritage Foundation report, ``Defending the American
Homeland.''
At this time I would invite both witnesses to stand. As you
know, we swear our witnesses in.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mr. Shays. I would like to recognize as well--does the
gentleman, Mr. Otter, have any statement that you would like to
make?
Mr. Otter. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. My apologies
for being late.
Mr. Shays. No apologies necessary.
Mr. Otter. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank you and the
ranking member for holding this hearing. I also want to thank
Governor Keating from Oklahoma, and the other witnesses for
testifying. In the 6-months since September 11th, our country
has been guarding against future attacks for the entire
country.
The administration has done an admirable job appointing
Governor Ridge to run the Office of Homeland Security and
creating the Transportation Security Administration to adopt
new security measures for our airway systems. Much remains to
be done to protect against, to prepare for the next terrorist
attack.
History has shown us that the trend line for terrorist
attacks casualties are steadily upward. Should our foes strike
again, they will probably dwarf the losses of September 11th.
In light of this real threat, we cannot afford to waste
resources on duplications and inefficiencies.
As the witnesses will tell us, we are already seeing
counterterrorism being used as a justification for every type
of spending imaginable. Stronger controls are needed in
Washington, DC, to ensure that our spending is directed to the
most necessary security measures. More attention must be given
to the rural areas of our Nation than the current antiterrorism
strategy.
While our great cities will always be at risk of attack,
rural areas contain such key critical infrastructure whose
destruction would be viewed as deadly for our citizens and
dangerous obviously for our economy. Rural areas also are less
likely to have the resources in place to deal with a nationwide
biological threat or a mass exodus from our cities.
One of the lessons of September 11th is the importance of
local leadership and preparation. All of the Federal
antiterrorism preparation was of little use to the mayor in New
York City that morning, without the city and the State's own
years of planning for a worst-case scenario.
If new Federal spending does not support our local
emergency services and law enforcement, it will be worse than
useless, lulling us into a false sense of security while
neglecting the men and women on the ground who bear those
dangerous burdens.
History will record that the terrorists who struck this
country on September 11th struck without warning or without
mercy. We must all work to ensure that when our foes strike
again, history does not say of us that we were forewarned and
we did not forearm.
So, Mr. Chairman, once again, I want to thank you very much
for calling this very important meeting. I would also like to
submit my little longer statement for the record.
Mr. Shays. Without objection. Thank you.
I would like to thank Ambassador Bremer. We wanted to have
two panels and enjoy the synergy, Ambassador Bremer, of you
participating in the second one.
So as well, welcome both our witnesses here. We will start
off with you, Governor, and then we will go with you, Attorney
General.
STATEMENTS OF FRANK KEATING, FORMER GOVERNOR OF OKLAHOMA; AND
EDWIN MEESE III, FORMER ATTORNEY GENERAL, CO-CHAIRMAN, HOMELAND
SECURITY TASK FORCE, THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION
Mr. Keating. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee,
thank you for giving me this opportunity to once again appear
and share some perspectives from the State and local vantage
point. First I want to thank President Bush for his leadership
in responding to the terrorist events of September 11th and his
magnificent leadership in bringing together the world community
to resist further terrorist events.
Second, I want to thank the Congress and the President for
their leadership role in providing the assistance to my
colleague, Governor Ridge, my former colleague Governor Ridge,
in placing an emphasis on homeland security. As the members of
the committee are well aware, two-thirds of the Nation's GDP is
consumer confidence, and if there are frequent events like
those of September 11th, there will be few people traveling,
there will be fewer people investing, and it will be
calamitous, not only for the people of the United States, but
also for our economy as well.
I want to ask that the committee consider the formal
presentation that I have placed before it, but I would like to
make a couple of comments that might be of some interest or
relevance to the membership, from a State and local leader's
perspective.
First, I want to thank the Congress for providing some
financial assistance to us to prepare and to train. I think as
the Governor of Oklahoma during the Oklahoma City bombings and
also the worst tornadoes ever to strike an urban area of the
United States, the tornadoes of May 3, 1999, I have had
regrettably my fair share of man-made and natural disasters. In
all of those experiences, I have been enormously impressed with
the coordinative mechanism of FEMA, the fact that we are able
to draw on other State and local entities to send us assistance
in our time of need. I think FEMA is a first-rate organization
that does wonderful work, and I commend the Congress for their
commitment to that organization.
But I would encourage you to recognize something that many
of our citizens, fellow citizens don't recognize, and that is
there is no such thing as a Federal posse coming to the
assistance of Oklahoma City or Cleveland or whatever community
you may be from. There is no such thing as a 747 filled with
doctors and nurses from Walter Reed Army Hospital. The first
responders are State and local officials. The second responders
are State and local officials. The third responders are State
and local. All of them are State and local.
When we had to ask for help and received it from President
Clinton following the April 1995 bombing of the Murrah Building
in Oklahoma City, the Sacramento and the Phoenix and the Los
Angeles, Fairfax County, Virginia, Prince Georges County,
Maryland, New York--and, yes, many of the New Yorkers who
helped us in Oklahoma City were killed on September 11th--all
of these were State and local officials. Only the FEMA team
from New York had a law enforcement component. All of the rest
were strictly firefighters. And, of course, they had knowledge
of rescue and recovery procedures, and they were, as members of
those teams, first rate and professional.
But it is important, following the events of September
11th, to encourage those other FEMA teams to have a law
enforcement component as well. These events are criminal
events. There are communities in the United States that do need
the assistance of highly trained law enforcement officers as
well.
Second, it is very important, I think, to provide that any
plan, any system to provide for distribution of Federal funds
back to the States to prepare for another terrorist event be
required, first, to be based upon a State plan.
I testified in New York in front of a--with Governor Barnes
of Georgia and Governor Bush of Florida in front of a
subcommittee of this House. And one of the Members asked me
what was the No. 1 issue as a Governor of a State or a mayor of
a State that you faced to prepare against a similar national or
man-made event, and I said the lack of interoperable radio and
communications equipment.
Interestingly, Governor Barnes said exactly the same thing.
And obviously Oklahoma is a middle-sized State, Georgia is a
much larger State, and Florida is a much larger State still.
Governor Bush said exactly the same thing.
We had a tragedy in Oklahoma City, and my youngest is a
state trooper in Oklahoma. But we had a tragedy in Oklahoma
City where a police officer in pursuit of a criminal, with
lights and sirens, went up the interstate in the wrong way. A
state trooper coming in the other direction with lights and
sirens pursuing someone else, neither of them communicated one
with the other, both of them crashed into each other and both
law enforcement officers were killed.
This is not uncommon around the United States. And the bill
for replacing many of these ad-hoc decisions is to the lowest,
best price for communications gear for ours is $50 million.
If those moneys are provided strictly on the basis of local
need, I am afraid that we will have the same thing again.
Cities will acquire, at the lowest best bid, perhaps utterly
incompatible communications equipment and other cities, other
counties, other law enforcement agencies, Federal, and of
course any out-of-state assistance won't be able to communicate
as well. It is very important that whatever we do, we do it
with the State planning and regional planning, that the
equipment that is purchased is compatible with Federal, State,
local, even, for example, electric utilities coming from other
States to assist in putting back a communications system or an
electricity or a gas system that was disrupted by a natural or
man-made event.
It is just very important that we have a State plan. In our
State we divided up with the State into eighths. I placed an
individual, an ex-FBI agent, and my commissioner of the
Department of Public Safety in charge.
The FEMA, or the State version of FEMA, the local rescue
and recovery people are a part of that. We have two pieces. We
have an avoidance piece, that is a prevention piece, as well as
a response piece. I think it is as sophisticated as any State
in the union. But it only works as long as all of those people
can communicate each with the other. For the first time now we
have a public health component, something we have not had
before.
By the way, I also would encourage that FEMA be required to
have a public health component. When they come into a State,
that is something that is extraordinarily important.
Also on that same note, I might add that I know, Mr. Shays,
after Dark Winter last summer, I had the opportunity to appear
with others to testify before you and the members of this
subcommittee. But we discovered then that if there were a
bioterrorism event and it took many days to determine what in
fact had happened, those are many days to create panic, those
are many days to create mayhem.
So to the extent that there can be an aggressive research
and development program--we defeated the Germans and the
Japanese in 4 years in World War II. We ought to be able to
provide an ability quickly to identify anthrax or smallpox or
some other bioterrorism challenge and not have to wait several
weeks before we know if, in fact, there is a problem.
Also--and I appreciate the leadership of the members of
this committee as well. It is important for us at the State and
local level to know that if an event occurs, what is it that
occurred, what kind of dosage units are available and where to
provide for vaccinations for our rescue and recovery personnel,
and we want to make sure that we can identify whatever that
event is quickly so we can vaccinate our rescue and recovery
people to prevent them getting sick and provide an opportunity
for our citizens to be safe.
As you know, one of the problems is if there is an--if
there is--there is a suggestion of a bioterrorist attack, it
may well be that if the people working in public health, a
third don't show up, because they don't want to get sick, a
third may already be affected, and maybe you only have a third
of the people who can really address the issue at hand, namely
the protection of the public. This is a very complex and a
very, very worrisome potential scenario to me. And in our own
murder board, if you will, our own actions and reactions at the
State level, the public health piece is the one that is the
least sophisticated to start, because we never imagined
something like this to happen to the United States.
Let me mention something briefly about the avoidance or the
prevention piece. There are more State and local law
enforcement officers out there than Federal agents. Today most
States require police officers in urban areas, even State
troopers, to be college graduates.
When I was an FBI agent, you had to be a lawyer,
accountant. Many States today, their local police, State police
are as well educated and as well trained as any Federal agents.
There are a lot more of them out there. And we need obviously
to encourage the sharing of intelligence between the Federal
authorities and State and local authorities. They are best
positioned to identify on the ground what could happen and best
positioned--to be in a position if someone is in the United
States meaning us harm to make arrests and to avoid--we find in
our State the FBI has been excellent in coordinating with us.
If there has been a failure it has been on our part to change
the open records and open meetings laws to permit them to share
intelligence with us. That is something we are addressing this
legislative session.
I commend to the members of the committee that is a problem
in every State. Every State needs to look at their statutes to
make sure that they can coordinate with the Federal
authorities. But we are only as good as the intelligence given
us. If the intelligence given us is inadequate or incorrect, we
will take action or we won't take action to the--to the great
disservice of our people. That has to be addressed.
We do need assistance in training. I think it is very
important that the Congress provide a seamless mechanism out
there where people come to our State or our people go to your
State, they know how to react, and they have been trained
pretty well similarly.
If you have a regional event, for example, in our State,
let's say, a train derails in a rural area right across the
border from Texas and it is a much more urban area, the people
who will come rushing into Oklahoma will be from Texas, not
from Oklahoma. There wouldn't be that number of people in our--
in that part of the State to respond. So they need--we need to
have intercommunications equipment that is interoperable on the
regional level. We have to have people trained on a regional
level. We have to have the sharing of intelligence and the
sharing of preparation on--in intelligence on a regional level,
not just simply on a State level.
I would encourage, and I have to my fellow Governors and
mayors, that they look at all of these issues and they focus on
the best intelligence provided us by the Federal Government,
the best intelligence we develop ourselves and murder board and
prepare over and over again, so that in the event something
happens we are truly and well prepared so that the public has a
sense of confidence and trust.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Keating follows:]
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Mr. Shays. Governor, thank you. Your oral statement only is
identical to your written statement, very thorough and very
helpful. I would like to thank you publicly for so many of the
families who lost loved ones in the bombing in Oklahoma City,
their participation up in New York.
I had a number of families from the Fourth Congressional
District who lost loved ones, and they found tremendous
guidance and comfort from people from Oklahoma who came to New
York.
Mr. Keating. Thanks, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Shays. Also, just to let you know, on April 23rd we
will be having a hearing on the allocation of radio frequency
spectrum and proposals to designate certain frequencies for
police, fire and emergency medical use, both nationally and,
frankly, internationally. So we are going to be trying to
followup on that.
Attorney General Meese.
Mr. Meese. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I am honored to have the opportunity to appear before this
committee and particularly to join my good friend, Mr. Keating,
and my colleague and co-chairman ambassador Bremer.
Mr. Shays. We are honored to have you.
Mr. Meese. I would join Mr. Keating in expressing
appreciation for the outstanding leadership of President Bush
in dealing with both the international and the domestic aspects
of terrorism.
Following the September 11th attacks, the Heritage
Foundation established its homeland security task force which
brought together some of the best experts in the world on this
subject.
It included a former chief of staff of the Army, a former
commandant of the Marine Corps, Mr. Keating himself was a
member of that task force, a number of police chiefs and others
who had particular expertise in this field.
That report and the findings of that commission which, by
the way, looked at all previous commission reports and other
recommendations to see what had been accomplished up until that
time, what continued to need to be accomplished, has been
summarized in this booklet, ``Defending the American
Homeland.''
And I would ask, Mr. Chairman, that be entered into the
record, along with a full copy of my testimony, since I will be
limited in what I can present here.
Mr. Shays. That will be done. Thank you.
Mr. Meese. Thank you. Since that time we have had briefings
for White House Office of Homeland Security, Governor Ridge,
Members of Congress, and other organizations and individuals
that were interested in the subject. We have a continuing
dialog with the Office of Homeland Security, including a
conference that will take place later on this afternoon.
Basically our report covered four major areas: Protecting
the Nation's infrastructure, strengthening civil defense
against terrorism, improving intelligence and law enforcement
capabilities, and military operations to combat terrorism.
In regard to protecting the Nation's infrastructure, I
think it is important to stress what Mr. Otter mentioned
earlier, that many of the facilities in the infrastructure are
located in rural areas, particularly nuclear facilities, power
plants, that sort of thing.
When we talk about infrastructure we really are talking
about a variety of very critical items within our Nation, such
as communications networks, utilities, water supplies, banking
and finance systems, transportation nodes, and intelligence
systems.
And that is why this particular recommendation is so
important. Part of this also involves local and State
officials, because obviously the inventory of the
infrastructure assets that need to be protected can best be
done at the local level where the officials there will know
what are the particular facilities, plants and otherwise that
need to be protected, and so it is very important to facilitate
the communication on infrastructure issues between the Office
of Homeland Security and other Federal agencies and State and
local officials.
One of the interesting things in our report was the
highlighting of the fact that the global positioning system is
one of those critical infrastructure items. And I was pleased
to see just within the last week or so that is being recognized
by the Federal Government as one of the particular items in our
infrastructure that will in fact be protected.
In terms of strengthening civil defense against terrorism,
as Mr. Keating mentioned--and one of the critical items is the
protection against bioterrorism, since that is the one thing
that is new to the inventory of potential disasters. As the
Governor pointed out, we have things like railroad accidents,
we have hurricanes, we have earthquakes and various other types
of major incidents. But our country has never really
experienced a bioterrorist attack, and so the chemical and
biological aspects of terrorism particularly deserve attention,
and the inclusion of the health component in our planning and
preparation to deal with those kind of incidents.
I would indicate particularly the importance of, at the
present time, I believe the country is without a surgeon
general, and that might well be the key place where the Federal
Government could concentrate its leadership in terms of
coordinating the various Federal agencies, since the National
Institutes of Health, the Center for Disease Control and
Prevention and other aspects of the Department of Health and
Human Services would be involved.
But it is critical that the planning include the State and
local officials, officials such as the State departments of
public health and county and city departments of public health,
as well as extending this cooperation to the medical
profession, which is largely in the private sector, as well as,
of course, our series of hospitals.
It is my understanding that at the present time that the
Center for Disease Control and Prevention has a network of some
115 hospital laboratories throughout the country that are
prepared to analyze a potential attack, chemical or
bioterrorist attack. But it is important that there be the
coordination with the local officials so the information can
get from local doctors and local health officials to these
laboratories.
In terms of intelligence and law enforcement, one of the
critical issues is the one that the Governor mentioned, that is
the willingness and ability of intelligence sharing on a two-
way basis between or among all of the levels of government.
In the past, much of the knowledge that we have had of
terrorist incidents, and I am not--even before September 11th
came from local officials who saw something strange in their
particular jurisdiction. In many cases they were the ones that
actually apprehended the potential terrorist. It is very
important that the steps be taken so that local law enforcement
officers have the information, the intelligence that is
possessed at the Federal Government level, that there be
communication links so that local officials can provide that
information to the Federal agencies.
At the Federal level, the principal recommendation in terms
of intelligence is that there be a fusion system, so that the
information coming in from a variety of sources can be brought
together and analyzed and processed in a central clearing
house, and that then would be the--would give the ability for
this information then to be disseminated out to those agencies
at all levels of government where it can be utilized.
The other major recommendation in terms of law enforcement
has to do with control of our borders, and the importance of
making sure that information particularly is transmitted to
those officials who have something to do with the border
control or the control of people, particularly foreign
nationals, that are coming into this country. A very important
element that often is left out is the fact that we can best
control our borders by dealing with foreign nationals coming
into this country at the source. In other words, at the foreign
country location where they receive their visas. And that is
why the consular service of the State Department needs to be
brought into this whole system of information, particularly
about foreign nationals who might have a potential for
terrorist activity.
In addition to this, it is important that we control those
foreign nationals within our borders. It is estimated that over
300,000 foreign nationals are now illegally in the United
States, a large proportion of them illegal in the sense that
they have overstayed their visas or they have not complied with
other requirements of being in this country. And so aspects of
controlling that type of foreign national, which specifically
pertains to the people who were involved in the September 11th
incident, ought to be a very high priority.
Finally, our fourth area of recommendation had to do with
military operations to combat terrorism. And there, it is clear
that the most important military element to deal with homeland
defense is the National Guard. This involves two major policy
changes at the Federal level.
One is to be sure that there is adequate funding for the
National Guard in order to provide for their homeland defense
mission, which often would otherwise be left to State funding
which, as the Governor mentioned, is not really available in
concrete terms.
And the other thing is that our national war plan must be
reviewed to be sure that we are not depending upon National
Guard troops to be serving overseas in the series of military
activities taking place in foreign nations at the time that
they may be needed for homeland defense within this country.
We also, I think, have to review the issue of to what
extent we want National Guardsmen to be on duty essentially
full time, as they are presently at the airports, inasmuch as
this interferes with the concept of citizen soldiers or citizen
military personnel in which they still have to go about their
normal jobs and carry out the responsibilities of their
employment.
Finally, Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, let me
make a couple of observations that cover the entire report. One
is, we believe it is absolutely critical that homeland defense
and homeland security be engaged without in any way violating
the essential liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. We feel
it is possible with the proper planning, with the proper
oversight, of the entire homeland security effort that we can
indeed continue, even though we may deal--we may have to invade
some of the conveniences that people enjoy, such as at
airports, which we know about at the present time. But the
basic protections of the Constitution must be guaranteed to all
U.S. citizens at all times, including time of war.
Second, I would reiterate what the Governor said in terms
of the first responders. We know it will be the local police
and fire who are responsible, and medical emergency medical
services for the initial response. This means that Federal
funding must be adequate to give them the necessary planning
and coordination capabilities to give them the equipment they
are going to need, to give them the training, particularly, and
Federal agencies can be very helpful as in the FBI providing
intelligence training to local law enforcement.
But particularly the point that the Governor made, which I
would like to reiterate and which is contained in our report,
the importance of exercises to work out the plans, to see what
works and what doesn't, to see what glitches occur, to see what
difficulties there are, and I suspect, as the Governor
mentioned, the communications difficulties, the
interoperability of radios, for example, will be one of the
first things that would be recognized if an exercise were held
today.
Third, it is important, I believe, that the intelligence,
as I mentioned earlier, be shared horizontally among Federal
agencies, and then vertically with State and local agencies.
And finally, let me again mention the fact that control of
our borders is an absolute key if we are going to provide
adequate protection against terrorism.
Mr. Chairman, I believe that concludes my testimony, but I
would be happy to respond to any questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Meese follows:]
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Mr. Shays. Mr. Meese, thank you very much. And thank you
for such a thorough statement in writing. You couldn't possibly
cover it in 10 minutes, the four areas. The significant number
of priorities you stated in each area are very helpful to the
committee, and I have a feeling very helpful to Mr. Ridge's
office as well. So I thank you for that.
First, let me just recognize the presence of a very active
Member, Mr. Tierney from Massachusetts. We are going to start
with Mr. Otter. If you wanted an opening statement, we will
have you use the opening statement in the next panel, if you
want to use an opening statement because we are somewhat under
a time restraint with this panel. Mr. Otter.
Mr. Otter. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. And I would
like to start out with the Governor. I happened to be in the
audience 2 weeks ago in Boise, Idaho, Governor, where you gave
a very comforting speech. I will tell you that the thousand
people in that room went out of there feeling like we truly did
have the leadership at the State level, in many of the States,
and it was a great source of comfort to most of those folks,
because they hadn't had the opportunity obviously to hear a
Governor speaking from a national level on the importance of
our readiness and on the importance of this war against
terrorism.
Your State was the first one, I should say was the State
prior to September 11th that had witnessed--had been the victim
of the worst terrorist attack on the United States prior to
September 11th. And I know that you stated during your opening
statement that there were several conditions that the Federal
Government did not seem to be prepared for when they came to
Oklahoma City to help you assuage the problems that were
created by that terrorist attack.
I am also familiar that you did make many recommendations,
or many recommendations were made as a result of that terrorist
attack to the Federal Government. Could you briefly go through
those for us and which ones the Federal Government did adopt
and has not yet adopted that may have helped us greatly with
the events of September 11th?
Mr. Keating. Mr. Otter, after the April 19, 1995 tragedy in
Oklahoma City, I had occasion to share my observations and
experience with many different Federal agencies and
individuals, and I think those suggestions and observations
were placed in action plans and were in fact a part of the
response suggested in the event of a national or man-made
calamity.
The challenge, of course, is that you have a rescue and
recovery mission on the one hand, and a criminal investigation
on the other. In Oklahoma City, for example, with wind and with
rain, with a building that could collapse at any minute and
literally kill hundreds of additional people who were rescue
workers in that building, the FBI was conducting a
comprehensive criminal investigation and found the key, as a
matter of fact, some blocks away to the rental truck that was
responsible for taking the bomb to the site. So it was an
extraordinary cooperative venture.
We could not prepare for such a thing. We did not because
we never anticipated it. But because of rough weather in our
section of the United States--some sections of the country have
hurricanes and some floods and some mud slides and some forest
fires. We unfortunately have been plagued obviously by
tornadoes in the central part of the United States. We had
prepared for those kinds of scenarios, bringing together the
hospitals and the rescue workers and the police and fire and
the like where they did know what to do. And that was basically
the response to the terrorism event. I think the suggestions we
had about using the military, and having military assets
quickly available, having FEMA come within 24 hours, and do the
superb job, the excellent job that FEMA does do, all of those
things that were suggested, all of those things that worked, I
think worked in New York.
I can't think of anything--for example, providing perimeter
security. That was something we suggested, not only to avoid
looting, but we had 320 buildings damaged or destroyed. We had
no act of looting at all. New York was slow in getting their
perimeter established.
But the other things that we suggested were done. But what
was not done was interoperable communications gear, because the
people who come from out of State have their own systems and
their own frequencies. Even the people within State. In the
event of a massive--and, Mr. Otter, you are right. I think that
if bad people continue to do bad things, we may have other
events like September 11th. If you have a huge onslaught of
professionals, firefighters, police officers, rescue workers,
public health professionals, they had better be able to talk to
each other, because they have to warn each other of what is
ahead as well as suggest a response.
That is--that was, in my judgment, the biggest missing link
in Oklahoma City, and the biggest missing link on September
11th, the fact that a lot of those people could not talk with
one another.
Now, the FEMA teams are highly trained. The problem is, you
want to make sure that all of our local law enforcement know
what they are going to do, the local fire service, they are all
trained together. They speak the same language regionally and
nationally and, of course, locally. They identify the same
problem. They respond, especially in a bioterrorist or
radioactive challenge, in the same way. That is the thing that
most concerns me, that we are not dealing with one bomb and one
building that knocks down 320 other buildings, but perhaps a
regional challenge, or a very large metropolitan challenge, to
be able to have many other agencies together.
We do practice, as Mr. Meese has indicated, but we really
need to make sure that we are practicing on a national scenario
plan more than just simply our little local challenges.
Mr. Otter. Thank you. My time is up. But I just want you to
expand just a little bit on that because I see a potential for
us here in citing and recognizing the common denominators in a
terrorist attack that would be the same throughout the United
States. But I also see some geographic discipline that is going
to be needed, because there are--there is terminology, there
are many situations. And I think Mr. Meese mentioned a couple
of those with infrastructure, that are particularly unique to
the West or perhaps to the Pacific Northwest, that we are going
to need some regional geographic discipline as well, aren't we?
Mr. Keating. Absolutely. In our planning process, State by
State, that is the missing piece, to regionalize the response,
because you have sometimes highly urban populations up against
very rural borders. And you may have an event, let's say a fuel
spill, I mean a train derailment, or in Oklahoma's case, for
example, you have most of the pipelines in the United States go
through that State. If you were to have an event there, you
need to know are there people coming who have knowledge of how
to respond to this, and is there a regional response able to
come, not just simply local. That may actually be further away
than a regional response.
Mr. Otter. Mr. Meese, would you like to respond to that? I
see you getting to the edge of your chair.
Mr. Meese. No. That is fine.
Mr. Otter. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Shays. Mr. Kucinich.
Mr. Kucinich. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I want to
thank the witnesses and say to Mr. Keating when I read your
testimony about the importance of involving State and local
responders, you know, you certainly have the experience on
this. And I, by having been a mayor, I can tell you that I
understand totally the points you are making, as well as
addressing the issue in your statement of avoiding Federalizing
local response.
I think that is a particularly important point for this
government to keep in mind, because there are great
constitutional implication there. And your speaking out on
that, I think, is extremely important. And I want to let you
know that I support that.
I would like to, for the moment, turn to the testimony that
was provided by Attorney General Meese, and say that first of
all the presentation that the Heritage Foundation's homeland
security task force has come up with is quite comprehensive. I
think that many of us in Congress would agree with most of it.
You might understand not all of it, but most of it. And the--
you know, it shows a well thought-out approach.
Mr. Meese. Thank you.
Mr. Kucinich. But there is one area in particular that I
thought would be interesting to talk about, given our next
witness. And that is, the section of military operations to
combat terrorism.
Priority No. 2, protect U.S. borders and critical national
infrastructure with air defense and missile defense. I would
like to focus on that part of your testimony and ask you on
what basis of a threat assessment do you conclude that the
threats of an attack by cruise missiles and ballistic missiles
requires that United States establish a robust air and cruise
missile defense system and begin testing ballistic missile
defenses on land and at sea, on full design capacity, and that
Congress--and the--that the Congress should go ahead with
providing additional funding and that the Pentagon should
deploy these defense systems? Can you share with this committee
the basis of that threat assessment?
Mr. Meese. I would be happy to. As a matter of fact, there
are a number of sources of this. One of the important aspects
of this was the Rumsfeld Commission, which during the last
administration looked into this at the behest of Congress, and
found that there were--that there were a number of nations now
that have ballistic missile capability, and that many of these
nations also had the capability for weapons of mass
destruction, not only in the nuclear field, but also in the
chemical and biological field, and that this was true, and
there has been other studies since that time that verify this.
It was true not only in terms of the importance of ballistic
missile defense to protect the United States but also to
protect the lands of our allies, such as the Republic of China
and Taiwan and other places.
And so the ballistic missile defense I think has repeatedly
come to the attention of both the public and the U.S.
Government as a key part of our total homeland defense here, as
well as the ability to carry out our international obligations.
Mr. Kucinich. I thank the attorney general. The question,
of course, was raised with respect to defense of this country.
It is my understanding that the Rumsfeld Commission focused on
speculation regarding a medium-range missile, known as Typo
Dong that dealt with the capacities of North Korea.
I am going to have to be more specific, Mr. Attorney
General, and ask you on what basis should the United States
deploy a missile system to defend against long range,
intercontinental ballistic missiles? What is the threat
assessment?
Mr. Meese. We have a number of countries that either have
or are developing an intercontinental ballistic missile system.
And----
Mr. Kucinich. Which countries are those?
Mr. Meese. Well, obviously the former countries of the
Soviet Union, several of them have intercontinental ballistic
capability. There is talk about Iraq developing a longer range
ballistic missile capability, as well as in North Korea. So
there are a number of countries.
There is also the possibility of this technology being
seized by rogue elements of the military. This is particularly
true in some of the countries of the former Soviet Union. So
there are a number of threats. But the fact that this--we also
have, of course, the potential in Iran. There are other
countries as well.
The fact that this technology is being exchanged or could
be exchanged between countries that have it at the present
time, and those other countries that might use it to our
disadvantage, indicates that we should be working on this at
the present time.
The time that you need a ballistic missile capability or
any defensive capability is not when the attack comes, and
particularly with a complex system such as this. It takes many
years of development in order to have it ready when the time
comes that you need it. It is very similar to the research and
development that went into other major advances in warfare such
as the airplane, certain types of ships, nuclear submarines and
the like. And so it is the time length that is involved in
developing these that means that we should not be behind the
curve.
Mr. Kucinich. All right. Mr. Chairman, I would just like to
submit for the record--I thank the gentleman. And I would say
to the gentleman again, I appreciate the tremendous work that
Heritage has done on this. The one area that I have great
concern about is on the area of threats assessment, Mr.
Chairman. I want to submit for the record this study of threat
assessment done by the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, which says actually that the trend on threats, threat
assessment for intercontinental range ballistic missiles is
down, that threats--intermediate range ballistic missiles down,
the threats for nations with ballistic missile programs of
concern, down. The potentially hostile nations with ballistic
missile programs, down.
And I think it is important that as we get into these
discussions that we try to use the most available information.
Thank you.
Mr. Meese. Mr. Chairman, if I might respond to that,
because I read that report. And I noted that it was a very
subjective report designed to--where the--even the charts there
were designed to reach a certain conclusion that the authors
had in mind, which was not borne out by the factual material
that they even included in their report.
One of the things we have to recognize, that while indeed
there may be fewer nations, only because of some of the
international things that have occurred recently, the fact that
the potential that those nations have, has increased
considerably in recent years.
So I would say if you look at the whole report and the
underlying data, it gives a very different picture than the
conclusions that might be reached.
Mr. Kucinich. Thank you very much, Attorney General. I
would like to associate myself with your remarks with respect
to the Rumsfeld Report.
Mr. Shays. Bottom line, this committee will be, at the
request of the minority, holding a hearing on national missile
defense, so we will probably get into more of that. It is only
a small part of the overall picture here, but a legitimate
question to ask our witnesses.
Mr. Keating, I am very interested in getting a sense of
what kind of clearance problems you might have encountered or
if you anticipate there are potential clearance problems. Let
me just illustrate. We had police chiefs who basically came
before us and said that--Mr. Meese, happy to have you respond
to this as well--saying that they had personnel assigned to
work with the FBI and other offices of the U.S. Government in
which their officers had clearance, but the chief of police was
not told what was going on, and he or she did not have
clearance.
I am wondering if the same thing applies to Governors as
well.
Mr. Keating. Regrettably, yes. As a matter of fact, I had a
similar incident. I appointed the adjutant general of Oklahoma,
who served our people most capably after the Oklahoma City
bombings. I am the commander in chief of National Guard of
Oklahoma. Bob Ricks, who is our commissioner of the Department
of Public Safety, former DEA general counsel, former deputy
assistant director of the FBI, special agent in charge of the
FBI during the Oklahoma City bombing, General Korite came to
the two of us and said, well, I have got some information that
I have to share, but I can't share it with the two of you
because you are not cleared.
Well, I was his boss. And obviously Commissioner Ricks is
the chair of our response and avoidance team. He needs to know.
Well, I don't question the need for clearance. What I hope is
that those clearances can be speedily provided to those public
officials, like mayors, like Governors that have to take charge
and respond to a national or man-made disaster, particularly
those that require some degree of clearance.
There is a level of discomfort and embarrassment over this
but it needs to be addressed and in our case it has been
addressed. But still it's disquieting.
Mr. Meese. I would certainly concur with the Governor. Both
he and I, for example, had the highest security clearance you
could get but when we served in the Justice Department I don't
think it would be very hard for them to update those clearances
rather quickly. I would suspect that in most cases the
background investigations could be performed quickly on police
chiefs, mayors and Governors. But I think it's absolutely
critical that those people in the chain of command where there
would be a response or the need to prevent a terrorist incident
have the necessary clearances available so that no intelligence
would be kept from them.
Mr. Shays. One of the untold stories, frankly, with the
past administration continues today. This one is the number of
security clearances that have not been done. Hundreds of
thousands backlogged. So even the private sector that hires
people that need clearances, they may be on the payroll for 9
months, say, at Sikorsky or United Technology, Pratt & Whitney
and not be able to do the job they're paid to do because they
don't have clearance. So it's a major problem.
We knew it was a problem with the chiefs of police. I am
frankly very surprised to learn that it would be with the
Governor and, obviously, mayors on occasion need it as well. So
Governors, mayors, chiefs of police, anyone else that strikes
you that we need to be looking at in terms of trying to
encourage clearance?
Mr. Keating. I think that would be obviously the
centerpieces of an intelligent avoidance piece. Obviously we're
not talking about response here. I don't think we have a
problem in most--in most response incidents. But the problem is
every State if they're doing it wisely, for that matter every
city, you have to have the sharing of information between the
Federal and the State and local authorities so that we can
avoid another calamity like September 11th. If you can't share
that information to put people on high alert, you obviously are
taking the risk of having another similar incident. But I
didn't want to admit to my wife that I wasn't cleared, but it
was rather awkward and embarrassing during that period of time.
Mr. Shays. The amazing thing is as soon as you're elected
as a Member of Congress you have automatic clearance. I think
we will be able to address it fairly quickly.
Mr. Meese. I think, Mr. Chairman, it's particularly
relevant now because the Office of Homeland Security is, as you
know, kind of refining their system of alerts. It was indicated
only within the last 24 hours I believe the new system they've
developed. And with that needs to come the information that
underlies those particular alerts so the proper response and
the proper protective measures can be taken. That necessarily
implies the people like Governors, commissioners of public
safety, mayors and chiefs of police in determining how to
deploy their forces in response to the particular alerts.
Mr. Shays. State Attorney Generals as well.
Mr. Meese. I would certainly think that the State Attorneys
General. The people who have command responsibility for law
enforcement and for emergency response, that would include
directors of the State offices of emergency services, for
example, others that might have a need to know. And that's been
pretty well--the need to know concept has been pretty well
established in the Federal Government. I think it could be
extended today to State and local governments.
Mr. Shays. I think we've made it pretty clear. I think the
record would show that. But, I mean, in this process of I think
five gradations of alert--are there five? Right. Bottom line
you could have a very serious warning and yet under present law
I'm gathering the Governor might not be able to be told exactly
whatever the basis is for this alert.
Mr. Keating. As Attorney General Meese said, some attorneys
general are strictly civil officers. Some don't have any
command and control responsibilities. But others do have
responsibility for law enforcement, Governor is commander in
chief of the National Guard and/or responsibility, in my case,
for law enforcement as well. I mean for me not to be able to
take that alert and reassure the public or take that alert and
take action to prevent an event in my State certainly appears
reckless not to be able to do that because you're denied
information.
As you know, we know from our own experience these
clearances can be reasonably quickly obtained. They can be
updated and there are gradations of clearance. All we're asking
for is information which will protect us and provide us an
opportunity to respond, which I don't think is too much to ask.
Mr. Shays. I have about 5 minutes more of questions. But
I'm happy to follow you, Mr. Otter, if you like.
Mr. Tierney, any time you want the floor you can claim it.
Mr. Tierney. No, thank you. I'm all set.
Mr. Otter. Yes, I have a couple that I would like to
followup both with the Attorney General and with the Governor.
First would be on the security clearance. As we establish a pro
forma for security clearances and the type of information that
we put out with that, then how do we govern the distribution of
that? We were told, this very subcommittee was told when the
Army Corps of Engineers, for instance, made an assessment of
the vulnerability of all of the infrastructure, whether it was
the dams or power corridors or pipelines, whatever it was, how
vulnerable we were, anybody that wanted to tap into and go
online could have figured out not only where we were the most
vulnerable but in many cases where exactly a small device could
be put within a nuclear plant in order to blow up the plant and
create the greatest amount of damage.
So as we provide security for those that need it, security
clearances for those that need it, how do we then govern the
distribution of that information so that it doesn't get into
the wrong hands?
Mr. Meese. Well, this is always a problem with any
information. And the need is to then, obviously concurrent with
the clearances, provide necessary training to the people who
have those clearances. My own experience, I found in the
Federal Government you have hundreds, perhaps thousands of
people that have security clearances of various types. And
there's a discipline that goes with that in the departments.
That same kind of discipline can be utilized and implemented by
officials at the State and local level. I would say since in
the Federal Government there's much more classified information
that goes through offices, that at the local level this will be
more of a novelty and therefore I would suspect at the local
level there would be even greater attention to the need to
safeguard this kind of classified information.
Police departments every day have all kinds of information
that requires a great deal of security about organized crime,
about narcotics rings and so on. They seem to be able to handle
this. I would say that they would be able to handle to this
kind of information likewise.
Mr. Otter. If I could get both of you to respond to this.
Would the distribution of security knowledge include--go down
as far as let's say--and I don't mean down, that's the wrong
word to use--but would it include the county sheriffs? Would it
include the 44 county sheriffs in Idaho?
Mr. Keating. It really depends on the nature of the
information, certainly rural California, as an example, that
counties really provide the law enforcement. Municipalities do
not have law enforcement. Those individuals are well trained
and they are well educated and they certainly ought to be in a
position, as the Attorney General said, on a need to know basis
to provide assurance to the public and a response and avoidance
piece to their law enforcement duties.
Congressman, we're struggling with this now in my State,
I'm sure Idaho, perhaps Massachusetts and Connecticut are as
well, you know, are you going to make terrorism a crime. What
is terrorism? Is that a status crime? And then are you going to
provide the public the information they need to know, the media
the information they need to know or are you going to put a
cloak over everything or in effect make everything secret or
everything subject to exclusion from open records. We're
struggling with that right now. The legislature is in session
as we speak. We're attempting to find that proper balance.
There are some who want to overdo and basically take everything
out of the public circulation. Others would under-do and not
provide very much protection at all.
So I mean we're trying to walk that very difficult straight
and narrow.
But I think what's most important is to be able to have the
FBI call the sheriff and say we have a problem. Here is what
we're looking for. You need to go out there and help us man the
line, if you will. Police sheriffs, State police and what have
you. So that kind of information is crucially important.
Now, more arcane information, you know, should a sheriff
have knowledge of the intricacies of a nuclear power plant or
the intricacies of a pipeline? Perhaps not. I'm not sure that
is particularly relevant. That information would perhaps not be
helpful on the Internet and could be accessible, available to
somebody who could do us harm. But law enforcement needs to
know what is the threat. If you have a red threat or a green
threat or yellow threat, whatever the threat may be, you need
to be able to hand that off like a baton from Federal officer
to State or local officer and say go get 'em. You have to have
that seamless information. And those individuals need to have
the access to the information. They need to have the security
clearance to get it.
Mr. Otter. Attorney General.
Mr. Meese. I think it would depend in terms of sheriff.
Reality would be is this principal the chief executive officer
of a law enforcement agency. And this varies from State to
State, even within States. In Virginia, for example, many
sheriffs have complete law enforcement authority. Other
sheriffs have only responsibility for detention in the service
of court orders and they're county police departments. So I
think the definition of the people that would need it are they
are the chief executive officers of a law enforcement agency.
Mr. Otter. The discussion that you had with the ranking
member earlier made me think of the Idaho Constitution which of
course is a duplicate, if you will, of the Federal
Constitution. And actually the highest ranking Constitutional
officer in the county is the sheriff and can only be arrested
by one person and that happens to be the coroner.
I would just ask you to reflect on one more thing. One of
the greatest advances or I guess I should say deterrents is
disinformation. Is there any part of the dimension of our
national security in which we're purposefully--we're
contemplating giving out disinformation in terms of our
security and in terms of our strategy for that security?
Mr. Meese. Well, I guess if we were to say that there was
would itself be self-defeating then for any such
disinformation. But I know of no such effort on the part of the
U.S. Government and certainly I think it would be wrong to
provide disinformation to public officials who have a duty to
carry out particular responsibilities. But I think that we have
enough trouble in the government generally just getting the
right information let alone disinformation.
Mr. Otter. I would only conclude--Mr. Chairman, I thank you
for the flexibility you have given me in time here. I would
only conclude that our first line of defense for our
communities are going to be the individuals within those
communities. And to the extent that we can get the citizens of
this country, 283 million citizen soldiers out there all
prepared to defend themselves, their families and then their
communities, it would probably bring a little more purpose to
the mandate that we were given with Flight 93 and the folks
that took the airplane down in Pennsylvania. And I would hope
that we always make that a generous portion of any national
policy that we have.
Mr. Keating. May I say something along that line. I had the
opportunity before I came here to speak to a large Red Cross
gathering in Milwaukee. The point I made to them, and I would
encourage the Congress as you look at funding State plans, in
effect that's what your doing, to encourage that municipalities
be a part of that, that they sit on that board. You can say
cities of 100,000 and more have to have a representative,
whatever the suggestion might be, but also the nonprofit
community. Because the Red Cross, all these people they show
up. If they have no knowledge, if they are potentially affected
by a very serious physical challenge by showing up, by
providing meals, by being there heroically as they do day by
day, the Salvation Army as well, they need to know these
things. They need to be a part of the mix in discussing a
response, not particularly the response piece but they must--
the health piece has to consider the 501(c)(3) community as
well because they're going to be there with most of the assets.
They're going to be there timely. They're going to be the very
first people off the boat, if you will, will be those 501(c)(3)
folks. They need to be at the table to know what it is they can
expect if they get involved.
Mr. Shays. Mr. Meese, I know you need to leave soon. Do you
have 5 more minutes here? Let me say to you that I believe and
I think a lot of other Members do as well that any
disinformation program would be deadly because not only do
public officials need the truth but our bosses do. If they're
not told the truth, they're not going to be able to tell us the
right things to do. And our bosses are being basically the
general public. They need to know the truth to tell their
elected officials what they want done. And so I just shudder
when I think that there was any possibility of a disinformation
program.
We know in the early 1950's President Eisenhower had to
deal with a new assessment of a threat and develop a new
strategy along with Congress. And he brought everybody into the
White House and into the Sun Room and it began to be basically
the solarium project in which we developed a new threat, our
ally, now our enemy, wanting to overtake us politically,
economically, militarily, and the cold war began.
We're kind of at that point right now. Where I am getting a
little nervous is we basically have a very competent person--
not basically we do--in the Governor but he is an appointee of
the President not answerable to Congress. And that's a fact.
But he is in charge of doing something we need to ask questions
about. What is the threat, what is our strategy, and how do we
deal with it. All three commissions Bremer, Hart-Rudman, and
Gilmore Commission said know the threat, have a strategy and
then deal with it.
I guess what I want to ask you do you think it's taking us
too long to assess the threat. We've already started to take
actions before we got the threat assessed. And who does
Congress go to ask about these questions.
Mr. Meese. Mr. Chairman, I think this is a very profound
question that has Constitutional ramifications. I understand
the reasons why a member of the White House staff, a member of
the President's official family, is not--cannot--is not
appropriate that they testify. I think there are, however, may
be some way to reconcile this just as there is in matters
relating to the budget where the Office of Management and
Budget, which is also within the executive office of the
President, the Director of OMB does in fact testify before
Congress. And I think is a matter that might well be discussed
with the President as to how to place someone, whether it's
Governor Ridge or someone immediately as a spokesman for him
that could testify to Congress.
The other alternative, of course, would be to invite
Congress to the White House for briefings there. I think
there's no question in my mind that it's important that the
Office of Homeland Security share information with the Congress
so that the Congress, as the very direct representatives of the
people, can know what's going on and obviously can deal with
matters such as the budget, legislation, which are their piece
of responsibility in terms of homeland security.
I think that--so I think that this is a soluble problem
that should probably be raised with the White House to see what
kind of a solution can be gained. I know during the time I
served in the White House there were many occasions where it
was necessary to give information to the Congress such as in
the Operation Grenada, which was a very sensitive operation
where Members of Congress were brought to the White House so
that information could be given to them. So I think there are
ways of solving this. I agree with the chairman that kind of
two-way communication is very necessary.
Mr. Shays. Thank you. Mr. Keating, any comment? Governor,
I'm sorry.
Mr. Keating. I think the most information is the better.
You all determine where the money is spent and how it is spent.
And to have a dialog, a conversation between the executive and
legislative branches I think is essential in order to be able
to be truly prepared as a people. So I would certainly agree
with what the Attorney General said.
Mr. Shays. Thank you. You both are excellent public
servants. You serve our country well, continue to do. We
appreciate you honoring our committee with our presence. And
thank you very much.
We'll go to the next panel. Our next panel is comprised of
four individuals. Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, who is Chief
Executive Officer of the Marsh Crisis Consulting Co. He was
chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism and co-
chairman of the Heritage Foundation Report, Defending the
American Homeland.
Mr. Randall J. Larsen is the Director of ANSER Institute
for Homeland Security and previously a colonel in the U.S. Air
Force. Colonel Larsen has been a frequent guest on Larry King,
discussing counterterrorism issues, and other shows as well.
We also have Mr. Joseph Cirincione, who is the Director of
the Nonproliferation Project of the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace and a frequent contributor to newspaper
opinion editorial sections.
And Mr. Henry L. Hinton is the Managing Director of the
Defense Capabilities and Management Office, General Accounting
Office and has appeared before the subcommittee on numerous
occasions.
Mr. Hinton, we're going to swear in some of the other
people as well, but is there anyone else who needs to be by
your side?
Mr. Hinton. No, sir.
Mr. Shays. Let me ask to you stand. Let me swear you in and
we'll begin with the testimony.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mr. Shays. Thank you. I appreciate this panel listening to
the first panel. Some of the questions and comments of the
first panel you may want to make mention of in your statements.
We are fortunate to have a co-chairman on both panels, so we
appreciate that, and appreciate all of you being here.
Ambassador Bremer, I give you special deference because you
were a former resident of New Canaan, Connecticut, and also I
might say the first Ambassador on Terrorism for the State
Department. Sadly that wasn't continued, was it?
Mr. Bremer. Actually I was the Ambassador for
Counterterrorism.
Mr. Shays. Counterterrorism, not terrorism. Excuse me. You
always make me speechless. When you speak, would you use your
mic.
Mr. Bremer. Sorry.
Mr. Shays. Go for it.
STATEMENTS OF AMBASSADOR L. PAUL BREMER III, CHAIRMAN, NATIONAL
COMMISSION ON TERRORISM, MARSH CRISIS CONSULTING; RANDALL J.
LARSEN, DIRECTOR, ANSER INSTITUTE FOR HOMELAND SECURITY; JOSEPH
CIRINCIONE, DIRECTOR, NONPROLIFERATION PROJECT, CARNEGIE
ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE; AND HENRY L. HINTON,
MANAGING DIRECTOR, DEFENSE CAPABILITIES AND MANAGEMENT, GENERAL
ACCOUNTING OFFICE
Mr. Bremer. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to
be here. You mentioned a very important point in your last
comment to the Attorney General, which is that we are at a flex
point in American national security policy, very similar to the
position we were in in the period 1945 to 1947, when we had to
find a new organizing principle for American foreign policy.
In those days, as you pointed out, the organizing principle
was to defeat and to contain and eventually defeat Soviet
communism. That's a fight that took 50 years. The President has
in his speech September 20th, in his State of the Union Address
and in his statement yesterday in the White House made clear
we're in a similar position now and that the new threat now is
terrorism.
And it's there for basically two reasons: One, because
we're facing a new kind of terrorism where terrorists have
moved away from a restraint in the number of people they kill
to mass casualty terrorism most recently on September 11th and,
second, because of the America's geopolitical situation. We
dominate the world as no Nation in recorded history has
dominated the world. This creates opportunities but also
obviously creates resentments against America.
The lesson of the Gulf War was that America is essentially
not defeatable by conventional weapons. So people who resent
and hate us are forced to consider moving to unconventional or
asymmetric warfare using weapons of mass destruction or using
terrorism. That is why we are faced in fact with a different
situation today than we were on September 10th.
And as the President correctly identified in his State of
the Union address, we face a nexus, a nexus between terrorist
groups who wish us ill, between States which support terrorism,
and between States which have access to weapons of mass
destruction. And in most cases, also weapons that have access
to ballistic missile technology which poses a particular threat
to our country, as the Attorney General pointed out.
Now, this leaves us with a multi-faceted challenge. We've
got to have new thinking across the board. We need to be able
to change the culture of the way certain parts of our
bureaucracy think, the FBI, the CIA. We need to have new means
of communications between the Federal, State and local
officials, as the Heritage Foundation study which I co-chaired
showed, and we're going to have to understand there are no
quick fixes. This is going to be a very long struggle.
I think the most important message that the President has
given, which I support fully is that we have to change our
entire strategy. Mr. Chairman, in the last decade our strategy
was basically to wait for terrorists to attack and then to
respond. Wait and respond. The stakes are now so high that we
have to shift to a strategy which I call detect and prevent.
The President said yesterday in the Rose Garden there are no
margins for errors, there is no chance to learn from our
mistakes. And he is absolutely right. The stakes are simply too
high to get it wrong. We have to move from an emphasis on
deterrence to an emphasis on prevention. We have to do things
differently.
For example, in the Heritage Foundation we should be
getting aircraft manifests before a plane takes off, not after
it takes off. We need longer notice before cargo ships and
cargos arrive at our ports. I'm glad to see that Congress is in
the process of making that recommendation come into effect.
Everyone needs to be involved in protecting the homeland,
Federal, State and local officials as we said, the private
sector and, as Governor Keating pointed out as well, nonprofit
sector.
The public itself needs to be involved. I was pleased to
see that one of the recommendations of the Gilmore commission
on which I served is being put into effect with the
establishment of a domestic alerting system similar to the
military DEFCON system, Defense Condition system, one of our
major recommendations. Homeland defense does not begin at the
border and it doesn't end at the border. As the Attorney
General pointed out, we need to be concerned about how visas
are issued. I'm pleased to see that the Congress is in the
process of encouraging the establishment of a single lookout
system, lookout data base so that everybody involved in border
security can be looking at the same system.
And, of course, we've had the establishment of the Office
of Homeland Security under Governor Ridge. I have, as you know,
Mr. Chairman, supported the establishment of the office and
believe Governor Ridge is doing a heroic job trying to get his
hands around the multi-headed, hydra-headed bureaucracy.
I think it's only fair to point out that all of the
commissions which you cited at the beginning, Mr. Chairman,
also noted that Congress is not well organized on
counterterrorism. There are some two dozen committees up here,
that's before September 11th, I hate to think how many there
are now, which assert some jurisdiction in one form or another.
I'm pleased that the Speaker in this Chamber has at least
established a Subcommittee on Counterterrorism to the House
Intelligence Committee, which is at least a first step in
trying to pull together this Chamber's approach to terrorism.
But as you rightly criticize the Federal Government's lack of
organization, from time to time I think Congress should look in
the mirror as well. Congress is not very well-organized either.
I think the most urgent thing that I would like to focus on
today, and I'll be very brief, is to counter the threat of
biological terrorism. It is important to get a nationwide
health surveillance system in place. Again, steps are being
taken in that direction. It's very, very important to
accelerate research for drugs and vaccines against
bioterrorism.
Now that the human genome sequence is available on the
Internet, the nightmare is that some microbiologist somewhere
will create a virus we've never heard of for which there are no
vaccines.
I'm pleased to say that the National Academy of Sciences
has established a commission that is looking urgently at how
the scientific community in the United States can be brought to
bear on the problem of focusing research on these biological-
chemical-radiological threats. I'm serving on that commission.
We hope to have a report to Congress and the President in the
next couple of months.
This is going to be a long and difficult fight and every
American life will be touched in some way by the battle. As the
President said yesterday, there are more dangers and more
sacrifices lie ahead. And he is surely right.
Thank you.
Mr. Shays. You were right, you were very mercifully brief
but very precise. Mr. Larsen.
Mr. Larsen. Thank you, sir. I'll be quick. Several things I
want to discuss. First of all, I agree with Ambassador Bremer
on many things he said. He's also been studying this for a long
time. I've been looking at it since 1994, the idea of new
thinking and new cultures as he mentioned.
I was asked to talk about how we've done in the first 6
months. I think Governor Ridge's office has done a marvelous
job in his top priorities of training and equipping first
responders. Bio defense, I agree with the Ambassador, I've been
studying that for many years. Bio threat concerns me more than
any other that we could face from external threats. Protecting
our borders, information sharing, which was discussed earlier,
is incredibly important, and the alert and warning system which
will be announced today.
However, if we could have that first slide up there,
please. The executive order that was signed by the President on
the 8th of October creating Governor Ridge's office, I think
this is some of the cold war thinking that we're going to have
to progress beyond. This is exactly what we needed on 8th of
October. We did not know what attack was going to come on the
9th of October, whether it was going to be larger and far
worse. We needed something to unite us to work together on. If
you take the word ``prevent'' out of there, it looks like a
framework that would be used by FEMA to respond to a natural
disaster.
One of the things we have to understand is when Hurricane
Andrew hit Miami it was no smarter from Hurricane Hugo's
experience in Charleston. The thinking enemies we are dealing
with are smarter now once they have seen our reaction to the
anthrax attack on the Hart Building and how slow we were to
respond.
This is not the framework we need for the long term to
build a national strategy that you talked about so often, Mr.
Chairman. This is a great tactical and operational strategy.
If I could have the next slide. This is a concept we've
been working on since about 1999, when we first developed this
at the National War College to look at. We began with
deterrence over there. You sat here during the Dark Winter
exercise when we were here in July. Deterrence, prevention, and
preemption are the most important things and we talked about
that. You'll see that Governor Ridge has virtually no--on my
next slide you'll see that he has no real coverage of that.
Deterrence is far more difficult than during the cold war.
Deterrence is either based on punishment or denial. In the cold
war it was all punishment because we knew civil defense was
pretty much a placebo that didn't work. Now deterrence is much
more based on denial. So we talk about public health
infrastructure and consequence management, yes, that's going to
save lives but it also may help us deter it.
Prevention are defensive things, everything from aerospace
defense, maritime defense, border controls. When I showed this
to former Speaker of the House Tom Foley, he said in prevention
you should include a Marshall like program for those parts of
the world that tend to breed terrorism.
Preemption used to be something that was a four-letter word
in the cold war because it was tied to the first use of nuclear
weapons. Something we wouldn't do. I think we need to rethink
preemption quite a bit. When we have seen what small actors
could do to our Nation, unfortunately there's a fine line
between preemption and aggression. So it's something we have to
look at carefully, but I think it's something we need to
consider.
Crisis and consequence management, that's FBI, lead Federal
agency, consequence management FEMA, I'll jump over those.
Attribution is an important element in this strategic cycle. We
still don't know, the FBI Director last week said he doesn't
know if it was a domestic or international source that sent
that letter to Senator Daschle's office and the other letter.
Until we can do the scientific work we need to help us with
attribution for biological or cyber attacks and even nuclear
attacks, we have very little chance of an effective response
and re-establishing deterrence.
Now who's in charge of attribution? Clearly the FBI. Their
budget last year was $3 billion. They don't have the science
capability that our national laboratories do, civilian and DOD.
That is the linchpin to this entire cycle. Once we figure out
who did this attack to us when it happens, then we can properly
respond. I use the respond there because if it's domestic we'll
prosecute. If it's an attack from an external power we'll
retaliate, as we did in Afghanistan.
That's not for revenge, that's for two purposes: One to
eliminate the capability to cause further harm, and No. 2, to
reestablish deterrence.
Now if you'll just go quickly to the next slide. The shaded
area up there on the left, that is a busy slide, but just look
at the shaded area. It's kind of hard to see up there. But
you'll see Governor Ridge's responsibilities are for crisis
management and consequence management, one little segment in
prevention. That executive order, all it defines prevention as
is preventing bad things and bad people from crossing borders.
Prevention to me is much larger than that. I brief this concept
to senior people in Governor Ridge's office, DOD CIA, a lot of
folks up here on the Hill. They seem to like this idea of a
strategic cycle. I think it's something you should consider
when we talk about building a national strategy, a threat
assessment of what we look at.
Just two more quick slides here to show how complex this
is. People ask me how is Governor Ridge doing. I say well,
first of all, you have to understand he has the most complex
challenge any Federal official has had. You take those 7
mission areas, you lay them across the top of that, then the
down left side the most likely threats we're going to face. If
you look at who the Federal Government is responsible for
chemical consequence management, a total group of people that
are completely different than cyber prevention. Who is in
charge of all that? But this is a rather simplistic chart. If
you go to the last, this is what it really looks like. Because
you got to put Federal, State, local and the private
organizations in there. That is the job we have given Governor
Ridge. I'm not sure he has all the authority to do it that he
needs. And particularly I think there should be one Federal
official in charge of that entire strategic cycle.
The next thing I want to mention, I'll sum up quickly here,
a lot of money is being spent on training. I think that's very
important that we do that. I haven't seen many proposals yet
for education. In many respects, Mr. Chairman, I think we're
sitting right here similar to where we were in 1952 and with
regard to the cold war.
In 1952 Herman Kahn hadn't started writing, Henry Kissinger
hadn't started writing. There was no discipline known as
national security studies at our great institutions. We need to
develop an academic discipline called homeland security
studies. So, yes, let's spend the money to train the first
responders, but I'm talking about educating people from the
State legislature level on up that are going to have to make
decisions not just in crisis but do I fund a new sewer system
or do I do something that is going to have to do with homeland
security.
I think that's very important. I see Senator Frist
mentioned that in his speech yesterday down in Florida. He said
people are more important than technology in this, as General
Schwarzkopf said after the Gulf War.
I have a few more comments, but I'll end them there because
I'm over my time.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Larsen follows:]
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Mr. Shays. Mr. Cirincione.
Mr. Cirincione. Thank you very much, Congressman. It's a
pleasure to testify here today.
I spent 10 years in the professional staff of the House
Armed Services Committee and this committee. From 1991 to 1994
I served on this subcommittee. It's easier being on the other
side, I'll tell you that right now.
I am Director of the Nonproliferation Project at the
Carnegie Endowment, and as such I was the author of the study
that was referred to in the previous panel.
Some may have interpreted Mr. Meese's remarks to indicate
that he had some question about the integrity of that analysis.
I had the opportunity to speak with him just as he left and he
assured me that was not his intent.
I did develop an analysis that indicates that the ballistic
missile threat to the United States is actually decreasing. I
invite comment and improvements on that analysis.
What I'm here to talk about today is the way we've been
doing our national threat assessments. It's my belief that part
of the reason the United States was so unprepared for the
attacks of September 11th is that for the past few years the
way our political process has handled the national threat
assessments it's been given has consistently pointed us in the
wrong direction. In part, this is a result of some of the
partisan political warfare that was so prevalent in Washington
over the past few years.
As examples of this I can point to the two studies that are
most widely known as independent threat assessments. Those were
both chaired by Donald Rumsfeld as it turns out. The first was
the report of the commission to assess the ballistic missile
threat to the United States which warned that the United States
faced a threat by missiles that could be fielded by a hostile
State with little or no warning.
In January 2001, the report of the commission to assess
U.S. national security, space management and organization
warned just as ominously that we faced a Pearl Harbor in space
unless we immediately deployed a new generation of sensors,
satellites and weapons.
Together these reports fortified a particular national
security vision favored by some conservatives and heavily
influenced the political debate of threat assessments and
budgetary priorities.
Now we've all made mistakes in the past. Let me start by
acknowledging our mistakes; that is, proliferation experts. We
have made serious mistakes over the past few years. As a person
who spends most of his professional career tracking the spread
of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons I think we have
overemphasized this danger. That is, we thought the main danger
to the United States was going to come by people developing the
kinds of weapons that we did during the cold war. And we
overlooked the kinds of attacks that occurred on September
11th. These terrorists didn't study physics or biology. They
studied flight manuals. They stole what they needed and they
turned our own technological marvels against us.
Similarly, whoever perpetrated the October anthrax attacks
didn't do the kind of biological attack we thought we would
experience. They either didn't know or didn't care that a
sophisticated dispersal mechanism was needed to maximize
casualties. They did a cheap but extremely effective biological
attack that we were frankly unprepared for.
As a Nation, as experts, we have to redefine what we mean
by mass destruction. I would say we now have to expand that
definition of weapons of mass destruction to include the kinds
of attacks in our critical infrastructure that we experienced
on September 11th. We have to reassess our assessments. Are we
getting the kind of national threat assessments that we need to
get and we have to reorient. I strongly agree with Chairman
Shays' comment that short-sighted attachments to the status quo
only increase the likelihood and lethality of the next attack.
Very often we have gotten the warnings but we have ignored
them. And some of the gentlemen that are here today have been
making those warnings. As I point out in my written testimony,
we were repeatedly warned that we faced a danger, an imminent
danger of a terrorist attack.
One of the people that I spend a lot of time paying
attention to is the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency,
Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson. I have his testimony from a year
ago, from January 2001. He detailed eight dangers that he
feared in the next 12 to 24 months. So this is February 2001.
The top of his list, a major terrorist attack against the U.S.
interests either here or abroad, perhaps with a weapon designed
to produce mass casualties. His second item, worsening
conditions in the Middle East. He goes on to detail eight
other--a total of eight challenges, four of which in fact
turned out to have occurred in those next 12 months.
He also identified a threat of an expanded military
conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, something
that did flare up in November and December of this year and
thankfully has receded. He also identified intensifying
disagreements with Russia over U.S. policy options, something
that did flare up but thanks to the skillful diplomacy of
President Bush and the wise strategic reorientation toward the
West of President Putin that danger is now gone.
Anybody who is detailing eight dangers and four of them
turn out to be right is somebody I would like to listen to. The
problem is we didn't listen to this, because of, frankly,
political considerations. Congress and the executive branch
emphasized the threats that were most convenient to our
political agendas. So we spent a lot of time and attention on
ballistic missile threats. We spent $8 billion a year on
ballistic missile threat. Is that where we should be putting
our money? Is that the most urgent threat?
I would argue that it is not, that we have to find a way to
depoliticize our threat assessments to come up with a national
consensus on what the true threats are. I would encourage this
committee to see if we can't devise a way to get a global
comprehensive threat assessment that is nonpartisan, nonbiased,
removed from the particular political agendas of the moment
that can help guide our budgets, our diplomacy and our policy.
Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Cirincione follows:]
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Mr. Shays. Thank you very much.
Mr. Hinton, thank you very much as well for participating.
Sometimes we put GAO as a special part of a panel. But I wanted
the synergy of the four of you together, as I said before. So
thank you.
Mr. Hinton. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Kucinich, members
of the committee. I appreciate the opportunity to discuss with
you today our country's progress in combating terrorism to
enhance homeland security. Protecting the United States and its
citizens from terrorism is a national effort involving both the
government and nongovernment sectors. Such broad-based efforts
are inherently difficult to lead and manage. We've heard that
this morning. It's been a theme. Enhancing homeland security
involves all 50 States, the District of Columbia and the
Territories, thousands of municipalities, more than 40 Federal
agencies and countless private entities. These organizations
have multiple specialized missions, distinct organizational
cultures and millions of employees. Trying to effectively
involve them in a single coordinated effort is a monumental
undertaking.
As requested, my testimony will cover three areas: One,
progress in enhancing homeland security through legislative and
executive action; two, the preliminary results of our work
we're doing for you, Mr. Chairman, and other Members of the
House on integrating the efforts of all levels of government
and the private sector into an overall homeland security
strategy and; three, an approach that could be helpful in
integrating governmental and private sector organizations into
the Office of Homeland Security's planned national strategy.
Very briefly in response to those three objectives. One, a
variety of legislative and executive branch actions to enhance
homeland security were underway prior to September 11th or have
been taken since that day. After the attacks the President
established the Office of Homeland Security, which plans to
issue its national strategy in July of this year. In the
absence of a national strategy agencies have been implementing
many homeland security initiatives, including planning to
produce new vaccines against anthrax, and expanding the
existing smallpox vaccine stockpile, providing additional
planning and training for State and local disaster response and
enhance aviation, seaport and border security.
Legislative actions include appropriations of about $19\1/
2\ billion for 2002 and about $10 billion contained in the $40
billion emergency supplemental bill that was enacted shortly
after September 11th. And for 2003 the President has requested
about $38 billion for homeland security.
Our on board work, Mr. Chairman, indicates that government
and nongovernment activities are looking to the Office of
Homeland Security for further direction on how to better
integrate their missions and more effectively contribute to the
overarching homeland security effort. Without a strategy in
place some Federal agencies are not sure what else they should
be doing beyond their traditional missions. They also do not
share a common definition of homeland security.
Even though officials at key Federal agencies believe such
a definition is needed to promote a common understanding of
operational plans and requirements, to enforce budget
discipline, and to avoid duplication of effort and gaps in
coverage, although Federal agencies are looking for guidance,
they also want to ensure that their organization's unique
missions are sufficiently factored into the national strategy
and implementing guidance as developed. Officials in State and
local governments that we interviewed are also looking for
assistance in terms of funding relief and better access to
threat information, a theme that we heard this morning from the
Federal Government.
Finally, private sector entities expressed a willingness to
contribute to homeland security, but they are concerned about
the potential for excessive Federal regulation. Once the
national strategy is issued, Mr. Chairman, Federal, State and
local government agencies and private organizations will need
to work together to effectively implement the goals and
objectives. Public/private partnerships were used to address
the Y2K concerns and can be similarly used to promote
implementation of the national strategy by public and private
sector organizations.
These partnerships that came about in the Y2K debate were
implemented through five broad efforts: One, congressional
oversight of agencies to hold them accountable for
demonstrating progress to heighten public awareness of the
problem; two, central leadership and coordination to ensure
that Federal systems were ready for the date change to
coordinate efforts primarily with the States and to promote
private sector and foreign government action; three,
partnerships within the intergovernmental system and with
private entities divided into key economic sectors address
issues such as contingency planning; four, communications as
we've heard this morning to share information on the status of
systems, products and services and to share recommended
solutions; and, last, but very importantly, human capital and
budget initiatives to help ensure that the government could
recruit and retain the technical expertise needed to convert
systems and communicate with other partners and to fund
conversion operations.
There are many parallels that are evident from the Y2K
experience that can be translated to the current debate around
homeland security.
Mr. Chairman, that concludes my statement. I'll be ready to
take any questions you may have.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Hinton follows:]
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Mr. Shays. Thank you very much. Mr. Tierney didn't
participate in the first round and, with Mr. Kucinich's
concurrence, we're going to go to him first.
Mr. Tierney. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, if it's acceptable to
everyone, I'll submit my statement for the record and then just
ask the questions because I have to run.
Mr. Shays. Sure, that would be good.
Mr. Tierney. I thank the witnesses for their indulgence.
Somebody mentioned either, this panel or last panel, that
President Bush said there was no margin for error, the stakes
are too high to get it wrong, which apparently seems to be
correct except when it comes to national missile defense, which
is raised somewhat to the level of religion by some folks
around here because apparently it now seeks to do a trial and
error process of development of national missile defense. And
our occasion for determining whether or not the trial has been
in error won't be until we are under attack.
That concerns me greatly because I think if we properly
assess the threats that are posed to us and put them in the
proper priority order, then we will have time to research and
test any type of national missile defense before we actually
start trying to build it and potentially wasting a lot of money
for false security.
Mr. Cirincione, back before 1998 most intelligence
estimates indicated that the nearest threat we had of any
country sending a long range ballistic missile at us was 2010
or beyond. Then along came Mr. Rumsfeld and, not surprisingly,
I would guess a couple of reports came out and all of a sudden
it became much more immediate. Then the CIA then bought into
it, the Pentagon.
Can you explain to us what seems to have happened that
people so radically changed their opinion apparently without
any change in the underlying facts?
Mr. Cirincione. Several things, Congressman. And in 1993,
when Mr. Woolsey was Director of the CIA, he submitted a threat
assessment, national intelligence estimate, they're called,
NIE, on the ballistic missile threat to the United States that
concluded that the United States would not face a third country
developing an ICBM with a nuclear warhead for at least 15
years. In 1995, a new assessment was done that reaffirmed and
went even a little further, went into greater detail, the fact
that the United States would only face a ballistic missile
attack from Russia or China over the next 15 years.
At that time those assessments came under harsh criticism
from some Members of Congress, and there were a number of very
intense hearings that criticized those assessments for
underestimating the ballistic missile threat. The Congress then
decided to do its own independent assessment and Congress hand-
picked a commission to review the national intelligence
estimate.
In 1996, that commission reported back and concluded that
in fact the estimate was valid and in fact the case was
stronger even than the publicly presented information. That was
a commission that was headed up by Mr. Robert Gates, the former
Director of the CIA under then first President Bush. That
report was not made public until December 1996, after the
Presidential election, but again this was now the third
assessment in a row that it found that the ballistic missile
threat while serious was not urgent.
The Congress then appointed another commission and this was
the commission that came to be known as the Rumsfeld Commission
that came back with a very different assessment in 1998, that
found that there was a threat of a third country, specifically
Iran, Iraq or North Korea, developing an ICBM, missiles that
could hit the United States with little or no warning, that we
might not know when a country was doing this and we would wake
up when it was too late. That report was actually criticized by
the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They did not agree with the
conclusion of the Rumsfeld Commission. But nonetheless, those
views and those methodologies came to be adopted by our
Intelligence Community, and that produced in 1999 the first
national intelligence estimate that corresponded with the
Rumsfeld conclusions and found that in fact there could be a
possibility of a threat from North Korea, secondarily from Iran
and possibly from Iraq.
And I believe they, just to sum up, that these national
intelligence estimates are wrong, that they overestimate the
threat and they reach these conclusions by basically changing
our standards of how we judge the threat, that they lower the
standards by which we would judge a ballistic missile to be
threatening the United States and seemed to indicate that there
was some dramatic new threat when in fact they were assessing
the programs that we had known about all along but now we're
judging them in a different way.
Specifically, they changed the range from an attack on the
continental United States, which had been all other
assessments, to one on any part of the United States. And the
difference between, for example, Seattle and the tip of the
Aleutian Island chain is 5,000 miles. So it meant that a medium
range missile could now be a threat to the United States.
Changed the time line and several other factors that you
could go into if you would like; most of all focused on the
developing missile threat from these three countries and did
not do a global assessment of the overall situation with
ballistic missiles which, as the report that I've submitted
indicates, is actually declining and declining dramatically by
most criteria.
Mr. Tierney. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I know that you had a
question. I yield to you whatever time I have. I have to run.
Mr. Shays. I would just like to have a full response to
that question if you want to stay here. It could be your time
if would you like. Yes, Mr. Bremer.
Mr. Bremer. I have to say that I'm not an expert on
ballistic missile technology, but I also don't have the
confidence of my co-panelist in predicting the future. I'm a
historian. Historians are students of discontinuities. I'm
always very uneasy when people make straight line projections.
It seems to me there are two relevant points about the
ballistic missile technology.
First is we've just seen one of the most extraordinary
failures of American intelligence in our history on September
11th. During the 1990's, people who didn't know what they were
talking about predicted confidently that in fact the threat of
terrorism was declining and in fact it was increasing. At the
end of that decade we had one of the most extraordinary
failures of intelligence. So anybody who stands today and says
that he is confident that he knows that we will have warnings
it seems to me is ignoring the experience we've just seen in
the last year on a very important issue, in this case
terrorism.
Second point is more the historical point. One can of
course list today the States which have ballistic missile
technologies and might under some conceivable circumstances
want to use that against the United States or threaten to.
Attorney General Meese mentioned several of those countries in
the previous panel. What one cannot say is what the world is
going to look like 10 years from now. So even if you accept the
original Woolsey panel assessment of 1993 that we did not face
a threat for 15 years, I remind you that's only 6 years from
now. I don't know how long it's going to take to develop
ballistic missile technology. I know we have to develop it. I
don't think it is prudent to assume that we will have warning.
I think we've already seen 9 of the 15 years even by the
Woolsey definition that have gone by.
So I fully support the deployment as soon as it is
practicable of ballistic missile technology and, as Mr. Meese
pointed out, technologies which are--would be available to not
only protect America and its homeland from Hawaii to Maine but
also to protect our allies and our troops stationed abroad.
I think the fact that five of the seven States which
support terrorism, five of the seven have ballistic missile
technology today, should be a rather sobering reminder to
Members of Congress about the importance of this area.
Mr. Tierney. That said and having stayed for it----
Mr. Shays. You have 5 minutes.
Mr. Tierney. I do have to run. I want to make a point. I
think what we're talking about is assessing threats and
prioritizing them. That's the real key here. If we're going to
go out on some untested system that has been nothing but
failures pretty much, unless we expect we're going to have a
missile sent out of the country instead of in with a beacon on
it three times the size of what's there with no decoys or
whatever, we're putting our priorities for what is anticipated.
What is anticipated by most accounts of reasonable people
is that we will see more terrorism acts along the nature of
what we have experienced so far, or things like that, well
before we'll experience a long range ballistic missile that is
big enough, powerful enough, accurate enough and able to carry
the kind of payload to be concerned. So as we prioritize those
things, that will be a little further down the line. That's
what we have to spend our money on is the things that hit the
top of the line first and then test the system, instead of
starting to build the thing before it even gets tested.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank the witnesses.
Mr. Shays. The question I wrestle with, and that is why
would someone send a missile when they can just put it in a
suitcase.
Mr. Cirincione. In fact, in the latest national
intelligence estimate, this is what the intelligence agencies
conclude. They conclude that it is more likely that the United
States will be attacked by a weapon of mass destruction by
nonmissile means; that is, by ship, plane or truck. So they do
make that assessment that the nonmissile means of delivery is
more likely than missile means.
Mr. Shays. But I wrestle with Ambassador Bremer's comments
as well. Because I realize that anything I do really has impact
10 years from now. So we have to anticipate 10 years from now.
So my own view based on the hearing we've had is that you
continue the development but you don't--excuse me--the research
and continue to try to improve the technology but then you
don't yet proceed to go into production. It's kind of how I
sort it out myself.
Mr. Cirincione. I would agree with that, sir. I think
that's a prudent course. What we're talking about here is
balance and priorities. How far money goes to these efforts,
how much priority, how much diplomacy, how much of our senior
leader's attention goes to this particular threat as compared
to all the other threats that we face.
Mr. Shays. Yes. Mr. Hinton.
Mr. Hinton. As you well know, one of the key
recommendations we made last year was for the focal point being
Governor Ridge's office that the President appointed him to to
oversee the development of a national threat and risk
assessment. That would bring to light all of the diffused
threats that your Nation would face in the future and go
through the assessment of the threat, look at the various
vulnerabilities and look at the criticality assessments of our
infrastructure and try to lay those out so that we could see
everything and how they stack up, so that would help us direct
where we need to put the resources.
We still believe that recommendation has merit. We have not
seen that implemented yet. And we continue to stand by that
because we think it is very important for the oversight
purposes of the Congress, as you are overseeing the expenditure
of all of the money that we are making available for homeland
security.
Mr. Shays. I will give Mr. Kucinich 10 minutes and then go
to Mr. Otter and I. But I will just tell you where I want to
use my 10 minutes. I want to--I am going to real religion on
this issue of knowing what the threat is and developing the
strategy because we had too many hearings before September 11th
when we were told we need to do it. And I don't--I see more the
strategy being developed before we know what the threat is. I
am going use as the basis of my question Ambassador Bremer's
comments about--instead of the strategy of wait and respond, I
guess before that is prepare, wait and respond. We need to have
one that is prepare, detect and prevent.
I am going to ask it based on what threat and--but that
will be my time after my two colleagues have gone. Mr.
Kucinich, you have 10 minutes. We will do it in two 5-minute
lots just so you see it happen.
Mr. Kucinich. Thank you very much. I thank the witnesses.
Mr. Cirincione, I wanted to thank you for your testimony. I
thought your piece in The Washington Post was breakthrough.
Contrary to what we have been hearing in the last few
years, it appears that the threat of intercontinental ballistic
missiles has actually decreased over the last decade, rather
than increased. I want to go back to that. Is that fairly
stated?
Mr. Cirincione. Yes, it is, sir.
Mr. Kucinich. I took the liberty of copying the chart that
accompanied your piece. I mentioned it earlier. Would you mind
briefly running through that for the benefit of the
subcommittee? It is basically divided into two timeframes, the
situation in 1987, the situation today; is that right?
Mr. Circincione. Yes, it is.
Mr. Kucinich. What does each of those rows represent?
Mr. Cirincione. The hours on the end--the hours on the end
represent the trend lines. What I tried to do was assemble the
various criteria by which anyone would judge a ballistic
missile threat, and then try to assess where those criteria
were going, what was the trend line.
And, you know, I am obviously inviting others to bring in
their own criteria. What other standards should we use?
Mr. Kucinich. So when you put all of this----
Mr. Shays. Let me ask the gentleman to yield. Do the other
panelists have a copy of this? I would like you to be able to
look at this to be able to respond as well.
Thank you.
Mr. Cirincione. Would you like me to go through it? What is
the biggest threat that we face? Intercontinental ballistic
missiles. There are only two countries in the world right now
that can threaten the United States with long range land-based
intercontinental ballistic missiles: Russia, which has
thousands of them, and China, which has about 20.
If we go back 15 years, where were we 15 years ago? I
picked 1987 because it was one of the peak years of the cold
war and it was before arms control treaties started reducing
the ballistic missile threat. Fifteen years ago there were
2,384 long range ballistic missiles threatening the United
States. Now there are 1,042. All but 20 of those are Russia's.
Mr. Kucinich. So the real concern, in terms of threat
assessment with respect to threats to this country----
Mr. Cirincione. To any part of this country.
Mr. Kucinich. China.
Mr. Cirincione. China. Russia. Those are the only countries
that can hit us with an intercontinental ballistic missile
currently.
Mr. Kucinich. So based on your studies of threat
assessment, have you seen any circumstances which would suggest
that either China or Russia would initiate an attack on the
United States, a missile attack?
Mr. Cirincione. No. That is an extraordinarily unlikely
event.
Mr. Kucinich. In concert with that, how does that then fit
into a newly enunciated U.S. policy of first use or first
strike, which it appears some of our panelists have advocated?
Mr. Cirincione. If you are referring to the recommendations
of the nuclear policy review---.
Mr. Kucinich. I think the word is posture.
Mr. Cirincione. The nuclear posture review, there are
recommendations there that the United States develop a new
generation of smaller, more usable nuclear weapons for a wide
variety of contingencies against States that have weapons of
mass destruction, or that might present us with a surprising
military development.
Mr. Kucinich. How does that square, though, with the
realities of the situation?
Mr. Cirincione. In this case, there is no correlation
between the two facts.
Mr. Kucinich. Elaborate. What do you mean there is no
correlation? Could it be fairly stated that this policy that
has been enunciated and elaborated on in the nuclear posture
review has no basis in reality that we should--that the United
States should take a position of advocating first strike?
Mr. Cirincione. These are two slightly different areas. But
there is no justification in an assessment of the threats from
ballistic missiles that would warrant the United States
changing its nuclear doctrine at this point.
Mr. Kucinich. And if other--is it possible that other
countries that have weapons of mass destruction right now,
intercontinental ballistic missiles--you talked about China and
Russia who have them right now. How would the threat assessment
change if they suddenly adopted the same policy of the United
States?
Mr. Cirincione. Well, this is always a very good test of
our policy. How would we feel if other countries announced, for
example, if they were developing a new generation of smaller
nuclear weapons and were intending and developing a doctrine
for use? I don't mean just a rogue nation, but India, for
example.
Mr. Kucinich. How does this change the threat index?
Mr. Cirincione. That would substantially increase your
risks of nuclear weapons being used in combat and significantly
increase the chance of other countries acquiring nuclear
weapons. So it would be a more dangerous world if other
countries adopted the kinds of policies that are being
recommended by this policy review. I think it is unquestionable
that it would lead to a more dangerous world.
Mr. Kucinich. So those policies actually increase the
threat to this country?
Mr. Cirincione. I think they do, sir. That is why I think
this is a dangerous set of recommendations, and I hope that the
senior leadership of the administration sends this report back
for revision, and that Congress gets involved in this
discussion. This is a very, very dramatic change in U.S.
nuclear policy. It should not be a change that is made by the--
--
Mr. Kucinich. I would like to say here in this hearing, as
the ranking Democrat of one of the subcommittees involved here,
that I think it is urgent for Congress to get involved in this,
because the whole calculus of threat assessment is being used
as the basis for building missile defense systems and spending
billions upon billions of dollars for homeland--so-called
homeland defense. And yet at the same time, those policies
enunciated in the nuclear posture review put the United States
in much graver danger than the United States was in prior to
those policies being enunciated.
Mr. Cirincione. It does get back to the chairman's main
point here, that some of those strategies and policies are
being developed before a concrete threat assessment.
Mr. Kucinich. I would like to go one step further with
that. This is not a particularly partisan statement, because I
challenged the Clinton administration on a number of its
foreign policies. But I think that--the fact that the potential
first use of nuclear weapons--and when we talk about first use,
not against necessarily government actors, but against their
people, that the fact that can be blindly discussed anywhere is
the height of immorality, and whatever administration, at any
time, to throw that stuff around as though it is--as though it
is just casual locker room banter, snap the towel, no, you
know.
I am looking here at one of the witnesses--a new strategy
must be to detect and prevent attacks before they happen. Well,
on one level that could be acceptable. But if you are talking
about--if that is translated to nuclear first strike, just
putting that out there, it is immoral. That is all. It puts the
United States in a position of telling the whole world to go to
hell. And that is not a way to conduct world affairs.
You know, I am just stopping the music here for a moment to
focus on this, because, you know, we can talk about all of the
threats that Governor Keating is familiar with, and we can talk
about the Heritage Foundation's report, which has a lot of
interesting information that might be of real value. But when
we get into a discussion here where we are actually talking
about the first use of nuclear weapons, and making that a new
doctrine, people are playing with the Apocalypse, they are
playing with doomsday scenarios, and it has to be stopped. It
is not an acceptable part of a dialog in a civil society. It is
basically insane, and it needs to be challenged. And this is
just one Member of Congress here. But whatever needs to be
done, needs to be done nationally and even internationally to
stop this descent into this maelstrom of chaos which is brought
about by loose talk of a nuclear first strike.
You know, I saw the movies about the Cuban missile crisis,
and I saw the discussions that people had about their children
and their grandchildren. This is just not acceptable. So if
there is anybody here even remotely connected with the
administration, they should just know that there is going to be
efforts made to start a national movement to repudiate this
first strike dementality.
I don't have anything more to say.
Mr. Shays. I just want to point out that the comments of
first strike, we are not even quite sure where they are coming
from, or any validity. I hesitate to even speak about them,
because I don't give them much credibility, but I would welcome
any comment that anyone else wants to make on this issue before
we go on.
Mr. Kucinich. Would the Chair yield?
Mr. Shays. I just want to make sure that the full panel
responds.
Mr. Kucinich. Would the Chair yield for a question?
Mr. Shays. Sure.
Mr. Kucinich. I spent some time Sunday watching members of
the administration on talk shows try to explain the
administration's position that was stated in The Los Angeles
Times story, and I didn't see anything that repudiated the
United States or what sounds like very strongly United States'
position with respect to first strike.
You know, they may have backpedaled about whether or not
the circumstances would come up, but they basically have said
there would be a reservation of the right. And I am saying, so
to be very clear about what I am saying here, that it is
immoral to let that kind of talk go out there, about reserving
the right for a nuclear first strike, and particularly--I mean
you look at these threat assessments, there is no justification
for it even technically, let alone getting into the morality.
Thank you.
Mr. Shays. What I listened to was a very cautious response
and no--no real acceptance that those reports were accurate,
other than to say that all administrations have had to look at
all options and had to respond to all options as a possibility.
Mr. Kucinich. Well, further asking the Chair for his
indulgence, no administration has been confronted with these
set of circumstances, nor has an administration ringingly
rejected the comprehensive test ban treaty, the antiballistic
missile treaty, talked about building a national missile
defense, building bunkers they have people hiding in. I mean
what signal does that send to anyone? And then you also have
this loose talk about a first strike. I mean we are--you know,
somebody is screwing around with the end of the world here. And
I think that it ought to be called for what it is.
Mr. Shays. I am afraid they are the terrorists that are
screwing around with the end of the world.
Mr. Kucinich. We need not copy them with our mentality.
Mr. Shays. OK. Let me just invite the panel to respond to
any comment.
Mr. Larsen. Yes, sir. In my statement there was discussion
of preemption, but there was no discussion of first use of
nuclear weapons. I think that has been a long-standing policy
of the United States. But one of the things that has to be
discussed is we sat in here in July and talked about the Dark
Winter exercise. There are nations out there that we believe
have smallpox, which in many respects could be worse than a
nuclear strike on this Nation.
North Korea and Iraq are the two that I am greatly
concerned about that can cause significantly more loss of life.
People I talked to at CDC and Johns Hopkins who have studied
this for years tell me it could take this Nation beyond the
point of recovery. That is a serious threat to our national
security. It is not the highest probability, just like when we
talked about national missile defense, is that the highest
probability? No, but what are the consequences? I think we have
to look at it.
The Gilmore Commission looked at low probability--I mean
high probability, low consequence truck bombs. I don't lose a
lot of sleep over those. Those are personal tragedies, but
those are not threats to our national survival. I think
reevaluating some of our issues such as preemption, as I had
talked about in my statement, had nothing to do with nuclear
weapons; that we need to send a very clear message to those who
brought about September 11th attacks on this country and those
out there who have capabilities to bring even more severe
attacks, that the United States takes this very seriously, and
we will respond as necessary to protect our Nation.
Mr. Kucinich. Do you advocate that the non-state actors,
that we respond to them by attacking the States from which they
come?
Mr. Larsen. I think we should attack the actors. Thirty-two
years in the military as an Air Force pilot. I dislike nuclear
weapons probably more than you do. They are terribly--they are
a terrible weapon. You know, the idea of dropping a nuclear
weapon on Baghdad is preposterous, and kill 2 million people. I
will agree with you on that point. But I tell you what. I want
to make it very clear to anyone who thinks that they will
launch further attacks on the United States that we don't take
anything off the table, and if you attack our Nation with
something that could threaten the very survival of this
government, we should take nothing off the table when we talk
and think about that response. And you were talking about, oh,
we are building bunkers out here in the mountains. Those were
built in the Eisenhower administration. That program has been
around--I worked in that program----
Mr. Kucinich. Did we have a separate administration set up?
Mr. Larsen. We have no separate administration today. There
are different levels of alert, just like we have--you mentioned
the force protection levels, Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and Delta.
At times of higher threat, and I think we are in times of
higher threat right now, I am happy to know that there are some
folks out there. Whenever we have----
Mr. Kucinich. Congress would have been happy to know, too.
Mr. Larsen. Whenever we have a State of the Union address,
we don't put the whole leadership team in one building.
Mr. Shays. Let me give the time to Mr. Otter, but just say
that this committee has no doubt about the reliability of
information that has come to us that said terrorists have
chemical, biological, potentially radioactive material, and has
sought to get nuclear weapons. And we basically have heard
testimony that says we are in the race with terrorists to shut
them down before they shut us down. But I am pretty clear about
one thing, the fact that we are concerned about the potential
of a nuclear attack on the United States. It won't be by
missile, it will be by suitcase or truck or something else. It
is real. And we tell the American people the truth and then
they respond by telling us what they want to do. That is in
fact the truth. And I just want to make this point. It would be
absolutely inexcusable for this administration not to
anticipate that possibility and act on it.
Mr. Kucinich. Well, let me ask the Chair a question then. I
am not going to dispute your scenario with respect to a
suitcase, but I heard seven nations named in the nuclear
posture review now. They weren't talking about suitcases.
Mr. Shays. I agree with you. But I am just responding to
your whole point of why we have a government, somewhat a shadow
government in exile. Let me give Mr. Otter 10 minutes.
Mr. Otter. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I hadn't intended to
continue with this sort of discussion, but I guess I will
because the Rumsfeld Report, I think, brought a lot of things
to light.
Now one of the previous questioners mentioned the greatest
key to this whole discussion is the question of assessment. And
I think the greatest danger to this whole discussion and this
hearing that we are having today is to focus ourself so much on
one potential threat as to ignore at our peril the rest of
them.
We did focus on a missile defense, obviously to the extent
of ignoring potential terrorist threats, and those did not come
without warning. You know, when you think back in the previous
administration, when the al Qaeda organization led a strike
against the World Trade Center, also against the Korban Towers,
two embassies in Africa, and then against the USS Cole, and I
would ask you and I would ask the ranking member, I suspect
that is it worse to warn about potential threats and make
necessary assessments and prepare for those than it is to let
those four attacks against this country go on except for to--
over an 8-year period, except to bomb an aspirin factory in the
Sudan and deny those people an opportunity to get over a
headache.
No, I think it is much more dangerous to focus our
assessment on just one area to the exclusion of the other. And
let me go on record as saying that I do not believe it is
immoral for this country to prepare for its survival. And if
that survival includes assessments of other countries'
abilities to attack us, I think we need to know that.
But having said all of that, I guess my question then would
go to--relative to those assessments or relative to those
attacks that came over the last 8 years, is there any reason to
believe that those won't continue? Is there any reason to
believe that perhaps those targets will come closer and closer
to the Western Hemisphere? And if there is, instead of
attacking the embassies in Africa, perhaps we need to have more
assessments of the attacks that are possible on our own
homeland. I think that is where this discussion really ought to
go.
And if we fail to respond in kind, as we did in those four
instances during the last 8 years, can't we just expect to
continue to be chipped away at to a point beyond irritation,
and a reoccurrence of September 11th? If you will, panelists,
respond to that. Mr. Ambassador.
Mr. Bremer. The consensus of most people who look at the
terrorist threat in the government, out of the government, here
on the Hill, is that what we saw on September 11th was the
logical if horrible extension of a trend that was visible
throughout the 1990's.
I know of no one who thinks that trend will diminish. Most
of the analysis--and I think my commission was the first one to
point out this problem in June 2000, when we pointed out that
we thought there would be mass casualty, mass destruction
attacks in the United States on the homeland, and we reported
in particular to the dangers we associated with the possibility
of chemical and biological, particularly biological attacks.
I have been involved one way or the other, for my sins, in
counterterrorism now for almost 20 years, and I don't know of
anybody who disagrees with that assessment. So I think it is
prudent to expect that we will continue to see mass casualty
attempts in the United States, and that it is the only prudent
and, indeed, politically defensible thing for the
administration in power to do, to do everything that it
possibly can to prevent that from happening.
Mr. Otter. Mr. Larsen.
Mr. Larsen. I think our No. 1 priority, as I said in my
statement, should be on deterrence. And we are seeing now, much
different than in the cold war, but in this new era, the role
that consequence management and crisis management plays in
deterrence. We still don't know who sent those letters to
Senator Daschle or to the news offices. Our enemies understand
that. Whether that was some domestic terrorist, we don't know.
But the international enemies we are most concerned about here,
they understand how poorly we responded. We don't know who did
it.
I think the most important thing is reestablishing that
deterrence and the--the priorities that you spend--that we
spend in the next couple of years are going to do that. What
money is in the current budget for attribution?
Mr. Otter. Mr. Cirincione.
Mr. Cirincione. Thank you. I think the war in Afghanistan,
which I strongly support, is a very powerful deterrent. Perhaps
al Qaeda thought that they could get away with this. Perhaps
they thought that they could provoke the United States and it
would result in U.S. involvement in the Middle East that would
trigger the Jihad that they sought. They were sadly mistaken. I
think any terrorist group that thinks that mass casualties in
the United States are somehow going to accomplish their purpose
now has to think at least twice about that.
As to the threats we face in the near term, I again defer
to an international expert on this, the testimony of Vice
Admiral Thomas Wilson, the director of the Defense Intelligence
Agency. This February he lists again his top concerns, and
right at the top is still a major terrorist attack against U.S.
interests here or abroad. Second on his list is escalating
violence in the Middle East. He goes on to worry about a war
between India and Pakistan, widespread violence against U.S.
citizens and interests in Colombia, and other factors,
including the dangers of ballistic missile attack. It is a very
comprehensive assessment.
He also goes out of his way to emphasize some of the
contributing factors to global instabilities, such as
demographics and economic dislocations. He talks about
resources shortages in many parts of the developing world. The
danger--I think where we get into trouble is not that we don't
listen to those assessments, but we then pick and choose the
threats that we want to respond to. That is a problem. We are
clearly having a problem as a Congress, as an executive branch,
as a Nation, prioritizing the threats that we face,
understanding how to allocate the resources. And my simple
message is that I think we misallocated our resources in the
past.
We have to correct that imbalance. We have to put our money
where our threat assessments are.
Mr. Otter. Mr. Hinton.
Mr. Hinton. Mr. Otter, our work has largely focused on the
process, if you will, and I don't know if I can add any more
than what I said earlier, which was picked up in the letter
of--the bipartisan letter that went from this committee over to
the President seeking a threat-and-risk assessment in this
whole area to try to take stock of what the threats are and to
come up with a balanced portfolio against those. So I think
that is the process that needs to unfold. That has been the
subject of the recommendation and our reports where we are
looking to Governor Ridge to oversee that process, that will
provide that information to help you all in your oversight
capacity.
Mr. Otter. Much has been said about the cold war, and the
result of how the cold war came about. I happen to be a
student, not a disciple of, but I happen to be a student of the
notion that when the Manhattan Project was put together, had
equal enthusiasm been in place, an equal study, an equal
deliberation on what would happen if they were successful, if
that had paralleled the efforts of Oppenheimer and the rest of
the folks to make that major weapon of mass destruction, and we
had known, and that assessment been made then, 1945 would have
seen the total control under one government. That one
government would have been the government that invented it, and
they would have had the assessment that if anybody else gets
their hands on this stuff, this knowledge, we could be in for a
50-year cold war, which is exactly what happened.
So we need to study these things, not only--and deliberate
them in their total vision, in our total vision of assessments
of danger to this country, but also I think we need to assess
at the same time is what happens if we are successful.
I thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back the balance of my
time.
Mr. Shays. Thank you. I have a number of questions. I want
to get right to it. I was kind of thrown for somewhat of a
loop, Mr. Bremer, when you talked about 1947. And I am
realizing that there must have been two parts to getting our
act together, under Truman putting the Pentagon together,
basically building it, creating this force structure, and then
the strategic must have been what happened in the Solarium
Project. But I don't feel that we can wait 5 years to resolve
this. I am getting very, very nervous that--we continue to talk
about strategy before we have this kind of assessment of the
threat.
I want to--maybe I get some comfort in you kind of making
what seems complex seem kind of simple to me. I want you to
elaborate a bit on the wait-and-respond versus the detect-and-
prevent. What is our strategic strategy? We had to be prepared,
correct, but it was basically--it was a deterrent, we waited
and we responded.
Talk to me a little about detecting and preventing. That is
a strategy, right?
Mr. Bremer. Well, it is a posture or a strategy. I think
that obviously it is a bit--it does somewhat oversimplify to
argue that all we did was wait and respond, because before
September 11th, we also had programs to try to detect what
terrorists were up to and to disrupt their plans before they
could attack. But as the Bremer Commission pointed out, as the
Gilmore Commission pointed out, as a number of other studies
have shown, over the last decade our intelligence abilities
have deteriorated because the intelligence agencies had adopted
a sort of--or had acquired a risk-averse culture and we were
not out aggressively enough going after terrorists because our
general posture was the terrorists would attack and we would
then try to figure out how to respond.
That was certainly the case, as Mr. Otter just pointed out,
during the four major incidents that he referred to in the last
decade.
What I am saying is that the threat posed by terrorists
today and their new motives is such that we simply cannot
afford, it is not morally or political acceptable to say to the
American people, I am going to wait now for the terrorists to
get their hands on this bad stuff, because we are talking about
not 3,000 people being killed or 30,000 or even 300,000. It
could be 3 million people. If it is the case of smallpox, as
Colonel Hansen pointed out, we could be talking about tens of
millions of people.
So the stakes are so high now the government cannot get the
strategy wrong and the government cannot get the organization
of the Federal Government wrong. We don't have that margin. We
don't have 5 years, as you pointed out.
Mr. Shays. It strikes me, though, that one of the key
things that this President has done--and I think most of his
success is, you hold the country responsible that allows the
terrorist activity to grow and prosper in that country. And the
reason I am struck by, from all of our hearings, is that
basically cottage industries can create weapons of mass
destruction within a border and wipe out humanity as we know
it, as relates to biological.
What I am also struck with, though, it seems to me that
what--as we sort out this threat and we develop a strategy, and
I open it up to any comments from any of the panelists, that we
may have to act unilaterally if in fact our strategy is to
detect and prevent, we are not going to wait to--I mean there
was this great cartoon one time showing Soviet tanks in
Washington, and Congress was meeting, and we--you know, we
finally decided to declare clear war against the Soviet Union
in this scenario.
It strikes me that we can't wait, if we are going to detect
and prevent, and that may require us to act unilaterally. And I
will throw it open to any--I will start with you, Mr. Larsen,
and then go to you, Mr. Bremer.
Mr. Larsen. Yes, sir. I think after a truly major attack on
the United States, there would be no debate whether we would
act unilaterally or wait for some sort of coalition. Perhaps we
should look at that first. The line between unilateral
operations and leadership is sometimes very thin. I remember
January 10, 1991, polls in the United States, even here,
domestically was not in a favor of starting the war in Iraq.
President Bush started it, thought it was the right thing to
do. Three days after the air war began, all of a sudden the
American people, like 75 percent, said, yeah, it was the right
thing to do. That was leadership.
I think when we see some of the problems, like with the
biological warfare convention--I wish we had a better treaty,
arms control regime for biological weapons. They scare me more
than anything else. But I don't think we should sign up to
something that won't work. We had the most intrusive inspection
regime going on in Iraq----
Mr. Shays. Let me go to the next, if I could. Mr.
Cirincione.
Mr. Cirincione. I think there are a number of circumstances
where the United States will have no choice but to act
unilaterally, particularly in situations such as were just
described. I think that should be, unless it is time-urgent,
that should be our last option. It is always better when the
United States acts in concert with their allies and friends.
The 1991 Persian Gulf War is an excellent example of that. That
is why Vice President Cheney is out in the region again.
Mr. Shays. I put one caveat, though. There was basically an
agreement in order to get that unification, that we weren't
going to go into Bagdad. And this--this White House isn't going
to--I am pretty comfortable in saying that, because I just
remember in the dialog with the President, the former
President, getting this Peace Corps volunteer to vote for war,
he was saying, you know, we have an understanding, we are going
to Baghdad. That was no secret. We didn't.
I mean, at least that is the way I always assumed it as I
dialogd with the White House on this.
Mr. Cirincione. There are a number of things that we
probably should have done differently at that end of that war.
Whether going into Baghdad would have solved the problem is
unclear. But you could go into lots of things. For example,
allowing Iraq to keep flying helicopters. Allowing it to keep
building short-range ballistic missiles, not having a no-holds-
barred inspection regime. There is a whole lot of things that
we should have done differently.
Mr. Shays. Mr. Hinton, and then Mr. Bremer.
Mr. Hinton. Chairman Shays, that is a policy realm for
which I don't feel qualified to answer that.
Mr. Shays. Well, you are qualified, but you are wise not to
answer it.
Mr. Bremer. I don't think there is any question we have to
be--the President has to be able to act unilaterally. Of
course, it is better to have some friends along with you. As
Winston Churchill said, the only thing worse than fighting with
your allies is fighting without them. But there will be times
when people won't come along with us and we will have to go
along on our own.
Mr. Cirincione. But when that happens, it should give us
pause. We should think about why it is that no one else would
agree with us, and maybe we should be rethinking our policy or
our priorities.
Mr. Shays. Continue.
Mr. Cirincione. Well, the case of Iraq is much in the news.
You know, Iraq doesn't show up on most threat priority lists.
It isn't in Admiral Wilson's list. Is it a danger? Yes. Would
we all be better off if Saddam Hussein were not in power? Yes.
Should it be our No. 1 priority? Should we subordinate
everything else to that effort?
Mr. Shays. I am nodding my head and saying yes, because I
don't know what reports you are looking at, but the basic
information I get that isn't classified is three to 5 years he
has nuclear weapons. This is a regime where basically heads are
in pickle jars and a regime that has used chemical weapons to
destroy 30,000 people in almost a day's work. So it shows up on
my radar screen.
Mr. Cirincione. I think we can separate regime change from
acquisition of weapons of mass destruction. It is not
necessarily so that we have to remove Saddam Hussein in order
to prevent those programs from advancing, nor is it necessarily
so that if we do, that the next regime would not pursue those
capabilities. And that is part of the reason I think why the
United States is trying its best to explore options through the
United Nations of reestablishing the inspection regime. That
may be ruled out. Iraq may make that impossible. He may give us
no other choice but to once again engage in military action.
But that is why it should be a last choice, not the first
choice.
Mr. Shays. When we try to determine the assessment of
threat, I am struck by the fact that the threat is so different
and has so many parts compared to this monolithic attack
potentially from the Soviet Union. Is threat assessment, going
back to the 1950's, much easier than threat assessment now, or
it is basically the same process and it shouldn't be any more
difficult?
Mr. Cirincione. Let me just start this process. It is much
more difficult now. There is no question about it. There is a
little bit of historical revisionism going on where we now
remember the Soviet Union as this almost benign predictable
deterrable foe. That is not how we saw the Soviet Union at the
time. And you, sir, got involved in many hearings where we
started off with a very concrete threat assessment of a Warsaw
Pact invasion through the Folder Gap.
Mr. Shays. There are bomb shelters all over my district.
Mr. Cirincione. Sir, we all did duck-and-cover drills. This
was very scary times. We engaged in numerous diplomatic crises,
we spent hundreds of billions of dollars to deter the Soviet
Union attacks. Now we have a less concrete, more diffuse,
somewhat less predictable threat, and it requires a lot more
analysis and many more tools. If you just look at Admiral
Wilson's testimony, he talks a lot about the underlying forces
that generate global instabilities and how we have to deal with
them, and it is a much more complicated political, military,
economic, diplomatic issue than a straightforward military
threat assessment.
Mr. Shays. The bottom line, deterrence doesn't mean much,
it strikes me.
Mr. Bremer. I agree that the threat assessment is more
difficult. I think one of the problems, Mr. Chairman, that we
all have to grapple with, in some ways we are all still
thinking of this in cold war terms as if threats were
quantifiable, you know, how many SS-20's does the Soviet Union
have? Where are they deployed? What is the order of battle for
the Red Army? These are all very tidy things, difficult to get
your hands on it, but once you do get your hands on it, you can
do the threat assessment.
As my colleague said, the threat is so diffuse now, it
comes from so many directions, and it is potentially in many
ways even greater than it was at the height of the cold war. We
have to, I think, not--I think you would make a mistake, it
seems to me, in Congress to say we need a very precise threat
assessment before we can do anything. You are not going to get
that. The threat is so different.
America's vulnerabilities are essentially infinite. You
cannot start with the vulnerability analysis, because with the
country of 283 million spread across the continent and halfway
across an ocean, our vulnerabilities are essentially infinite.
So, of course, you have to have some sense of the threat in
order to determine priorities, which is the theme that the
ranking member has made and others have made here. Absolutely
correct. But let's not get ourselves into the mindset that it
is going to be the way it was in the cold war, that a threat
assessment is sort of almost a mathematical thing. It is not
going to be that easy.
Mr. Shays. Before I give the floor to Mr. Kucinich, though,
don't you need to know what the threat is before you develop a
strategy?
Mr. Bremer. I agree. I am saying let's be careful when we
get to the issue of quantifying the threat.
Mr. Shays. But we still need to know the threat to develop
a strategy.
Mr. Cirincione. I think it is quantifiable. I think it is
knowable. It is not completely unpredictable.
Mr. Larsen. It was much more capabilities we looked at in
the cold war, our intelligence community, and they are still
focused on that, counting missiles and armor divisions. Now it
is more intent that we are worried about.
Mr. Hinton. Chairman Shays, I would like to add I agree,
too, that the threat is more complex, it is diffuse. But key to
this, I think, is understanding all of the complexities around
the different threats out there before you come up with the
strategy.
Mr. Shays. Mr. Kucinich, would you like the floor back?
Mr. Kucinich. Yes. The Chair raised a very good point here,
first know the threat before you look at the strategy, because
otherwise we end up in, you know, Alice in Nuclear Land. You
know, first, the strategy, then the threat.
And that seems to be some of the case of what is going on
here, Mr. Chairman. I want to call to the committee's attention
an article from January 11, 2002 in The Washington Post, ``U.S.
Alters Estimate of Threats, Non-Missile Attacks Likelier, CIA
Says.'' And the first paragraph of the article says, ``The
United States is more likely to suffer a nuclear, chemical or
biological attack from terrorists using ships, trucks or
airplanes than one by a foreign country using long range
missiles, according to a new U.S. intelligence estimate.''
Mr. Shays. Doesn't everyone, everyone, basically agree with
that point in the short run?
Mr. Cirincione. Yes, I do.
Mr. Kucinich. Well, I am glad that there is concurrence
among members of the panel. However, what we are seeing raised
here with the administration is what Mr. Cirincione has said
publicly is the elimination of the line between nuclear weapons
and chemical and biological weapons. And we are also seeing a
United States which is telling countries, as Mr. Cirincione has
said, that changing the policy--that if they did not acquire
nuclear weapons, we would not attack them with nuclear weapons.
That policy is being abandoned. The concern that I have is that
we are being, for some reason, pushed into a discussion about
survival.
And, Mr. Cirincione, I mean anything in these threat
assessments that you have seen, would they suggest that the
very survival of the United States is at stake at this moment?
Mr. Cirincione. No, sir, there is not, which is why it is a
mistake to conclude that just because the threats are more
difficult to analyze that therefore they are greater. I do not
believe we are under--they are greater threats to the United
States now than there was 15 years ago. Fifteen years ago we
were talking about national survival. Five thousand Soviet
nuclear warheads would have destroyed the country, in fact, the
planet. We do not face that magnitude of a threat, thank
goodness, today.
Mr. Kucinich. Any of the panelists want to disagree with
that, that the very survival of the United States as we know it
is at risk at this very moment?
Mr. Bremer. I disagree.
Mr. Kucinich. Do you want to explain?
Mr. Bremer. Well, I went through it rather at some length
in my opening statement. I think it is now clear that terrorist
groups, the ones we are most concerned about, have made it
clear they have a motive of killing as many Americans as
possible. Those groups have tried to get and may have gotten
hands on weapons of mass destruction.
Terrorists states, of which there are seven, five of them
have got nuclear, chemical, biological programs and ballistic
missile technologies. Some of those states could very well, and
have already have close relations with some of the terrorist
groups and could either make that kind of material available to
them or use it themselves.
The use of a biological, a well-planned biological attack
on the United States would absolutely threaten the survival of
this country, no question about it.
Mr. Kucinich. Mr. Cirincione.
Mr. Cirincione. That is certainly a worst-case scenario.
Mr. Bremer. So was a nuclear attack by 5,000 Soviet
missiles which you just admitted was a threat 15 years ago.
That was the worst case? Was there something worse than that?
Mr. Cirincione. No, there wasn't.
Mr. Bremer. Case made. If you want to look at worst-case
scenarios? , that is it.
Mr. Cirincione. In fact, Mr. Bremer, I think there is a
remote chance that there could be a biological weapons attack
that could kill millions of Americans. That is a terrible
scenario. Previously we feared that kind of attack from states,
and particularly from the Soviet Union, which had one of the
largest biological capabilities in the world. They could have
done that. Even so, even--granted that this is still a danger,
I--I believe it was a much greater danger 15 years ago when
those biological weapons existed in state hands with excellent
delivery vehicles ready to be deployed.
What we are now worried about now is whether a terrorist
group would do that. Terrorists do--are trying to acquire
biological weapons. But so far they have been unsuccessful in
developing or possessing a usable biological weapon. Does Iraq
have biological weapons? Absolutely. Will they launch a
biological weapons attack against the United States? It is
possible. That is something that we have to worry about.
Mr. Kucinich. Do they have the capability of
intercontinental ballistic missile technology?
Mr. Cirincione. No, they don't. They would have to bring it
over on a ship, a plane, or smuggle it in a truck.
Mr. Shays. Would the gentleman yield a second?
Mr. Kucinich. Sure.
Mr. Shays. I have some sympathy about the immediacy of
whether we need to have a missile defense system. And on that
I--I have some--but I just want to say to you, we have had
witnesses before us, doctors of noted medical journals, and one
of the last questions we asked, unprovoked, was, is there
anything you want to say before we close?
He said my biggest fear is that basically a small group of
biological specialists will basically create a biological agent
that has no antidote, an altered biological agent that will
wipe out humanity as we know it. And there was--there is a
basic recognition, this is more than just a possibility. And
the thing is, there is no restraint on them because there is no
government that says we are not going to do it because we don't
want to go into oblivion. There is no deterrence.
So all of a sudden you just left me way off. I can't tell
you how strongly I agree with--everything we have heard in our
25 hearings backs up what Dr. Bremer says. So you are kind of
on one side here. I would love to have you come back again. But
good grief.
Mr. Cirincione. Is it possible? Surely it is possible. It
is a question of how likely such a threat is. And there have
been some very well-funded, very determined terrorist
organizations, particularly Aum Shinrikyo, trying to do this,
and they have failed to do it. It is a lot harder than most
people think. Is it possible? Yes. Is it likely? I don't think
so.
Mr. Shays. I am going to invite you back when we have some
of those doctors here to respond. So I would love to get this
hearing ended. I would love to give you an opportunity to close
out.
Mr. Kucinich. I would like to just--to kind of wrap up this
discussion. We have--on this I spent a lot of time talking
about the attempts to buildup a national missile defense system
and the money that is being spent on that.
The Carnegie Endowment for the National Peace again in
their bulletin on March 4, 2002 talks about how in January 2001
a special commission chaired by Howard Baker and Lloyd Cutler
urged the administration to trim the money spent on securing
and eliminating Russia's nuclear weapons and materials.
Cutler said, ``our principal conclusions are that the most
urgent unmet national security threats for the United States
today is the danger that weapons of mass destruction or
weapons-usable material in Russia could be stolen and sold to
terrorist or hostile nation states and used against American
troops abroad or citizens at home.''
So it would seem that our money would be well spent in
addressing trying to control the nuclear weapons and materials
out of Russia. Furthermore, I think it would be important at
some point for this committee to bring people from the
administration in to go over this question about the
prerogative for first use, because that has to be based on some
kind of threat assessment, Mr. Chairman. And I have heard
testimony here about the threat assessment with respect to
China and Russia and the ICBMs. But the first-strike policy
would not be consistent with that threat assessment with
respect to ICBMs, and I just wonder why so many people are
pushed into this survival mode with respect to ICBMs when
others have testimony that there is other security problems
that confront this Nation.
Mr. Shays. I understand the gentleman's concern. I figured
it was a slow news day and it was a newspaper that got a story
that would could have basically written any year in the last 20
years in terms of what we require in the military to do.
But I am going to call this hearing to a close. I think
there have been some really important elements that you all
have brought out, and I think every one of you has made a very
fine contribution, and I thank you very, very much.
The hearing is closed.
[Whereupon, at 12:45 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
COMBATING TERRORISM: PROTECTING THE UNITED STATES, PART II
----------
THURSDAY, MARCH 21, 2002
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on National Security, Veterans Affairs
and International Relations,
Committee on Government Reform,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 1:35 p.m., in
room 2247, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Christopher
Shays (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Shays, Putnam, Weldon, Kucinich,
Clay, and Watson.
Staff present: Lawrence J. Halloran, staff director and
counsel; Dr. R. Nicholas Palarino, senior policy advisor;
Kristine McElroy and Thomas Costa, professional staff member;
Sherrill Gardner, detailee-fellow; Jason M Chung, clerk; David
Rapallo, minority counsel; and Earley Green, minority assistant
clerk.
Mr. Shays. I would like to call this hearing to order and
to welcome our guests, and obviously, to welcome our witnesses.
For more than 10 years, we have been at war with
transnational terrorists, but were unwilling to acknowledge and
confront the unnatural menace inexorably creeping toward our
shores. Today, while United States and coalition forces pursue
the armies of terror abroad, we remain avoidably vulnerable to
the next terrorist attack at home. Six months after lethal
terrorism came to our shore through the skies and through the
mail, we lacked the real time threat assessment, national
strategy and organizational reforms long acknowledged as
prerequisites to true homeland security.
Without doubt, the task is enormous. We are a mobile open
society of more than 286 million souls living within 7,000
miles of open land borders and 4,000 miles of unguarded
coastline. Public safety and public health systems are not well
integrated. Critical transportation and information systems are
susceptible to disruption. Intelligence sharing is stilted.
Military capabilities have not yet been fully transformed to
meet symmetrical threats.
Where to begin? It is a question of priorities. Until valid
threats are culled from innumerable vulnerabilities, until a
strategy is crafted to meet these threats and until governments
are organized to implement the strategy, time and money will be
wasted and lives put at risk as we lurch from crisis to crisis,
or succumb to bureaucratic infighting and inertia.
Last week we heard testimony from a distinguished panel of
experts who recommended a renewed sense of urgency to propel
and focus homeland security efforts. That momentum and steady
guidance are supposed to be supplied by the Office of Homeland
Security referred to as OHS, but there are indications that
staff level coordination mechanism may not be strong enough to
prevail in pitched turf warfare against entrenched interests in
the agencies and in the Congress.
While we appreciate the briefing that we hoped to have this
afternoon by Admiral Abbot, OHS deputy director, private
discussions alone cannot answer questions so critical to public
health and safety. So today we will hear from the Federal
departments and agencies charged with key initiatives to
protect the American people from terrorism. Their efforts,
individually and collectively, have made the homeland more
secure, particularly since September 11th, but the low-hanging
fruit of homeland security has now been harvested.
Unprecedented levels of coordination and cooperation will be
required to reach the loftier but essential objective of a
threat-based, strategically sound organizationally effective
homeland security program. The question we ask our witnesses to
answer, are we moving a pace toward that objective? We look
forward to their testimony.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Christopher Shays follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T4601.055
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T4601.056
Mr. Shays. At this time, I recognize the distinguished
gentleman from Ohio, the ranking member, Mr. Kucinich.
Mr. Kucinich. I want to thank the Chair, and I look forward
to our working to have a cooperative relationship on this
committee. Now, despite doubling funding for homeland defense,
despite asking Congress to provide $38 billion next year,
unfortunately, we don't have the director here to come to the
Hill and testify about this program. The Office unfortunately
has ignored repeated recommendations from numerous sources,
including the General Accounting Office, and even from this
committee, to conduct a comprehensive assessment of the threats
which may face this country.
This subcommittee has heard over and over again that to
craft a coherent strategy to fight terrorism, the
administration must begin with one job, conducting a
comprehensive assessment of all the threats our country may
face. The Office must gather intelligence from sources
throughout government agencies, must evaluate the many
different threats to this country side by side, and must place
them in some sort of priority order. Otherwise, how do we know
whether the $38 billion of taxpayers' money is being used
productively? How do we know that an additional $358 billion in
defense spending requested by the President will be geared
toward programs which really do protect the American people?
The President's budget calls for 8 billion to be spent on
missile defense in the year 2003, and 38 billion over the next
5 years, despite the fact that experts, including U.S.
intelligence and military officials have concluded that the
threat of a rogue state launching a missile at the United
States is an unlikely scenario. Who decided that in this
funding? What threat assessments were examined? This sort of
analysis is important.
Mr. Chairman, we joined together in writing to President
Bush last October when the head of Homeland Security was first
appointed. Chairman Burton and Ranking Member Waxman also
joined with us. This was an urgent call from all of us based on
our many, many hearings on terrorism, recommending that the
Office of Homeland Security determine what the threats are and
prioritize them in a logical fashion.
As we said, this is the first step toward crafting a
strategy toward allocating our budget resources properly. We
have been informed that this office refuses to take the step.
In fact, they are skipping the step altogether, plunging into
writing a national strategy to be released sometime this
summer. The Chair has said it, don't you need to know what the
threat is before you develop a strategy? Of course you do. We
all know that. GAO and the experts know that, but the Office of
Homeland Security has not acknowledged it. But maybe that will
change today.
So we must ask if the office is not basing strategy on a
comprehensive assessment of the threat, then on what is it
basing its decisions? I want to say I do have a lot of
confidence in Governor Ridge. He is a fine public servant,
someone who loves this country. He has served the people of
Pennsylvania well, and I think he will serve this country well.
I am confident that he can provide validated information, and I
am confident that he can provide the intelligence. I am
confident that he can provide analytical assessment. I am
confident that he can provide well-crafted priorities.
Unfortunately, the Office of Homeland Security hasn't produced
any of these yet. But I do have a lot of confidence and trust
in Governor Ridge's intentions and in his ability.
Now, earlier this week the White House press secretary
defended the administration's decision to keep the head of
Homeland Security from testifying in public. He said, ``this is
an important line to draw and the President has drawn it.'' But
it wasn't a line that was drawn when we saw the new alert
system brought forward, and of course Congress has had no
opportunity to bring questions to that. So I think we in this
committee try to be careful not to let politics obstruct the
pursuit of this Nation's security. Last year we heard from
Joseph Sirinconi of the Carnegie Endowment for National Peace.
He gave us some good advice. He said we need to find a way to
depoliticize our threat assessments to come up with a national
consensus on what the true threats are, and I would encourage
this committee to see if it can't devise a way to get a global
comprehensive threat assessment that is nonpartisan, nonbiased,
removed from political agendas of the moment. This can help
guide our budget, our diplomacy, and our policy.
Mr. Chairman, I think this is right on target. I want to
thank the Chair for having this hearing and indicate to you I
am pleased to be here and pleased that this is a public
process. Thank you.
Mr. Shays. I thank the gentleman. At this time, the Chair
recognizes Mr. Putnam.
Mr. Putnam. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I also want to thank
you for conducting this hearing, and I want to thank you for
your leadership on all of the issues surrounding homeland
security and terrorism and the threat assessment that this
Nation has undergone and needs to continue to undergo, both
prior to and since September the 11th. No other subcommittee
has shown the leadership that you have shown as chairman of
this subcommittee on these issues. No other subcommittee
chairman has been as open or as bipartisan as you have been in
searching for answers.
As the ranking member alluded to, there have been a number
of joint letters, a number of hearings where under your
leadership, you have gone out of your way to reach out to both
sides that we may get to the truth. Unfortunately today the
political agenda was in the driver's seat, and the political
agenda was the message and not the truth and not the search for
the best ways for us to secure our homeland security.
I am very troubled that we have been given an opportunity
to hear from the Office of Homeland Security, and because of
the political agenda and because of political high jinks, we
are now at least two more weeks removed from having any
information. I too am troubled by the reluctance of the Office
to provide testimony to Congress. I would like to have more
information about how the threat assessments are being made. I
would like to have more information on how the budget requests
were arrived at, but unfortunately, I don't have that
opportunity now because the political agenda trumped the search
for the truth today, and more importantly and more
disappointing to me, Mr. Chairman, is that in the greater
political game, and all of us are elected to Congress, none of
us are naive when it comes to politics, but in the greater
political game, the most open, fair and bipartisan chairman in
the Congress was trampled in the stampede, and that is what I
regret the most.
So I look forward to the hearing that remains. I look
forward to the testimony of this panel and the truth that
hopefully is yet to come. Thank you.
Mr. Shays. Thank you. At this time I would like to
recognize the gentlelady from California, Diane Watson.
Ms. Watson. Thank you so much. Mr. Chairman, I too am here
to gain as much information as we can relative to our plan, our
design and our strategy for freeing this country from
terrorism, sneak attacks, and securing the safety of our
Members. However until we are fully informed, we cannot see the
whole picture. It is regrettable that our administration
chooses to not take us along and keep us as well informed as
possible but there are other ways to seek the truth of the
matter and I trust that under your leadership of the committee
we will become knowledgeable. We all need to be partners in our
national security.
I wish Governor Ridge well. I know he suffers from lack of
resources and maybe lack of communication, but I do think
communicating to us that which can be made public will not be a
threat. I understand there are certain things that needed to be
kept away so that our enemies don't know what we are planning
but I think there is a broad overview that could be presented
to us.
So I am hoping as a result of our hearing that we can make
a positive impact on the administration and have somebody come
and tell us what the plans are. We that appropriate need to
understand and need to be part of that general planning. Thank
you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Shays. Thank you very much and thank you for that very
articulate statement.
Mr. Clay.
Mr. Clay. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, we gather
today to review the progress of goals and challenges made by
the executive branch and its departments to develop a
comprehensive threat and risk assessment plan. I think it is
very important to state at the onset that from our
constituents' point of view they do not want their Members of
Congress to make this briefing and investigation a partisan
fight that ostensibly erodes to name calling and finger
pointing.
All of us are in this together. No one can escape or
dispute the reality that there are vulnerabilities in our
domestic assessment because of a lack of defined methodology.
Like the constituents we represent, there are many political,
religious and social persuasions present here today, all coming
together to plan for a safer America through an agreed approach
to homeland security. However, I am deeply troubled by the
administration's ongoing over effort to thwart Congress from
being a part of the solution.
Mr. Chairman, how will we, as Members of Congress, be able
to give an accounting to our constituents of the moneys that
are being requested by various Federal agencies without a
comprehensive risk assessment plan in place? What methods will
Federal agencies use to prioritize counter measures? How large
is the domestic threat? And where will the next threat come
from? How much time will elapse before these questions can be
answered? What or whom is being evaluated?
Like many Americans, I eagerly await Director Ridge's
proposed national strategy in July. Supposedly, it will set
clear objectives with performance measures supported by a
crosscutting Federal budget plan according to the GAO. As the
administration works to formulate its plan to be presented to
the American people, I would suggest that a more expanded
approach to its planning effort occur first. All future
planning regarding domestic security should include Federal,
State and local stakeholders.
I would also suggest, as Senator Lieberman has suggested in
the March 19 letter to Director Ridge, that the following
components be addressed in a comprehensive homeland security
plan, methods to improve communications among the agencies and
between the public and private sectors, methods to better
coordinate response efforts among all responsible entities,
methods to improve the resolution of conflicts between
competing agencies and an improved comprehensive national
strategy that identifies the homeland security responsibilities
of all relative public entities. Then after careful
consultation with other stakeholders, goals should be
realistically set, threats identified and priorities proposed.
And Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to submit my
statement.
Mr. Shays. Thank you very much. Does anybody else seek
recognition, any other statements before we begin? At this
time, let me just deal with--I ask unanimous consent that all
members of the subcommittee be permitted to place an opening
statement in the record and that the record be remain opened
for 3 days for that purpose. Without objection so ordered. I
ask further unanimous consent that all witnesses be permitted
to include their written statements in the record and without
objection, so ordered.
At this time, let me acknowledge the presence of our
witnesses, and then afterwards, I will ask them to stand and
swear you all in. We have Mr. Peter Verga, special assistant
for Homeland Security Office of the Secretary of Defense. We
have Mr. Stephen McHale, Deputy Under Secretary for
Transportation Security, Transportation Security
Administration, Department of Transportation. We have Dr.
William Raub, deputy director, Office of Public Health
Preparedness, Department of Health and Human Services; Mr.
Kenneth 0. Burris, director of Region IV, Atlanta, Federal
Emergency Management Agency; Mr. James Caruso, Deputy Assistant
Director for Counterterrorism, Federal bureau of investigation;
and Mr. Joseph R. Green, Deputy Executive Associate
Commissioner for Field Operations, U.S. Immigration and
Naturalization Service.
I would just point out that before I ask you to stand, we
realize it is a large panel, I'm still going to invite you to
speak for 5 minutes plus. You have that range between 5 to 10.
You don't want to get close to 10, but we want you to say what
you need to say, and then we will seek to ask you questions. I
consider this a very important hearing, and I welcome you here,
and I think we can learn a lot in this process, and at this
time I would ask you to stand and I will swear you in.
Before I begin is there anyone else whom you may seek to
ask advice from? If so, I would ask them to stand as well. Is
there anyone else in your office? OK.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mr. Shays. Note for the record that all of our witnesses
have responded in the affirmative, and I'm making the
assumption we are going to go in the order in which I called.
Are we lined up that way? Let's see. We're going to start with
you, Mr. Verga, and we'll need to hear you and there's a clock
in front of you, just so you know--is it working? Five minutes
and then it will get to red and you'll see the red and you will
know you've got less than 5 minutes to conclude.
Mr. Verga. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Shays. Thank you.
STATEMENTS OF PETER VERGA, SPECIAL ASSISTANT FOR HOMELAND
SECURITY OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE; STEPHEN MCHALE,
DEPUTY, UNDER SECRETARY, TRANSPORTATION SECURITY,
TRANSPORTATION SECURITY ADMINISTRATION, DEPARTMENT OF
TRANSPORTATION; WILLIAM RAUB, DEPUTY DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF PUBLIC
HEALTH PREPAREDNESS, DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES;
KENNETH O. BURRIS, DIRECTOR OF REGION IV, ATLANTA, FEDERAL
EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY; JAMES CARUSO, DEPUTY ASSISTANT
DIRECTOR FOR COUNTER TERRORISM, FEDERAL BUREAU OF
INVESTIGATION; AND JOSEPH R. GREEN, DEPUTY EXECUTIVE ASSOCIATE
COMMISSIONER FOR FIELD OPERATIONS, U.S. IMMIGRATION AND
NATURALIZATION SERVICE
Mr. Verga. Mr. Chairman, members of the subcommittee, thank
you very much for the opportunity to speak with you to the
Department of Defense activities with respect to homeland
security. I will outline the Department's organizing approach
to oversee and conduct homeland defense missions and how DOD
assists and coordinates with the Office of Homeland Security.
Mr. Shays. I'm going to make a request. I can hear you
because you, but just lower the mic a little bit. You have a
cool mic there as well that goes somewhere else, and I want to
make sure they can hear you as well.
Mr. Verga. At the direction of the Secretary of Defense,
the Department is developing organizations that will oversee
policy and conduct operational missions related to homeland
defense and support to civil authorities. Secretary of the Army
White has been managing day-to-day execution of homeland
defense activities on a temporary basis in his capacity as
interim executive agent for Homeland Security. The Deputy
Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, is leading the effort
within the Office of Secretary, to establish an office at an
appropriate level to provide policy guidance for and oversight
of the Department's homeland defense and civil support
activities, and to work with the Office of Homeland Security.
The Deputy Secretary is scheduled to propose organizational
options to the Secretary not later than May 1st of this year.
This office will ensure internal coordination of DOD policy
direction and provide oversight for military activities in
support of homeland defense and civil support. It will also
provide a focused, coherent interface with the Office of
Homeland Security and other agencies of government on these
matters. The schedule calls for the new office to be
established by June 30th of this year, subject, of course, to
any necessary legislation.
Second, the Department is considering a revision of the
unified command plan which is the plan that establishes U.S.
unified commands and assigns to them geographic areas of
responsibilities and missions or functional responsibilities.
The objective of this revision is unity of command in the
conduct of homeland defense missions.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has proposed to
the Secretary the creation of a new combatant command, U.S.
Northern Command. This command would be assigned the mission of
defending the United States against external threats and
providing support to civil authorities. Under the proposal,
Northern Command would assume responsibility for security
cooperation with Canada and Mexico as well. If approved by the
President, the proposal is to activate the command on October
1st of this year. At the same time, the Deputy Secretary is
overseeing preparation of a report mandated in the fiscal year
2002 National Defense Authorization Act.
The Congress has asked the Department, among other things,
to describe its supporting organization within the Office of
the Secretary to address combating terrorism, homeland
security, and sharing of intelligence information on these
activities with other agencies. That report is due at the end
of June of this year.
Previously, the Quadrennial Defense Review recognized that
the highest priority for the U.S. military is the defense of
the U.S. homeland. The Department of Defense is, of course, a
key agent for protecting U.S. sovereignty, territory and the
domestic population and critical defense infrastructures
against external threats and aggression. In addition to its
homeland defense role, the Department is asked, from time to
time, to support a lead Federal agency such as the Federal
Emergency Management Agency in responding to domestic
emergencies such as a major hurricane. The Department stands
ready and willing to assist civil authorities in crisis
situations.
Beyond such emergency situations and other extraordinary
circumstances, the Department of Defense support to U.S. civil
authorities should be called for only when DOD involvement is
appropriate and where a clear end date for the DOD mission is
defined. The Secretary has also stressed the requirement for
other agencies to reimburse the Department of Defense for civil
support missions. An example of this support is what we are
doing with the Treasury and Justice Departments to augment the
border security activities on the northern and southern
borders.
To ensure the Department's readiness for homeland defense
and civil support missions, DOD components also engage in
emergency preparedness, that is, those planning activities
undertaken to ensure DOD processes and procedures and resources
are in place to support the President and the Secretary of
Defense in a national security emergency. These include
planning related to cognitive operations during crisis and
protection of civil critical defense infrastructure.
For the first time since World War II, the Department has
been engaged in the direct defense of the American homeland.
Operation Noble Eagle commenced immediately after the September
11th attacks. It includes combat air patrols over various
domestic locations, other expanded air operations, and command
and control of active component forces. The security of U.S.
domestic air space is, of course, a major concern. Other
support to civil authorities in the United States includes
National Guard's security augmentation at commercial airports,
the support to the Olympics, and the support to the Super Bowl.
As long as terrorist networks continue to recruit new
members, plan and execute attacks against U.S. national
interests or seek weapons of mass destruction, our forces and
Department must remain engaged. Our goals are to thwart
terrorist operations, disrupt their plans, destroy their
networks, and deter others who might consider such attacks on
our Nation. In the coming year, U.S. military forces likely
will be called upon to act either unilaterally or in concert
with others to address terrorist threats in a number of
countries. Our forces will be prepared to do this. Thank you
very much.
Mr. Shays. Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Verga follows:]
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Mr. Shays. Mr. McHale.
Mr. McHale. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Shays,
Congressman Kucinich, and members of the subcommittee, I am
pleased to appear before you today on behalf of Secretary
Mineta and Under Secretary John Magaw, to discuss the
Department of Transportation's progress in improving security
for airports and seaports as well as other parts of the
transportation infrastructure. The Aviation and Transportation
Security Act established tight deadlines for the Transportation
Security Administration to implement the enhanced aviation
security measures. We have met all of the law's deadlines to
date and are on track to meet all of the remaining deadlines.
Going forward, we will be using a wide variety of innovative
approaches to check baggage screening using explosive detection
technology, improved ways to run the passenger screening
process, and innovative procurement and recruitment strategies
using all of the tools that Congress has given us.
On February 17 the TSA took over all civil aviation
security functions performed by the FAA and responsibility from
the airlines for passenger and baggage screening. TSA is using
private screening companies until Federal security screeners
can be hired, trained and assigned to all U.S. airport security
screening check points. We have hired the first of tens of
thousands of new employees to screen passengers and baggage at
429 airports nationwide, and we fully expect to be able to
certify to Congress on November 19th of this year that we have
complied with the Act's requirement to carry out all passenger
and baggage screening using Federal personnel.
Our Federal security directors will be strong front line
managers who will bring Federal authority directly to the point
of service, the airport. An area of port security following
September 11th, the Coast Guard refocused resources to protect
high consequence targets in the marine environment including
port facilities, critical bridges, and other infrastructure. In
addition, Secretary Mineta established the National
Infrastructure Security Committee [NISC], a coordinated
interagency effort to address transportation security. An
analysis of our transportation system in the aftermath of the
events of September 11th clearly laid bare the susceptibility
of container shipments as delivery system for terrorist
weapons.
The Department, through TSA and the Coast Guard, in
cooperation with the Customs Service, is making every effort to
ensure that the security of cargo including containerized cargo
as it moves throughout America's seaports and the intermodal
transportation system.
The struggle against terrorism is a truly national
struggle. Federal, State and local government agencies, as well
as the private sector, must work seamlessly together. TSA and
all of DOT's modal administrations are engaged in extensive
outreach campaigns to all of the transportation industry. We
are also working with law enforcement and intelligence
officials at all levels to protect and defend against future
terrorist attacks and to effectively manage incidents whenever
and wherever they should occur.
In meeting our transportation security mission and helping
us coordinate other intelligence needs, we will rely on the new
Transportation Security Oversight Board, which met for the
first time in January. That board is composed of
representatives from a number of Federal agencies, including
the intelligence community. In addition, TSA is working
coordination with the Office of Homeland Security on a regular
basis as it develops national homeland security strategy. The
TSA, on behalf of DOT, is charged with security for all modes
of transportation and a focus on aviation must not slow the
TSA's pace in addressing the security needs of other
transportation modes. Across every mode we must continue to
develop measures to increase the protection of critical
transportation assets, addressing cargo as well as passenger
transportation. We will maintain a commitment to measure
performance relentlessly, building a security organization that
provides world class transportation security and world class
customer service.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman and I will be happy to answer any
questions that you or the subcommittee may have.
Mr. Shays. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. McHale follows:]
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Mr. Shays. Doctor, I've learned that if you give 10
minutes, you usually get five and when you give five you
usually get 10.
Mr. Raub. I'll try to keep of the pattern, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Shays. OK. You have 10 minutes.
Mr. Raub. Thank you, sir, and members of the subcommittee.
I welcome this opportunity to apprise this subcommittee about
the activities of the Department of Health and Human Services
related to protecting the United States from terrorist attacks.
I have a short oral statement and with your permission, Mr.
Chairman, I'll submit my written statement for the record.
Mr. Shays. Thank you.
Mr. Raub. Mr. Chairman, your letter of February 28 to
Secretary Thompson listed six topics to be addressed during
this hearing. I will address each briefly. First is
coordination with the Office of Homeland Security, or OHS. HHS
coordinates its antiterrorism activities closely with OHS.
Secretary Thompson, Deputy Secretary Allen, and Dr. D.A.
Henderson, director of the recently created Office of Public
Health Preparedness, are in frequent contact with OHS Director
Ridge and his senior multidepartment activities, as well as
specific HHS initiatives. Deputy Director Allen participates
routinely as a member of the Office of Homeland Security's
deputies committee, which is the primary senior level mechanism
for interdepartmental communication and coordination.
Several other HHS senior staff participate in more
specialized interdepartmental groups called policy coordinating
committees that support the work of the deputies committee.
Second is the establishment of HHS program priorities. The
priorities for the use of HHS counterterrorism funds are the
result of the confluence of the priorities articulated by the
President in his budget request and the priorities specified by
the Congress in the regular, and supplemental appropriations
for fiscal year 2002.
In general, HHS is directing its investments toward
enhanced preparedness for bioterrorism, other outbreaks of
infectious disease and other public health threats and
emergencies with antibioterrorism enhancements at the local,
State and national levels as job No. 1. Guided by this
strategic framework, HHS's primary emphasis areas are as
follows: One, enhancing State and local preparedness; two,
improving HHS response assets to support municipalities and
States as needed; third, developing and procuring safer and
more effective vaccines against smallpox and anthrax; fourth,
developing better diagnostic tests, drugs and vaccines for the
microorganisms most likely to be used by terrorists; and fifth,
reinforcing and augmenting border coverage of all imported
products, particularly foods through increased inspectional and
laboratory resources and coordination with the U.S. Customs
Service.
HHS is striving for measurable achievements in all of these
areas. For example, recently awarded cooperative agreements to
enhance the terrorism related capabilities of health
departments and hospitals feature particular critical
benchmarks, critical capacities and other specific objectives
that the States and other eligible entities are expected to
achieve. Third is coordination with other agencies. HHS has had
a long-standing role with respect to the Federal response plan,
working closely with the Federal emergency management agency,
the Department of Justice and other agencies as appropriate.
In particular, under the Federal response plan, HHS is the
lead agency within the Federal Government for addressing the
medical and public health consequences of all manner of mass
casualty events, whether terrorist induced, accidental or
naturally occurring. This responsibility is codified as
emergency support function No. 8. HHS also is working to
coordinate planning, training and consequence management
actions at the State and local levels.
The recently awarded cooperative agreements to enhance the
terrorism relevant capabilities of health departments and
hospitals across the Nation emphasize statewide and regional
planning, training of health professionals and other
responders, and medical and public health preparedness in
response to mass casualty events. As work under the cooperative
agreements progress, HHS will collaborate with its State and
municipal partners in identifying exemplary practices in these
and other preparedness areas and promoting common approaches
wherever appropriate.
The fourth topic was private sector feedback. The private
sector seems able and eager to help advance the HHS priorities.
In the vaccine development area for example, representatives of
the pharmaceutical industry have stressed that to the extent
that the Federal Government can provide its vaccine
requirements and assure upfront that the requisite funds will
be available, the industry will meet the challenge.
Thanks to the President's leadership and congressional
appropriations for fiscal year 2002, this currently is the case
for the HHS effort to develop and acquire a sufficient quantity
of a new smallpox vaccine to protect the entire U.S.
population. HHS is hopeful for a similar scenario to be
realized for a new anthrax vaccine if the advanced development
work during fiscal year 2002 is successful and if the
President's request for $250 million for anthrax vaccine
acquisition in fiscal year 2003 is approved by the Congress.
The fifth topic is other actions to facilitate the
development of new medical products. HHS-funded research,
primarily through the National Institutes of Health, is
attempting to produce new knowledge that will enable the
development of new or improved antiterrorism capabilities.
Foremost among these is the rapidly expanding array of studies
in microbial genomics. By sequencing the genomes of the various
species and strains of the microbes most likely to be used by
terrorists and by performing comparative analyses of these
genomes and their protein products, scientists hope to achieve
fresh leads for the development of new or improved diagnostic
devices, drugs and vaccines.
Moreover, such research often referred to as comparative
microbial genomics and proteomics, also may yield new insights
into the genetic basis for why different species of microbes or
even different strains of the same species differ from one
another, often substantially, in either their virulence or
their susceptibility to antibiotics. The results of such
research not only could spur advanced development and
commercialization of new diagnostic, therapeutic and
prophylactic products, but also could enable more informed
preventative and therapeutic strategies using existing
products.
Finally, with respect to other necessary steps, HHS
recognizes that much remains to be done to ensure our Nation is
adequately prepared for bioterrorism, other outbreaks of
infectious disease, and other public health threats and
emergencies.
For example, a robust infrastructure for infectious disease
surveillance will require continuous improvement over the next
several years. Moreover, the development and commercialization
of new diagnostics, drugs and vaccines almost inevitably are
complex scientific and technical endeavors and rarely proceed
on a predictable course or time line. Nevertheless, despite
these formidable challenges and uncertainties, HHS believes
that its fundamental antiterrorism strategy is sound and notes
that it is already yielding solid incremental enhancement in
local, State and national capabilities to ensure homeland
security. The major challenge at present is to invest in
enhanced local, State, and national capabilities as rapidly yet
responsibly as possible. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Shays. Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Raub follows:]
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Mr. Shays. Mr. Burris, you're next. Just refresh me, your
district is Atlanta, but how many States does it include?
Mr. Burris. The 8 southeastern States from Mississippi over
to North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky.
Mr. Shays. Great. Thank you very much.
Mr. Burris. Yes, sir. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and
members of the subcommittee. On behalf of Director Allbaugh,
I'd like to extend his regrets for being unable to be here
today, but I'm more than happy to be here to discuss FEMA's
efforts in homeland security. December 2000, the Gilmore
Commission issued its second report, stressing the importance
of giving States and local first responders a single point of
contact for Federal assistance in training, exercises and
equipment. The third Gilmore Commission report included
recommendations to address the lack of coordination including
proposals to consolidate the Federal grant program information
and application process as well as to include the first
responder community in participating in Federal preparedness
programs.
These findings and recommendations have been echoed in
numerous other commission reports and GAO reports as well, and
by first responder community and State and local officials.
FEMA's role in responding to terrorist attacks was well
established before September 11th. On May 8, 2001, the
President tasked Director Allbaugh with creating the Office of
National Preparedness within FEMA. The mission of the Office of
National Preparedness is to coordinate and facilitate Federal
efforts to assist State and local first responders as well as
emergency management organizations with planning, equipment,
training, and exercises.
The goal is to build and sustain their capability to
respond to any emergency or disaster, including a terrorist
incident, weapon of mass destruction or any other natural or
man-made hazard. By creating the Office of Homeland Security,
the President took an important first step to improve the
Nation's capabilities to respond to and to coordinate Federal
programs and activities aimed at combating terrorism.
FEMA works closely with the Office of Homeland Security, as
well as other Federal agencies, to identify and develop the
most effective ways to build and enhance the overall domestic
capability for response to terrorist attack. In January, the
President took another important step to support the efforts of
first responders to prepare for incidences of terrorism. The
First Responder Initiative, which would include $3.5 billion
distributed to State and local jurisdictions, will give them
the critically needed funds to plan, purchase equipment, train
and exercise personnel to respond to a terrorist incident.
These grants to be administered by our Office of National
Preparedness will be based on lessons learned by the first
responder community of September 11th. These lessons will be
incorporated as national standards for the interoperability and
compatibility of training, exercises, equipment and mutual aid.
The grants coupled with these standards will balance the need
for both flexibility that is sought for by States and local
government and the accountability at the State and local level.
FEMA's Office of National Preparedness will work with other
Federal agencies and the States to coordinate terrorism-related
first responder programs in order to simplify and unify the
national response system. FEMA is well prepared and equipped to
respond to terrorist events.
Our goal is to ensure that the Federal Government and its
partners provide support to disaster victim, first responders,
and local government. We are positioned to move forward in
these initiatives in a meaningful way and look forward to
working with our other Federal partners, State and local
partners in helping our Nation prepare for the future. It's
critical that we require--this requires a commitment of all of
our partners working together to ensure its success and if by
doing so we can accomplish the greatest achievement of all for
our country and that's a Nation prepared.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Shays. Thank you, Mr. Burris.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Burris follows:]
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Mr. Shays. Mr. Caruso.
Mr. Caruso. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much, members of
this subcommittee. With your permission, I would enter my
written statement into the record and just make a few points.
Mr. Shays. You can do that even without my permission.
Mr. Caruso. The United States faces a serious threat. The
No. 1----
Mr. Shays. Could you move your mic just a little close
closer to you. Thank you.
Mr. Caruso. We face a serious threat. The No. 1 threat is
radical international jihad movement, and the No. 1 group
within that movement is al Qaeda. We place at the doorstep of
al Qaeda the following brutal horrendous attacks on American
interests, both at home and abroad now: East Africa bombings of
August 1998 we place at that doorstep; the bombing of USS Cole
in October 2000 we place at the al Qaeda doorstep; and the
September 11th attacks in New York and Washington against our
country we place at the doorstep of al Qaeda.
The primary tactic of the radical international Jihad
movement is attacks of large scale, high profile, and high
casualty. A second category of international terrorists more
clearly defined in some respects would be Palestinian Hamas,
Hezbollah and other organizations. Director Mueller has changed
the mission of the FBI. When he briefs the President, which is
on a daily basis, the President of the United States does not
ask Director Mueller how many people have you arrested today
and how many people have you investigated today and prosecuted?
He asks what have you done in the past 24 hours and what
will you do in the next 24 hours to prevent a terrorist
attack--a terrorist attack against the United States?
What flows from a mission change is new thinking.
Information sharing and gathering is crucial to that success.
Under Director Mueller's leadership, we have changed, we have
used existing channels of communication with Federal, State and
locals, local police and public safety agencies in a way we had
not leveraged before. We have also identified new methods
because new thinking brings new methods of communicating
information to our partners at the Federal, State and local as
well as foreign, and when you share information, you also
gather it.
We're also placing a premium on training of individuals
worldwide to solidify the kinds of partnerships that we need to
successfully win this war. No agency, no country can do this
alone. Priorities for our--for funding purposes for the FBI
with reference to the counter-terrorism program, our priorities
match the priority targets of the radical international jihad
movement as well as other international terrorist groups, and
with those targets, we plan to apply the funds that the
Congress gives us in areas that support what I would call a
360-degree attack against those targets, ranging from on ground
investigation here in the United States to investigation
overseas with other members of the U.S. intelligence community
as well as our foreign partners and a variety of other areas
which we can certainly discuss.
In conclusion, September 11th caused more casualties than
any other terrorist act. I also add that terrorists have many
different faces, just not one kind of face, that the 19
hijackers who perpetrated this attack were very disciplined,
and as a result of terrorists having many faces, and the
discipline that these 19 exhibited, it's a very big challenge
for the FBI and the U.S. Government.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Shays. Thank you, Mr. Caruso.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Caruso follows:]
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Mr. Shays. Lots of opportunity for questions in your
statement that was not delivered, in other words, your whole
statement, and I appreciate your entire statement and I
appreciate your summary. Look forward to asking questions.
Mr. Greene, you're going to close up and then we're going
to get to all of you in our questions.
Mr. Greene. Thank you.
Mr. Shays. By the way, I just want to thank again your
willingness to participate in a full dialog, because there will
be some exchanges, and I was feeling a little guilty in
thinking you have to listen to the testimony of some of your
colleagues. I don't always like to listen to the testimony of
all of my colleagues. Sometimes it's a mutual thing here but--
--
Mr. Kucinich. I love to listen to you, Mr. Chairman. I just
want that on the record.
Mr. Shays. But I think it's important that you hear each
other, isn't it? So there's some good to this. So excuse me.
Mr. Greene.
Mr. Greene. Thank you. I will be brief, Mr. Chairman. I'd
like to thank you and the members of the committee for the
privilege of being able to talk today about the----
Mr. Shays. I'm going to ask you to lower the mic. That's
the one to your left, the one that magnifies----
Mr. Greene. OK. And this is the one that picks----
Mr. Shays. So use the one to your left and just slide it in
an angle that way.
Mr. Greene. All right. Is that better, sir?
Mr. Shays. That's good.
Mr. Greene. OK. Thank you. It's a privilege for me today to
talk to you today about the--the work of literally thousands of
dedicated men and women in the Immigration Service, and what
they're doing to set new priorities and strengthen our border
security in connection with the overall effort to enhance our
national security. Since the terrorist attacks, the INS has
taken a number of steps on its own initiative to increase
domestic security, and some of these we've already discussed
with this committee.
We dispatched over 300 border patrol agents to major
airports in the immediate aftermath of the attack to increase
security at airports. We committed 50 percent of our special
agent resources and maintained that level of commitment for the
first 3 months after the attacks in order to support the FBI in
their investigation of these attacks and auxiliary matters that
grew out of that.
This occurred within the framework of the Joint Terrorism
Task Force and of the recently newly established antiterrorism
task forces that the--that the Attorney General had
established. We also detailed an additional contingent of
border patrol agents to the northern border to provide
additional security along that border. More importantly, very
quickly after the attacks, we coordinated with a number of
important agencies to increase the--reduce, rather, the
vulnerability of our visa entrance process and the process by
which people come to the United States.
With the Department of State, we have expanded the
screening process for overseas consular officers in connection
with the visa issuance processing. We have also made--the
Department of State has also made available to us temporary
visa application data that is now available to INS inspectors
at the port of entry where they do their work. With the
Department of Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control, we've
assisted in the identification and freezing of assets, a
project of which you all have widely heard.
But our most productive partnership to date has been with
the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We've worked with the FBI
on leads that have arisen directly out of the attacks
themselves. The intelligence and information that we gathered
with respect to movement of people in and out of the United
States was of material assistance to that investigation. We
have interviewed with the FBI and with State and local law
enforcement agencies, people who have been identified as
potential witnesses that would be useful not only in the direct
investigation, but also in our counterterrorism efforts.
With the Department of State, we've taken steps to tighten
our procedures regarding passengers traveling without visas
into the United States and also tightened our refugee
processing. We have worked under the umbrella of the
antiterrorism task forces with State and local agencies and the
FBI in an--an initiative that is currently directed at
identifying, locating, arresting and removing from the U.S.
people against whom final orders have been pending for years.
We have worked with the Department of--with the Office of
the Inspector General in the Department of the Interior, with
the Department of Labor and with the FBI on an initiative
called Operation Tarmac, which was ordered to be begun within
days of the attacks. This is where agents of the Immigration
Service working with FBI, working with the Department of
Transportation, have identified employers whose employees have
access to secure areas of major airports and other critical
national infrastructure locations.
To date, we have looked at over 800 employers. We have
examined records pertaining to over 200,000 people. We have
arrested over 100 people in connection with this initiative on
various charges including immigration violation, and that
effort is continuing. We have worked with the FBI and national
security agencies under the framework of the interagency
working group, an arm in the Department of Justice that is
responsible for looking at international smuggling and we have
identified and are working on a number of significant law
enforcement cases that will materially affect the security--the
national security of the United States.
Finally, I'd like to say that the INS has had to redefine
its priorities and look overseas as well in ways that we have
not had to before, and frankly this is the critical area where
the INS has--has worked successfully, and well with the Office
of Homeland Security.
As you know, the Commissioner of the Immigration Service
proceeded to Ottawa several months--rather in December to work
with the Canadians on the groundwork which led to the Ridge-
Manley document. Our Commissioner accompanied Governor Ridge to
Mexico to initiate and participate in discussions there with
respect to border security.
We are in fact stepping forward to reset our priorities in
terms of extending the ambit of our concern outside of the
ports of entry at airports, outside of the port of entry at
land borders, and to the places where people are originating to
come to this country, and we think that there is great promise
in these bilateral negotiations with Mexico and Canada, not
simply with respect to the national security interest, but also
with respect to some of the more festering problems that we
have faced in the national migration discussion that we've had
in this country for more than 10 years.
That concludes my remarks, Mr. Chairman and Members. I'll
be happy to take your questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Greene follows:]
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Mr. Shays. Thank you very much. Let me say that I'm going
to start out with Mr. Putnam and then go to Mr. Kucinich. We're
going to do 10-minute questioning. When a Member asks you a
question and you ask a question of one of you and you want to
jump in, you know, just try to stick your finger up and let
that Member know that you would also like to make a
contribution. It's their discretion on whether they want to use
their time in calling you forward, but I would hope the
Members, given that we have as much time as we need, would
allow for that interaction.
You all are involved interacting in some way. We need to
get--to see how this is working. We'll have a number of
questions. We'll get right to it and, Mr. Putnam, you have 10
minutes.
Mr. Putnam. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Greene, it has
been not exactly a chamber of commerce a couple of weeks for
your agency. Tell me, if you would, if the INS has run the
names of the other 17 terrorists to ascertain whether or not
they have documents pending within the INS.
Mr. Greene. Yes, sir, they are and they are doing it a
second time, and I think we're working a third time now.
Mr. Putnam. And under the Patriot Act, there was also a
provision that prohibited INS from issuing visas to relatives
of known terrorists. What steps have been taken to comply with
this provision?
Mr. Greene. It's my understanding that enabling regulations
are in the process of being worked on that. I don't have a date
for you, but--as to when that will be done. I'll be happy to
provide you with the status report on that effort.
Mr. Putnam. What is being done in the meantime?
Mr. Greene. Well, right now, as the commissioner has
testified before the Judiciary Committee last Tuesday, we have
a complete freeze on all of the documents, the I-20's, for
example, which were the issues. All of the applications that
have been filed with the INS that are pending with the INS and
that will be filed are being run through our IBIS system which
contains our lookout system before they are adjudicated. There
are a number of other steps specifically with respect to
schools. Some of the loopholes that we--that our analysis of
this event disclosed, such as allowing students to begin their
course of studies before the change of status had been
approved, have now been closed. You will not be able to study
in the United States, if you're already here without the change
of status having been officially adjudicated, and I will tell
you that the effort to tighten the process of visa application
is ongoing and continuing.
Mr. Putnam. Thank you. Dr. Raub, Director Ridge spoke at a
food safety summit on March 14th and indicated that one of
their priorities was to consolidate the functions of food
safety and inspection. At various times Secretary Veneman and
Secretary Thompson have each indicated that one of our key
vulnerabilities is in our food safety system. We have--if you
make a cheese pizza--if you have a cheese pizza factory, you
have one agency inspect you. If you throw pepperoni on it,
another agency inspects you. When we go to our airports and
seaports, if we're bringing in fruits and vegetables, you have
one set of inspectors. If you're bringing in meats, you have a
different. How far along is that planning, and please elaborate
on that consolidation plan.
Mr. Raub. I've not been involved directly, sir, in the
details of those discussions, so I can't provide more than some
very general knowledge. I know that the two Secretaries have
been in precisely those discussions with the staff and the
Executive Office of the President. In the short run, the
emphasis has been on strengthening the respective capabilities
in our department and the Department of Agriculture, in our
case, through the Food and Drug Administration by expanding the
number of inspectors and seeking broader authorization for
inspection capabilities, focusing on especially the ports and
other activities.
I know the discussions will continue about the pros and
cons of consolidation of those regulatory structures, but the
objective is the same in any case, and that is to strengthen
and ensure that our highly centralized system of food
production and distribution is not vulnerable.
Mr. Putnam. Is there a specific objective that any of the
agencies have outlined where we're going to move the number of
cargo containers inspected from 3 percent to 15 percent or from
12 percent to 70 percent? Is there any specific, tangible,
measurable, quantifiable goal that we can view the homeland
security budget and the consolidation plans and the added
emphasis on information and detection and be able to measure
progress?
Mr. Raub. I don't have those numbers with me, sir. I'll be
glad to provide them.
The FDA has as part of its budget development and
justification laid out the goals it believes it can achieve
with the expanded work force of inspectors and with the new
authorities.
Mr. Putnam. I'd like to--very much to see that. I look
forward to receiving it.
Mr. Burris, the--one of the key issues that this
subcommittee explored long before September 11th in its
discussions over homeland security and the competing
legislative proposals involved improved coordination and
communication and standardization of equipment,
interoperability of equipment among local first responders,
among the myriad of State and Federal agencies. What has been
done to standardize our communications equipment, our
decontamination procedures, our detection equipment, and what
is--what is the blueprint for progress on that?
Mr. Burris. Well, our FEMA IT directorate is undertaking
the responsibility to provide some type of standardization
within the communications arena. There's a lot--there's
several, you know, manufacturers. It has to do a lot with the
type of spectrum that's available to public safety users for
their radios. While, you know, I doubt that we'll ever be in
the business of telling a first responder community or telling
a local community which radios they're going to buy, we can go
about the business of identifying the specifications of what
that equipment is, and we're working with the FCC to do just
that. Some of the other compatibility issues revolve around
working within a common incident command system or--and issues
in that arena, and we're working on that.
There happens to be a lot of consensus-based standards in
this country, and they're voluntarily used around the country.
Part of what our responsibility will be is to encourage wider
adoption of those consensus-based standards by local
communities and the States.
Mr. Putnam. Mr. Verga, there have been reports that prior
to the September 11th attacks, at least one of the terrorists
involved in the flights that--in the flight that struck the
Pentagon was known by the CIA to have met with a group of
Malaysian--a known terrorist organization in Malaysia. He then
entered the United States before that information was
transferred to the INS and subsequently to the FBI. Have we
successfully cleared the hurdles of intelligence-sharing, and
have we improved the communication between agencies with
primarily nondomestic responsibility and those with domestic
responsibility, or are there still jurisdictional barriers that
are clouding up our communications capacity?
Mr. Verga. Let me say, first of all, I have no personal
knowledge of that particular incident that you--I reported, and
of course the director of Central Intelligence would probably
be better in a position to address the overall coordination
among the intelligence community.
I will say from the Department of Defense's perspective, we
recognize it as a challenge, and we're working very hard to be
able to get the information, and I would differentiate between
information and intelligence, because what is needed at the
local level to deal with problems is the information that--for
example, the State patrolman needs to know that an individual
is somebody who is on a watch list that, when he stops him for
a traffic stop, he needs to make further followup. That can be
differentiated from the source and the method by which we
obtain that information, and the Department of Defense is
working as part of the intelligence community to be able to
develop a system that will allow that information to get
transmitted down to the level that it needs. We're making some
progress. We have--we do have a long way to go.
There are issues of classification of information. There
are issues of how do you transmit the information over secure
means, and we are working with that. For example, during the
Olympics in Salt Lake City, we solved the problem essentially
by establishing a classified facility on one floor of the major
headquarters used for Olympic security, where defense and all
intelligence information was funneled into it, analyzed, and
then sanitized to put out to be used during the security
operation.
Mr. Putnam. Mr. Caruso, perhaps the FBI would like to add
to that.
Mr. Caruso. Thank you very much. I'll go back to the phrase
that was used earlier, new thinking, as an effect that ripples
out well beyond this so simple a phrase. The U.S. Patriot Act
is one example of the Congress's leadership in fostering
agencies that share information. In the U.S. Patriot Act, the
prohibition of sharing Federal grand jury information was
lifted. That allowed us and the FBI and others in the law
enforcement community to share information with the
intelligence community. It's something that wasn't--existed
before, and that was an important--an important--important door
to open. So from a legislative point of view, that's something
that was really very helpful.
New thinking also goes beyond--it goes into policy, and
people look--struggling with an issue and coming about it in a
new way. For example, through the National Law Enforcement
Telecommunications System, it's called NLETS, it's the way the
FBI communicates with other Federal agencies, as well as police
departments across this country. Shortly after September 11th,
we with the U.S. intelligence community made a conscious
decision to take classified information and declassify it and
send it out through the National Law Enforcement
Telecommunications System, NLETS, and that goes to thousands of
police departments and public safety departments across this
land, reaching hundreds of thousands of policemen and public
safety men and women. Before September 11th, that did not
occur. After September 11th, that kind of new thinking brought
on that kind of information-sharing, and information-sharing is
a two-way street, because when you share information, you're
providing essentially leads for policemen and women, and you
get information back, and it's a two-way system.
So there are just two examples of some of the new thinking
that occurred, one because of legislative leadership, and the
other because people sat back and thought anew.
Mr. Putnam. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Shays. Thank you very much. At this time I would
recognize the ranking member, Mr. Kucinich, for 10 minutes.
Mr. Kucinich. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, members of
the subcommittee. As I'm sure all of us would agree, democracy
and accountability thrive on openness and universal access to
information, and that's why this committee has held over two
dozen open hearings on terrorism. We've heard from virtually
every agency involved with counterterrorism. We've had
experts--panels testify. We've sought advice from the GAO. And
one constant theme through our witnesses that we've heard over
and over is that we need to put one job above all others, and
that is a job of conducting a comprehensive and analytical
assessment of whatever threats or concerns that our country
might face. And it's been suggested over and over that without
this assessment, we have no way of knowing what the priorities
should be, that our strategies wouldn't be fully informed, that
our budget may not be key to what might be the most dangerous
concerns we face. So we've had this repeated recommendation,
conduct a comprehensive threat assessment, figure out
priorities based on the assessment, craft a strategy to address
these priorities and link up the budget. And as I indicated
earlier, our committee actually sent a bipartisan letter to the
President detailing our findings, recommending that the
office's first priority be to conduct a comprehensive
assessment.
I'll ask Mr. Caruso, are you familiar with that issue of a
comprehensive threat assessment?
Mr. Caruso. Mr. Kucinich, I know that there is an interest
in creating and developing a national threat assessment. That's
as best as I can frame that.
Mr. Kucinich. Did the FBI actually begin one a few years
ago, like 1999? Was the FBI involved in starting to put
together a threat assessment?
Mr. Caruso. The FBI has conducted a number of different
threat assessments. There was an effort in--I know that in
2001. It may have started in 1999. I do not know that. But in
2001, there was an effort to put together a national threat
assessment, and as it was progressing, the September 11th
attacks occurred, and suddenly, as you can--as you understand,
everyone moved to that.
Mr. Kucinich. So that was--that assessment by the FBI was
basically put aside. Is that----
Mr. Caruso. Yes. The FBI is--since September 11th, which is
the timeframe I can speak to, since September 11th, we have an
ongoing national threat assessment, and you see that ongoing,
national threat warnings, and ultimately you see it in the
proposal that Governor Ridge has made with reference to his
national threat warning that is now out for public comment. So
that would be an ongoing threat assessment.
Overall, the FBI has conducted about 85 or so threat
assessments that are event-specific or site-specific. For
example, they will do a threat assessment when Pope John was
here in 1999, and in the midwestern Ohio. We would do one--we
also did one for, of course, the 2002 Olympics. So the FBI's
overall consistent thrust has been threat assessments that are
based either on an event or a specific site, not national----
Mr. Kucinich. Right. The one that--the one that started a
few years ago was an attempt, from what I understand, anyhow,
that there was an attempt to establish a generalized
assessment, and I understand what you have told this committee,
in that the FBI has been dealing with some of these things on a
case-by-case basis, but generalized, you did--you did at some
point start a generalized threat assessment that was----
Mr. Caruso. Yes. I also believe that a generalized threat
assessment is too broad for the kind of dynamic country that we
have, in the sense of size and complexity, to have much meaning
to it even before it's published, because things do change. So
my own personal opinion and professional opinion is that a
national threat assessment is not quite as valuable a tool,
that you could turn into actual--actionable items.
Mr. Kucinich. Yes. What I'd like to know, I mean, just--and
let me say that I appreciate the work of the FBI, that I feel
that the FBI has done everything it can to help this country,
and I think generally the people of this country appreciate it.
What we're trying to figure out here is that how do you know
your priorities if you don't have an assessment, how do you
develop a strategy? You know, because we don't have anybody
from the Office of Homeland Security here who could help guide
us. Does the FBI have any recommendations that you might want
to address to the public as to what steps might be taken to be
able to assure the public that the big picture, which is really
what this office is about with this $38 billion budget, that
the big picture is going to be addressed?
Mr. Caruso. I need to defer to Governor Ridge for the
bigger picture. All I can speak for is the FBI, and what I
would say is we do know the No. 1 threat that faces the United
States and it's al Qaeda in the terrorism area, and we know
that because we have investigations that--of the East Africa
bombings in 1998, the USS Cole in 2000, and now the September
11, 2001. Those investigations and information that we've
gotten from our partners in the intelligence community and that
partnership is crucial to success, as well as our partners
overseas, point to al Qaeda, which is the No. 1--the No. 1
terrorist that the United States--threat that the United States
faces so it's the investigation and the sharing of information
that leads us to the conclusion, and I think it's shared by the
U.S. Government, that al Qaeda is the No. 1 group that we need
to be concerned about. That's not to the exclusion of others,
but that group, that sometimes amorphous group, has caused
extraordinary damage to us, as we all know.
Mr. Kucinich. Well, I thank the gentleman for his answer
and I just want to point out that I--you know, as you said, you
can't answer for Governor Ridge. I respect that. We're talking
about two different things. One is that--the very sharp
specific focus of the response of the FBI to whatever
challenges come up--you come up with a plan, you learn about
something--as opposed to just a general broader picture.
So I respect that you can focus on that one and respond
well as you did.
Now you indicated that al Qaeda is not the only problem we
face. One of the things that I thought was instructive in your
testimony was you cited a number of groups, including--in
addition to al Qaeda, you cite extremist groups such as Hamas,
Hezbollah, al-Gama'a, al-Islamiyya, and then you also mention
the Irish Republican Army. In all of the hearings I've been in,
this is the first time that I've heard a reference to the Irish
Republican Army in the context of activities in the United
States. I guess what I'm looking for is a response as to how--
it's the first time I've heard of that. Would you like to tell
this committee what the--what kind of activity the IRA has in
this country?
Mr. Caruso. Our interest in the IRA is--in this country is
in the area of garnering funds to support violence overseas,
garnering funds for--funds for--from individuals here in the
United States and also weapons, of procuring weapons here and
shipping them back overseas to support a violent cause. We have
examples of that--an example of that is in the--in our Miami
division in Florida a year or so ago, maybe a bit more, but
it's primarily fund-raising to support violence, as well as
weapons.
Mr. Kucinich. Yes. Again, it's the first time that I had
heard that. So under the Patriot Act, then, if someone had
given funds to any of these organizations, they then would be
subject to prosecution. Is that correct?
Mr. Caruso. I can't speak exactly to the Patriot Act. The
case I'm talking about occurred before the Patriot Act, so we
were able to use existing laws that were there to prosecute
these individuals.
Mr. Kucinich. You're talking about something in the past,
then, not something going on right now?
Mr. Caruso. Not--I'd rather stick--I'd rather remain with
the case that I cited, because that's been through the public
and the judicial processes, etc. Etc. is not the word I want to
use, but----
Mr. Kucinich. I think I get the gist of what you're saying
there, and I respect that.
I'd like to--how much time do I have, Mr.----
Mr. Shays. Probably about--how much time is left? 40
seconds. You've got a good minute.
Mr. Kucinich. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much for this
opportunity to ask these questions, and I'll yield back. It's
OK. Thanks.
Mr. Shays. At this time I would recognize Ms. Watson.
Ms. Watson. I'm going to yield some of my time back,
because I can't spend the whole 10 minutes, but what I've
noticed is that the further we are away from the attack sites,
the quicker people are getting back to their regular routine. I
represent an area that abuts the airport, LAX, and we have gone
after airport security with a great passion, but what I see on
the West Coast could be a threat to our waterways. We get water
from the Colorado River, from the dam and so on. Our
transportation system may be a big tanker full of high octane
gasoline running directly into a wall, that suicide mission.
Our borders and our seaports. Just anyone along the panel,
maybe the FBI, would want to comment on what are our short-
range priorities and long-range priorities in addressing these
various systems? That's what is troubling to me. When I go back
to my district and hold one of these forums, they want to know
where the nearest bunker is, and do we have water there and
what kind of food will be there, because they expect terrorism
will continue, this time on the East--West Coast. So can
someone respond?
Mr. McHale. The Transportation Department has got a number
of different programs that address some of your concerns. We do
not deal with the water supply. So I'll leave that to one of my
fellow panelists. But on the--on port security, we have a
number of programs, including some in Los Angeles and Long
Beach that address where we place sea marshals on ships,
particularly ships carrying hazardous cargo, and the sea
marshals stay on that ship as it comes into port to make sure
that it remains secure and to protect the navigational stations
on that ship.
In addition, you mentioned tanker trucks carrying hazardous
cargo. Our Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has
conducted almost 40,000 visits to companies that have hazardous
material licenses and has talked to those companies about
safety measures that they should take, reporting a suspicious
activity, checking their records and licenses of various
individuals employed by those companies. And in the course of
those, they referred over 100 cases to the FBI.
It's a vast system. The transportation system is a huge
system, and we're trying to look at it in a comprehensive way,
but we really have to leverage all of the resources of the
State and local governments, as well as the Federal Government,
and frankly the private sector. The responsibility is very
broad. The airlines and the airports have very much stepped up
to the plate. We've gotten terrific competition--terrific
cooperation from the trucking industry and the railroad
industry. The broader we work with them and communicate with
them, I think the stronger we're going to be. TSA is only about
2 months old, so we've got a long way to go, but the other
administration modes--modal administration of Transportation
have been doing a terrific job outreaching to their specific
transportation modes, trying to raise awareness and to give
them appropriate points of contact within the Federal
Government to report suspicious activity.
Ms. Watson. Since our country is so vast, so broad, have we
considered a regional approach to securing these different
systems and a coordinated effort here, maybe homeland security?
I do know there's been difficulty communicating across the
various department lines, but would it not be better in the
nooks and crannies of this country to work out a plan that
would address these categories I just mentioned?
Mr. Caruso. Ms. Watson.
Ms. Watson. Please.
Mr. Caruso. Governor Ridge's proposed homeland security
advisory system is out for public comment, to improve it if it
can be, but it lays out a foundation of warning. And if you
have an opportunity to take a look at the various colors----
Ms. Watson. Yes. I----
Mr. Caruso. With each one of the colors comes an increasing
level of vigilance, and so--and that can be--and that threat
warning can be applied to the Nation, to a region, to a
section. So that would be one way for individuals to be able
to--they best know their critical locations, and this system
would be a step in the direction of allowing them to take a
uniform precaution, a uniform understanding as to what they
need to do and their fellow citizens need to do to protect
certain vital critical key assets.
The second is that there is a--the National Infrastructure
and Protection Center, NIPC, which is a multiagency center
which has very good connectivity with what we call the eight
industrial communities, telecommunications, banking, finance,
and they have a very good connectivity and growing increasing
good connectivity with the various businesses and those
industries. And that's another method to target, if you will,
industries that there's a particular threat that's been leveled
against. And so you have those two systems which are very much
complementary in raising the bar with reference to awareness
and then responsiveness to that.
Ms. Watson. Two systems just failed. One was Bank of
America and its deposit system. You know, I'm just wondering
how we are going to assure that the systems are up and
functioning, and I look at the INS, it's been the whipping boy
in the last few weeks, and maybe rightfully so. I think
probably what you need--and I understand there's a new
structuring. You probably need more resources to hire more
people and train them better, more educational dollars and so
on. But my concern still is what do we know, and I'm talking
about the Members--we have to go back to our district. I'll be
on a plane in less than an hour--and we have to assure our----
Mr. Shays. Excuse me. You've got to be on a plane in less
than an hour?
Ms. Watson. Well, I'll be leaving, not on the plane.
Mr. Shays. Mr. Verga wanted to know how you were going to
do that.
Ms. Watson. Going through the security, it will be more
than an hour.
But we have to be able to be partners in all of this, and
when we go back, we have to assure those American people out
there that we got it under control. I try not to tell them
about September 11th, but we need to know something concrete
that we can take back to our Governors, our mayors, our board
of superviser members and so on, something concrete. I have
seen the color system on television, heard about it on the
radio, read about it in the newspapers, but it still doesn't
tell me anything. I know what green stands for and red and so
on. You know, I know the levels, but what's behind all of that?
And so we need more clarification. Maybe we should get a one-
on-one in secret. I don't know. Because I guess when we have
our briefings, there are too many people in that room and too
many people listening in. But I'm looking for concrete
information. I'm not getting it.
Mr. Greene. If I may respond to that, please, there are a
couple of concrete things I can tell you that buildupon the
statement that I made up front about the increased partnership
of the FBI, and there have been two things I can point to
immediately. The first is that very soon, like within a day or
two of the attack on the United States, that some total of INS
information with respect to people coming to the United States
was delivered to the FBI. The kinds of information that we
collect and then have to analyze in order to determine the
movements of certain people or to be able to even do some
predictive work with respect to folks coming into the United
States, the fusion point for that kind of information is now
the Foreign Terrorism Tracking Task Force, which I believe the
committee has been briefed on, and that provides a concrete
step toward the kind of information-sharing and the kind of
analysis that we need to do to complete the kind of prevention
work that the Attorney General has said is the strategy for the
FBI, the INS and the justice components in that regard, and I
want to keep this short because I know you have a plane to
catch.
Ms. Watson. I'll yield back my time, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Shays. Thank you very much. And thank you for being
here today.
Mr. Clay, you have the floor.
Mr. Clay. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Shays. We're just starting new time.
Mr. Clay. Mr. McHale, let me ask you, has there been an
assessment of the new airport screener process since the new
public law went into effect?
Mr. McHale. We have an ongoing assessment, and we're
actually still in the process of Federalizing the work force.
We took over the private sector contracts on February 17th. We
have worked to some extent to improve that process. We're
engaged in a very detailed planning to how we will operate the
screening check points when we bring in the Federal employees,
but the first Federal employees will not be reporting until
some time in May. So I'm not sure that answers your question or
not, but we're engaged in a very--very detailed assessment of
the current screening process.
Mr. Clay. In the meantime, I read a pretty disturbing
report about the lax security at the Salt Lake City airport
during the Winter Olympics. I don't know, have you all looked
at that situation?
Mr. McHale. Yes, we have. We've appointed an associate
under secretary for inspection, David Holms. He's been on the
job about a month, and we received--we received that report
about--about 2 weeks ago, and Mr. Holms and his staff, which is
still growing, small and growing, like our entire agency, has
actually assigned some people to go out there and look at that
and report back to us as soon as he can.
Mr. Clay. And they will make recommendations to that
airport and hopefully others that----
Mr. McHale. I think that's right. The situation in Salt
Lake City, of course, was, I think, quite extraordinary. I
mean, it's huge, huge influx of people into a relatively small
airport, but I think we can probably draw some lessons from
that we can apply nationwide.
Mr. Clay. How about your--the current status of the Federal
air marshal program? How is that going?
Mr. McHale. I can't discuss in an open session the numbers
of Federal air marshals, but I can tell you that the program
has greatly expanded. We have been greatly assisted by the
other Federal agencies, some--many of whom are here, by
assigning to us on detail many of their criminal investigators
who are serving as temporary Federal air marshals, and we at
Transportation are greatly increasing that program.
Mr. Clay. OK. Thank you for that.
And, Dr. Raub, tell me, are you familiar with the
precautionary measures that are in place in the postal service
as far as mail handers who handle the mail on a daily basis,
and if you are, are you pleased with the precautions?
Mr. Raub. I'm not aware in detail, sir. I know that
considerable attention has been expended through the Centers
for Disease Control Prevention and the post office with respect
to that. I think that will be a continuing effort of--to ensure
the level of improvements that are necessary.
Mr. Clay. Does your office meet regularly with the Homeland
Security Office here?
Mr. Raub. Yes, sir. Not only does our secretary and deputy
secretary meet regularly, but the director of our office, Dr.
Henderson, is in frequent contact with Governor Ridge and other
senior staff there.
Mr. Clay. OK. OK. Thank you for that.
And, Mr. Caruso, you noted in your opening statement that
al Qaeda was the No. 1 threat to this Nation. Can you give us
any indication of what their strength is today and where they
are? Do you know? I mean, I read a recent report that they may
be in Indonesia, and may have left Afghanistan and went to
Indonesia. Do you have any information on that?
Mr. Caruso. Sir, terrorism does not have one face. It's
made up of individuals of various nationalities and hail from
various countries. We believe that al Qaeda is--al Qaeda
sympathizers are spread in many places around the world, just
not in where these 19 hijackers came from. It would be unfair
to say that's where they came from, that all terrorists are
based there. We find them not only in the Middle East, but we
find them in places in Southeast Asia and in other locations as
well.
With reference to the numbers, I think individuals of good
will could vary on that, and so I don't think there's a precise
number. I think what you're--what will be there is a dedicated
group, hard core. How many that is, I do not know. It might be
several thousand, and then you have a concentric circle that
goes out of individuals who are less dedicated but would be
there to lend a hand if a situation presented itself, and then
you have a larger group who are just sympathizers who would not
be participants, but to put hard numbers on them, I don't have
them, nor does anyone else.
Mr. Clay. OK. Along those same lines of thinking, when you
talk about terrorism not having any single face, does the--has
the Justice Department and the FBI paid attention to the
sensitivity as far as Arab Americans and Muslims, because, you
know, history tells us that when we use a broad brush and say,
for instance, in World War II when we locked up an entire race
of people or a lot of them, it comes back to haunt us, through
reparations, through lawsuits. Is that going to happen a few
years out from today where we come back and look and say, oh,
we made a terrible injustice. We painted this group with a
broad brush. I mean, for instance, the guy that's locked up in
Virginia, I'm sure you all have more information than I on--
Moussaoui is his name, I think? I mean, is this going to come
back to haunt us?
Mr. Caruso. The FBI is very cognizant of its--of the
investigative tools that we have and the need to use them for
the good. The rule of law is what we are guided by, and we are
pledged to uphold. At the same time where we are vigorously
investigating with over 4,500 agents, we are utilizing over
4,500 agents to investigate the attack of September 11th, at
the same time we were conducting civil rights investigations
and hate crime investigations, because there were unfortunately
Arab Americans, innocent Arab Americans, and the vast majority
of them are, who were the victims of hate crimes, who were the
victims of just absolutely un-American kind of activities. And
so at the same time we're vigorously investigating the 19, we
were out conducting an investigation to prosecute, and we have
prosecuted individuals who have set upon these very, very
innocent people.
At the same time, we've also gone out through the
individual leaders of our field offices, 56 across the Nation,
and they have gone out and reached out to the--into the Arab
American communities, to the mosques and other cultural
centers, to extend a hand because they are part of the
community we're there to protect and we've made that a
conscious effort, because without the cooperation of the
American people, the FBI is not going to be effective, and we
want to be effective.
Mr. Clay. I appreciate your response, and thank you. Thank
you all for your testimony. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Shays. Thank you, Mr. Clay, for being here and for your
nice and your helpful questions.
I'm going to proceed with 10 minutes, and then Mr.--Dr.
Weldon will have some questions, and then I'll have some
questions again. I would just like to say before I begin that
Nick Palarino, who is next to me, has always insisted for years
that I not ignore a doctor when they are before me. I called
you Mr. Raub, and he said Dr. Raub, and I never figured out why
he was so insistent, until I realized on February 2nd of this
year he got his doctorate. He'd been working on it for so many
years, so I would like the record to note that you will no
longer be Nick to me. You will be doctor, Dr. Nick.
Congratulations, Doctor.
What brought that on was I was noticing that I had
professional staff, and we had counsel there before. He happens
to be the director, and I was thinking, if I was the director,
I'd rather have professional staff than counsel.
I have a number of questions, and I'm going to start by,
this is what I believe. This is what I believe: I believe that
we are at war with terrorists, that we have been at war with
terrorists for over 20 years and didn't know it. They did. We
didn't. That this war with terrorists is a fight to the finish,
that it is a fight to shut terrorists down before they use
chemical, biological agents, which we believe they have, heaven
forbid, radioactive material or, even worse, nuclear weapons
which they may have. If you ask me do our terrorists have
nuclear weapons, I say I don't know. I don't think so. But that
makes an assumption that every time a terrorist nation tried to
buy nuclear weapons, we caught them. If you ask me will
terrorists have nuclear weapons, the answer is yes. I'm
absolutely convinced of it if they don't have it now. And if
you said there was a nuclear explosion, heaven forbid, in this
country, would I be surprised, the answer would be no. So for
me the stakes are very high, and I think for every one of you
here.
And, Dr. Raub, I note when we had the anthrax attack, there
was a real sense that if the terrorists used anthrax the way
they could potentially use it, what we encountered would look
like a cake walk. In other words, as serious as that was, it
could be far, far worse. So we all know the stakes are very,
very high.
And I think it is very helpful to have all of you here. You
all play a role in what we knew we had to address in the 19
hearings we had before September 11th. We had all three
commissions come before us, the Kramer Commission, the Hart-
Rudman Commission, the Gilmore Commission, all saying to us we
don't have a proper assessment of the terrorist threat, we
don't know what our strategy is, and we aren't organized to
deal with it. And we're in the process of doing all three. It's
difficult for us to have an assessment of where we're at,
because really the only one who has anything dealing with
homeland security in a general sense is you, Mr. Verga, and
you're not Tom Ridge. And I know Tom Ridge.
So having said that, we're using all of you to help put the
pieces together, but there's going to have to be a time, and I
have to say this, in which the administration is going to
recognize that while they're seeking to protect the advice and
counsel to a President of someone who is close and intimate to
the President, Mr. Ridge, that ultimately there has to be a
process for Congress to respond to, and that doesn't require a
yes or no from any of you. You have your own roles to play, but
I want to state that for the record.
And I want to state for the record that ultimately I
believe that the assessment of the threat will require a
strategy that will require some reorganization of government
where we will have potentially a homeland office.
Now, Mr. McHale, let me start with you. When we passed
legislation dealing with terrorist threat as it related to
protection of airplane travel, I will say something else I
believe. I don't believe airline travel today is safe. I
believe it will be safe, but I believe that it is still
possible for terrorists to get explosives on an airplane,
particularly if they're willing to ride an airplane, and since
we had 19 go under riding an airplane, we know that's not going
to inhibit them, the old strategy.
Now what I'm interested in knowing is we put a law that
said originally in the House check for explosives the end of
2003. That was legislation that was pushed by me and others,
and the reluctance was that we didn't even know if we could do
it by 2003. What was fascinating was when it came back from the
conference committee, it said by the end of the year--I don't
mean 2003. By the year 2003, that by the year 2002 now it has
to be done.
Now we don't have the equipment yet to check for explosives
on an airplane, so I need to understand what it means by the
legislation language that says you will check all baggage by--
it's--the date has already passed. It doesn't say for
explosives. It just says you'll check all baggage. So help sort
that out to me. We need a candid conversation, and we'll go
from there.
Mr. McHale. There are two dates in the statute. One is
within 60 days of enactment, we had to screen all baggage for
explosives, ideally using explosive detection equipment or--and
then Congress listed a number of alternative means if we
couldn't do it. The second is a date the end of the year,
December 31st, by which we have to screen all checked baggage
using explosive detection equipment, with very limited
flexibility there.
We met the deadline of January 18th, I think it was, by
using explosive detection equipment where it was located. We
required that it be used to the maximum extent possible. We had
discovered that a lot of the equipment that had been out
there--and there weren't very many machines out there but the
equipment that was out there was not being used full time, and
we mandated that it be used if it is operational, that it be--
being used.
Mr. Shays. So is it fair to say we're using all the
equipment available, but we don't have enough equipment to
check all bags?
Mr. McHale. That's right. So we supplement it with dogs,
with manual search, and with origination bag match, all of
which were things that Congress recognized that would probably
be the only tools available to us on that short a timeframe.
To get to the end of the year, we have really worked on a
multiple strategy. There are two manufacturers in the United
States of what are called EDS machines. Those manufacturers are
relatively small. In the past they produced a relatively small
number of machines every year. We've been working with them to
get them to ramp up their production, but we've also worked
with them to procure the intellectual property rights to their
products on a license basis, and we are going to be using
additional--the assembly of these machines is not actually as
difficult as it is to develop them. So we can use additional
manufacturing facilities to put the machines together with the
intellectual property rights. So we're going to be able to
greatly increase the production.
And we're also going to be using other equipment to help us
deal with some of the issues that machinery raises. So there's
a lot of--we're proceeding on a lot of tracks.
We're also in the process of testing some additional
explosive detection equipment to see if we can certify it and
add to the total--I guess the total types of machinery that are
available to us.
Mr. Shays. OK. Let me ask you, though, the very clear
answer is not all baggage is checked yet for explosives?
Mr. McHale. All baggage is subjected to some form of check,
but one part of that check may be the origination bag match,
which is to ensure that the passenger gets on the plane with
their bag or that the bag does not get on the plane without the
passenger.
Mr. Shays. Now if you were walking on the plane, you take
the risk that your baggage will be randomly searched?
Mr. McHale. That's right.
Mr. Shays. But if you load it on the plane, it's less
likely that it's going to be opened up? Correct?
Mr. McHale. We use a lot of different techniques. It is--
you know, I don't--we don't open up every bag at the passenger
check point either so----
Mr. Shays. No. I understand. There's a difference. There is
a random check process. You don't have a random check process
to open up baggage that's in the belly of an aircraft.
Mr. McHale. We do.
Mr. Shays. How do you? Most of the baggage is locked. You
destroy the lock? What do you do?
Mr. McHale. We use--as I said, we use explosive detection
dogs. We use EDS equipment when it's available.
Mr. Shays. Here's what I asked you. You don't open up a
bag?
Mr. McHale. There are bags that are opened up at the
baggage check-in point. If there is a reason to open the bag,
we will call the passenger over and we will open the bag.
Mr. Shays. So your point is that it's a--is that the first
round? That was 10 minutes. Boy, it goes quick. Let me just
pursue this and then we'll go right to Mr. Weldon. I want to be
clear on this. You're saying that the way you make it random is
that sometimes before it's sent down, they check it right on
the spot?
Mr. McHale. There is a process that we use to identify
individuals whose bags we want to check very carefully, and
those bags are generally opened--they can be opened, or they
can be checked by explosive detection machine, or they can be
checked by a canine or whatever else is----
Mr. Shays. OK. So what you're saying is your sense of
search isn't necessarily that it is opened up, but if you
suspect a bag, you're going to make a second pass.
Mr. McHale. Right.
Mr. Shays. With an animal, with--I'm told animals have
hundreds--dogs have--certain dogs have hundreds--thousands of--
hundreds of thousands of times the capability of smell that
humans do.
Mr. McHale. Yes.
Mr. Shays. That----
Mr. McHale. The dogs are very effective.
Mr. Shays. Yes. That's what I've been told.
OK. Dr. Weldon. Dr. Weldon. I'm sitting next to Dr. Nick.
Mr. Weldon. I just have a quick followup question on the
random searches, Mr. McHale. I've gotten some complaints from
constituents, elderly people, young women carrying babies,
families with small children coming up on the random checks.
Have you any information that these random checks have
uncovered any potential terrorists getting on planes since
September 11th, or dangerous materials? And when I say
dangerous materials, I don't mean, you know, the little pen
knife that the Secretary of the Air Force gave me 4 years ago
that they took away from me shortly after September 11th. I
mean--it's--you know, my concern is, you know, aviation is a
big part of our domestic economy, and there are a lot of people
who are saying I'm going to drive, mostly out of fear of
flying, but I have had some people--constituents complain about
the random searches. Can you give me some information that I
can tell my constituents about these----
Mr. McHale. There is a 2-week period--unfortunately I don't
have all of the statistics here but there's a 2-week period
from the first 2 weeks we took over the check points. We took
over the check points on February 17th and during the first 2
weeks of that time, we confiscated over 100,000 items. Probably
a lot of those were little pen knives and things, but among
that were 40 weapons, firearms, a number of them loaded, a
large number of knives in excess of 3 inches and other things,
box cutters, etc. So there is a--there is a lot of material
still being recovered at check points. But we, too, are
concerned about the number of searches of individuals who fall
in those kind of categories----
Mr. Weldon. Perceived as harassment----
Mr. McHale. I don't think it's harassment. The system we've
got set up is one--we use the cap system to identify
individuals. That's still a somewhat crude tool that we're
working very hard to refine. That will actually pick up some--
many individuals who probe--who certainly are not terrorist
terrorists.
Another thing, though, is that we also do have random
searches. We have a certain number of passengers who are
identified for random search, particularly at the gate as they
board. And last, a requirement that we put into place right
after September 11th that is still in place is that the
individuals who stand behind the check point and use wands to
check passengers should be fully occupied so that if there
isn't someone who is alerted by going through the metal
detector, at a time they will actually call someone over to
check them. That again is another form of random search.
We actually have a number of projects under way to make our
checks a lot more sophisticated. Improving the cap system is a
project that we are engaged in with the hope of deploying the
new system by September, and one of the problems we have at the
passenger check point today, as those passengers arrive, they
arrive anonymously. We don't have a way at most passenger check
points to know who's arriving at that check point to be
checked. Not until you get to the gate do we often know who you
are.
Mr. Weldon. I hate to interrupt you, but I'm going to run
out of time. You answered my question right at the beginning.
You've discovered weapons, and you feel that the random checks
are justifiable--well, he's saying something to me that I think
you really ought to look at. Women with small babies, you know,
I guess it's within the realm of possibility that somebody
would do that. The terrorists that we're facing, I believe, are
the most diabolical and demonic opponent America has ever
faced.
But I have a question for you, Mr. Greene. And maybe we can
get back to this issue. But as you probably are aware, Congress
provided in the USA Patriot Act some requirements on the INS to
develop access and sharing of intelligence and criminal
background information, a tamper-proof machine-readable
passport and tamper-proof and machine-readable immigration
documents as well, along with the development of a biometric
evaluator like an iris or fingerprint scan. Also we provided
resources for the expedited implementation of this visitor
tracking system.
Mr. Greene. Yes, sir.
Mr. Weldon. It's been a few months. Can you report to us
the status on implementing a lot of these----
Mr. Greene. Just in two areas, and I can provide a fuller
piece on this after the hearing, but we have a project manager
in charge of the entry/exit system now that is looking at the
technical side of the sorts of questions that will have to be
in place in order to make an entry/exit system a viable system
for us. We know that in the airport environment and, to a
slightly lesser degree, the seaport environment, it is a--it is
not anywhere near as challenging as it is at a land border
environment, and so the plan, as I think it has been discussed,
is to look at a phased implementation starting with the--in the
airport environment at first and then proceeding directly to
overcoming the more difficult technical challenges.
Mr. Weldon. Well, it's safe to say at best for months, and
some cases we're years away, from implementing most of these
provisions.
Mr. Greene. Well, I don't know. The entry/exit system is on
a very fast track. I think we're looking at I want to say
airports by the end of this calendar year. That's my
recollection. I can confirm that with you when I get back to
the office. In terms of the--in the meantime, we have a
companion piece which arises out of the Congress's Data
Management Improvement Act, where the private sector who are
affected by this is also being folded into this process of
development, so that the exhibition impact, especially at land
borders of entry, again are sort of evaluated and their
concerns taken into account.
Mr. Weldon. Well, I just want to share with you, Mr.
Chairman, that while the INS is making its best effort to
implement all of these features, some of the provisions in the
act are months away. Some of them are actually years away, and
that we do have a period of vulnerability where the Immigration
and Naturalization Service cannot protect our borders from the
continued ongoing entry of terrorists in the United States, and
that's why I think I've spoken to you before, I've introduced
legislation to place a moratorium on entry from about 15
nations that are known to sponsor, harbor or produce
terrorists.
I just--I have a followup question for you, Mr. Greene. I
spoke with Congressman Hal Rogers who used to chair the
appropriations subcommittee that had the INS jurisdiction, and
he informed me that the budget for the INS was double to twice
during the 1990's. The impression I get is that with 11 million
visas that are issued every year, and I don't know what the
figure is, several hundred million tourists and students that
are coming in and out of the country and people who come back
and forth and back and forth, that even with all of these added
resources, that the agency is totally overwhelmed.
Mr. Greene. Well, I think the commissioner, Congressman,
has looked at the problems facing the INS in a number of
different dimensions. The first one certainly is a resource
question. The budget growth that Congressman Rogers described
to you is accounted for primarily by the increased assets that
were placed on the southern border to address a problem that
was, you know, demonstrably out of control in the beginning of
the 1990's.
In addition to the sort of management issues that the INS
faces, which the commissioner intends to address through his
restructuring plan, we also have problems with information
management which he has indicated he would like to address
through chief information officer appointed, working for him
and under him, and the current process that we're looking at,
the enterprise architecture project which we're looking at to
sort of standardize and consolidate the various discrete
information systems that have been set up through the INS over
the last 25 years to address specific missions and specific
problems that arose.
It is more than a resource problem, clearly. I think the
recent events have demonstrated that, and I think the
commissioner has acknowledged that it is more than a resource
question and he is taking steps to address those issues as
well.
Mr. Shays. I would like another round here, and if you can
stay, we can go back. I would like to ask each of you, first
off, is there any question that was asked of someone else that
you had made notes that you wanted to comment on before we go?
Is there any comment that any of you would like to make based
on any question that has already been asked? Yes, sir.
Dr. Raub. Just a brief comment related to Representative
Watson's comment before. I think appropriately her question and
the response of my colleagues keyed on prevention and securing
infrastructure and interdiction of events, but there's a
corollary side of detection and response in areas and
particularly related to biological terrorism, and the only
point I would have made--points, there were two, one is that
this spring, thanks to the President and the Congress, we are
investing more than $1 billion in the upgrading of State health
departments, local health departments and hospitals, with a
major emphasis on improving infectious disease surveillance and
response such that we could detect and respond quickly to a
biological event, and I believe that was important in the
context of your questions because that preparation has to be
uniform across the country. A communicable infectious disease
starting in any one place, given our mobile society, could
quickly end up in any number of other places. So it's important
that our protection be as nearly uniform as possible.
Second, while we're--bioterrorism is our No. 1 concern, we
recognize that the most likely type of terrorist event remains
the conventional explosive or variance thereof, and so we need
to continue investing in the--the medical response systems with
respect to burn and trauma and other types of medical
consequence management.
Mr. Shays. Thank you. When we had our hearing last week,
one of the witnesses basically--let my preface my comment by
saying that in the early 1950's, President Eisenhower
recognized we had a new threat, we had a new assessment of
threat, we had a new strategy, and we reorganized, and that was
the cold war. And it was a whole different war. It lasted 40-
plus years, and ultimately we were successful. It was based
pretty much on containment and responding to acts of
aggression. It was based on mutual assured destruction, and we
basically outlasted the Soviet Union economically, politically,
socially, and militarily.
The new strategies--the new type of response suggested by I
think former Ambassador Bremer on counterterrorism is that we
need to detect and to prevent--that a mutually assured
destruction would guarantee basically we would mutually
destruct each other, that it would in fact happen given that
people have a different sense of the value of life.
I'm interested in knowing from each of you, do you think it
is reasonable, based on your side of the equation, for us to
assume that the Office of Homeland Security will be able to
come up with an assessment of the total threat and to integrate
it to all your different parts, that it will be possible to
develop an overall strategy much like we did, and do you
ultimately see that would require some reorganization of
government?
Now I'm asking you all to go a little outside your box,
but, Mr. Verga, not as much for you. This is probably more apt
for you to respond to, and maybe Mr. Caruso, but all of you are
welcome to respond.
Mr. Verga. Thank you very much. First of all, let me say
we--we in the Department appreciate the leadership that the
Congress has taken on this issue and, quite frankly, those of
us in the executive branch recognize that in some cases
Congress was out ahead of us in looking at the homeland
security problem in a more holistic way than--than we have
looked at it, and we appreciate that leadership.
It's clear that traditional ways of looking at a threat,
counterthreat-based strategy, are not adequate for this
situation that we find ourselves in. By the same token, the
flexibility that's necessary to deal with these asymmetric
threats and essentially nondeterrable actors because to be--be
able--for deterrence to work, the other actor has to be a
rational actor, and in this case they're not rational actors,
as you pointed out--requires that we have a great deal of
flexibility and moreover a capability----
Mr. Shays. Can I--just since you attributed it to me, it's
rational to them, though, isn't it?
Mr. Verga. I would not pretend to be an expert on their
culture. I think that they think that the acts that they take
have a purpose in their--in their way of looking at it. So you
could probably say it's rational, but----
Mr. Shays. It's not our way of----
Mr. Verga. True, that's a good point. What I was about to
say is that in order to be able to accomplish and to have an
effective strategy in--in this world of asymmetrical threats,
we have to be much more flexible, much more adaptable, and move
more toward a capabilities-based approach, particularly in the
defense arena as opposed to trying to say you've got tanks, we
have to have tanks, you've got airplanes, we have to have
airplanes, because you can't find those--those symmetries that
you can balance off against. So that's why you find that we're
moving in those types of directions.
With regard to trying to do a threat assessment, you
somewhat run up against the same problem in that if you guess
wrong or even if you analyze wrong of what the threat is and
you counter that threat, you may have missed the one that you
end up facing, just as we did on September 11th and, therefore,
if you move toward analyzing vulnerabilities that you find
inside your own system and then develop capabilities to counter
those vulnerabilities, it may give you a better strategic way
of approaching this problem of asymmetrical threats.
Mr. Shays. Would anyone else like to respond? Because I
have a followup. Anybody? Yes, sir, Mr. Burris.
Mr. Burris. Yes. If I could, I think--and I want to echo
sentiments on this capability assessment. You can go about this
in a different manner, as opposed to, you know, a threat
assessment, by doing a capability assessment, and FEMA's done
just that, assess, you know, States' capabilities to handle
catastrophic disasters.
A good example is the REP program which does our nuclear
power plants, provides for preparedness initiatives around our
nuclear power plants. Whether or not you have a radiation
incident from a nuclear power plant because it's accidental or
because it's intentional, you still have to have the capability
to deal with it. And so a part of, I think, the first responder
initiative that the President's put forward is just to do that,
to address as a down payment, as it were, some of the
capabilities that we know need to be racheted up for our local
and State responders to be able to handle those incidences,
should they take place. So while the vulnerability assessment
is certainly important, I think we have a beginning point by
moving forward with the capability assessments that's taking
place in the States by the Department of Justice, by FEMA,
after September 11th and other agencies as a starting point to
start off in preparing our country.
Mr. Shays. Yes, sir. Dr. Raub.
Mr. Raub. Mr. Chairman, in a similar vein I'm optimistic
that the executive branch and the Congress can make some
considerable progress toward a broader base of assessment and a
better integrated look at the various threats and their
consequences.
For example, in the area of biological terrorism, over the
last several years we have consulted extensively, not only with
the medical and public health community, but with the
intelligence community, the law enforcement community and--and
others, and have been able to develop what we think is a strong
list of what the major threats are, either because the
probability is high or the consequences of their use are
enormous. We'll continue to build on and refine that, but we
believe that can and should be integrated with a broader look.
In our case, as I indicated before, our responsibilities
are primarily those of early detection and medical and public
health response. We need to rely heavily on others to interdict
those events in the first place, whether they be from other
nations, whether it be through law enforcement. We have a
limited role ourselves in the regulation of the transfer of
certain hazardous materials called select agents, but we need
to be an integral part of a larger effort from the whole scope
from prevention and interdiction all the way through detection
and response.
Mr. Shays. Well, what I'm struck with is that when we were
dealing with the Soviet Union, our strategy, our assessment was
pretty simple when you came right down to it. It was
symmetrical. We matched them, they matched us, we tried to not
make it a fair fight and to have superior whatever they had.
Here we--it being asymmetrical, we don't know where it will
come from and we don't know what it will be. And so, for
instance, I wonder if we decide that we have a pretty good idea
that if it's a biological agent, it's going to be this kind of
a biological agent, we almost can't make that a public
disclosure because then our enemies say, well, they're wise to
this, we'll do this. And the only thing I have comfort with
right now, the only thing, really, is that we are going to hold
the country accountable that allows the terrorist act to take
place in that country, and that simplifies it. But I mean--and
then Dr. Weldon will have the floor here, but we had one of our
witnesses say to us his biggest concern that relates to your
area is that a group of cottage industry scientists will
develop an altered biological agent that will wipe out humanity
as we know it.
So it's a real determination that we have great
intelligence work and also law enforcement efforts to uncover
this, but I guess what I'm saying is in the end when we hear
from Homeland Security, are we going to have--do you anticipate
that we are going to have a strategy that we can put--an
assessment that we can put on one page and a strategy that will
fit on another page, or will it fill an encyclopedia? I dated
myself.
Mr. Raub. Or a CD ROM, perhaps.
Mr. Shays. Yes. Just let me get a response to that and
then, Dr. Weldon, we'll go with you.
Mr. Raub. From my vantage point, sir, I think it's most
unlikely you'll see two side-by-side pages. I don't think it
needs to be the CD ROM or the encyclopedia either, but I think
realistically, given the array of different types of threats
that we can identify or imagine and the myriad ways they have
to be addressed, I think this will be of necessity a fairly
complex document.
Mr. Shays. Do you want to make a response?
Mr. Verga. I would just say I would imagine that you'll see
something that will be akin to the President's national
security strategy that's published every year, a book of about
50, 60 pages that will lay out in various shapes and forms that
approach.
Mr. Shays. And constantly being revised and so on?
Mr. Verga. Yes, sir.
Mr. Shays. But there will be some basic tenets in it like
we go after terrorists wherever we find them, that it's
preemptive rather than reactive? Those things will probably
last in all of them?
Mr. Verga. I think--I think that's fair.
Mr. Shays. And just the point that we are learning that we
have to somehow learn intent in order to know the likely areas
of vulnerabilities that we want to focus on, will intent matter
a big deal?
Mr. Verga. We in the Defense Department, of course, in
prosecuting the global war on terrorism are--are approaching it
from the--removing the capability of others to have safe havens
upon which they can then plan and train and attack the United
States from, and I think that will continue to be our approach.
It is very difficult and, of course, we have no internal
security function in the United States. That's left to the law
enforcement community. But it's very difficult to determine
intent on the part of terrorists. At least that's been my
observation.
Mr. Shays. Yes.
Mr. Caruso. Mr. Chairman, I would just add that the human--
human intelligence, whether it comes from the lips of an
individual or document he or she has written, is--is the--is
our best avenue for understanding what's in the hearts and
minds of men who want to destroy us, and that is a premium on--
that's something that we need to as a government have as
important key to our strategy.
Mr. Shays. I just would say--did you want to say, Mr.
Greene, anything?
Mr. Greene. No.
Mr. Shays. Before giving it to Mr. Weldon--Dr. Weldon,
excuse me, there is a conviction on the part of some of us that
when we look at September 11th we will say if we listen to what
they said in Arabic and not English we would have known about
September 11th, which is basically saying that if we had even
used our information systems and just monitored newspapers and
public discussions in other communities we might have known,
besides the human intelligence. I'm led to believe that will be
found to be true, but we'll see.
Dr. Weldon, you have at least 5 minutes.
Mr. Weldon. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I did
want to commend you for calling this hearing and I apologize
for missing the verbal testimony from the witnesses in getting
here a little late, and I do want to say to you, Mr. McHale,
that I would like to followup with you on the random search
issues particularly at the gate. I think that's the area of
concern of a lot of my constituents.
But, Mr. Greene, I did read your written testimony and
there were a number of questions I had about it. I was very
glad to hear that the INS is implementing an improved
information and data sharing system. Right after September 11th
we were provided some very disturbing information about the
inability of INS to communicate with various agencies that have
very valuable information that can help INS agents. You said at
the bottom of page 2 in your statement, ``We have been working
with the State Department to expand data-sharing to ensure that
immigration inspectors have access to issued visa information
and the consolidated consular data base. As a result, this
information is now available at all POE's.''
Have there been any results from any of this? Can you point
to any cases where we've been able to prevent a terrorist
entering the United States based on the information----
Mr. Greene. I don't think we----
Mr. Weldon [continuing]. Sharing that's available?
Mr. Greene. I'm sorry. I don't think we have information
with respect to terrorist prevention. It has been very useful,
though, in a number of other cases with respect to fraud. What
this data base provides us is a copy of the--basically the
nonimmigrant visa application that's filled out by the
applicant overseas and also a photograph. So it's--the
photograph that was presented with that application at the
time. So it has dramatically cut down on the photo substitution
vulnerability that we used to face with a valid visa in a valid
passport with a photo substitution allowing people into the
United States. I don't have those numbers off the top of my
head. There has been an increase in fraud detections since
September 11th----
Mr. Weldon. The photo substitution issue was one of the
major reasons why the language in the bill calling for the
development of a biometric evaluator was replaced----
Mr. Greene. That's right.
Mr. Weldon. So are you saying the need for that biometric
evaluator is diminished----
Mr. Greene. No. We----
Mr. Weldon [continuing]. Or do we still need----
Mr. Greene. Yes. We want to be able to have a biometric
identifier on all of the nonimmigrants who travel to the United
States because that's going to be key to the eventual success
of our entry/exit system.
Mr. Weldon. I think you go on in page 5 and you talk about
the passenger analytical units, PAUs, at airports, seaports,
determining whether a noncitizen seeking admission to the
United States is admissible. Particularly dealing with
airports, shouldn't a lot of this screening actually be done at
the consular level before it actually gets to the INS?
Mr. Greene. Well, I think that's part of our strategy and
that has become more and more prominent in--in our strategy
working with the Department of State since September 11th. We
used to talk about the immigration inspector as being the first
line of defense, but in actuality we appreciate that it's the
consular officer overseas who is the first line of defense, and
that's why we have also provided information to the Department
of State to assist them in--in doing the evaluation necessary
to--to make the right decision on whether to grant a
nonimmigrant visa or not.
Mr. Weldon. On page 10 you mentioned the INS and other task
force agencies. If anybody wants to contribute to this
response, feel free to do so. Coordinate their efforts to
develop lead information on counterterrorism-related subjects
and to neutralize the threat of alien terrorists. How many
leads have been generated by all this? What type of actions
have been the result? You've gotten a lot of bad press lately
and you've got an opportunity for some good press here if
you've kept some people out.
Mr. Greene. The--well, we actually do have some information
that I could brief you on separately with respect to----
Mr. Weldon. Classified----
Mr. Greene. Yes, sir.
Mr. Weldon. Yes. I would be very interested in hearing
that.
Mr. Greene. Above and beyond that, the Foreign Terrorism
Tracking Task Force is the--the group that has done the
manipulations of INS and other data bases in order to identify
potential witnesses who would come forward during the last
interview process, the--the list of approximately 6,000 people
that were jointly interviewed by Federal agencies and State and
local officials inviting them to come forward with information
that might be useful in our counterterrorism effort. The
President announced a similar initiative yesterday following on
that--that same line.
In terms of specific leads, I'd be happy to give you a--a
more thorough conversation about that in a different setting.
Mr. Weldon. Mr. Chairman, I yield back. Thank you very
much.
Mr. Shays. Thank you. I don't have many more questions and
so we'll probably get you out of here by 4 o'clock.
Mr. Greene, it's been reported that the administration is
considering a merger of INS and Customs within the Department
of Justice. What are the statuses of that consideration?
Mr. Greene. I'm not in a position to--to comment on that at
all, Mr. Chairman. The commissioner has--has put forward a
reorganization plan for the INS that was reviewed and approved
by the President. That was the proposal that was brought up to
the Hill in December. What we--what we are able to say about
any subsequent considerations----
Mr. Shays. Fair enough.
Mr. Greene. It's just----
Mr. Shays. OK. One of the issues on the Patriot Act was
that information the FBI--our committee had dialog in another
hearing before September 11th in which we learned that some
information that the FBI had was not--it was being shared with
INS but not with the State Department, and the Patriot Act
requires information to be shared with the State Department.
Can you give me any insights on how that's working out, Mr.
Caruso?
Mr. Caruso. Mr. Chairman, we are--the State Department has
a system, a visa system, known as Class, also known as Tip-off,
where U.S. intelligence--the U.S. intelligence community and
the FBI contribute names to that system so that consular
officers, when they are confronted with an individual who's
applying for a visa, can check that system and determine
whether there's an interest in a particular person by the U.S.
intelligence community or the FBI. We've contributed to that in
the past and we've stepped up our contribution of names to that
system. We are doing that--we want greater electronic
connectivity direct with that system so that we can avail
ourselves with modern technology to get the information in
versus disk and bringing it over periodically.
With reference to requirements beyond that, I would like to
provide you with some additional information outside the
hearing here only because I don't have the kind of satisfactory
answer that your question deserves.
Mr. Shays. Fair enough. That would be something I would
like you to convey with the committee staff, if you would. Just
to say parenthetically, I don't have a lot of faith in our--I
have a lot of faith in the people who work in our government,
all of you and your dedication. Most of you I believe are civil
servants as opposed to appointments of the President, though
both are appreciated and--but I don't have much of a comfort
level with our information technology in government. We put out
the bids, it takes so long, the system seems to be outdated
before it's implemented.
When we chaired the Human Resource Committee, we were never
happy with what we saw happening with Social Security, with
Medicare, with a whole host of systems that were put in place,
obviously not pleased with what INS has, and I will--the State
Department isn't here, but the State Department was using Wang
computers 4 years ago and they can't even communicate
internally in some cases within their own embassies, much less
communicate with other embassies. They can communicate with
Washington, but you can't have Ambassadors from neighboring
countries communicate.
So we know that there is a lot of work in this area and Mr.
Horn in particular in our Government Reform Committee has been
working on it.
Can any of you say anything that can make me feel
comfortable about any progress using information systems,
anything that I can--that this committee can say, well, this is
a good sign? I don't mean a hopeful sign, I mean a good sign.
Anything beyond hope? Yes, Doctor.
Mr. Raub. It may be one of those times when it's--when it's
dangerous to volunteer, Mr. Chairman, but I'll try. One of the
major emphases in our billion-dollar-plus investments that I
mentioned earlier in State and local preparedness is on
information and communication technology for public health, and
a major element of that is striving for interoperability of
those systems. The worst thing that could happen would be for
us to invest in myriad ways in State and local health
departments and our hospitals only to find that information
about infectious disease could not be shared efficiently and
effectively among them. So the guidance that we set out has as
one of its cornerstones a set of communication standards
developed at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
that is to guide the implementation of those activities. We are
going to work very hard at achieving that. I don't present it
as a completed act. I present it as one of our highest
priorities to achieve.
Mr. Shays. And will you be able to break the red tape and
the procurement challenge--my view is almost when I voted for
some of--for this immense amount of new dollars that in the
process I would waste some money, but do a lot of good in the
process, but we don't have time to not--we have to just move
forward quickly. Are you going to be able to move forward
quickly?
Dr. Raub. We believe we will, sir, and that the principal
acquisitions for this are going to be done by the State and
municipal entities. It's not important that we prescribe which
particular brand of hardware one gets or which particular
modem, but rather that certain functional characteristics are
met, and in general those functional characteristics have been
designed with knowledge of the market in mind. So there should
be for almost any entity an array of choices so long as the
connectivity and the so-called interoperability is achieved,
and--and that's our goal.
Mr. Shays. Just dealing with your area, I had been led to
believe before September 11th, based on previous committee
work, that we monitored every day potential outbreaks in urban
areas and that we checked with every hospital every day more
than once, and we learned after September 11th that we weren't.
Will there be a day and, if so, when will that day occur,
when--just like my Department of Transportation that can tell
you an accident any place on I-95, any place where it's cueing
up, will there be a day that you will be able to look on a
board and tell us there's so many outbreaks of this disease in
Cleveland, so many outbreaks of this disease in San Francisco,
so many issues of concern in another area? Will that day happen
where it will be centralized, up to date, kind of like what a
major company will do in being able to tell you how many
products they sold every day and what they were and what towns
they sold them?
Dr. Raub. I'd be overstating my knowledge and misleading
you if I said I thought I could tell you exactly when that
might happen.
Mr. Shays. Is that a goal?
Dr. Raub. Yes. That's one of the major goals of this
investment in the infectious disease surveillance. In many
parts of this country still, the surveillance of an infectious
disease depends upon an alert and conscientious and energetic
physician noticing something and reporting it to the local
Health Department. In many parts of the country that's still
done with a postcard, and perhaps a telephone call, perhaps a
fax message. We're a long way away from having any kind of
routine transaction recording that would get that information
to the local Health Department and enable it in turn to look
across the whole community and be able to see unusual patterns.
One of the interim steps that have been taken in
association with certain of the special events such as the
Olympics or the two national conventions in the last several
years, our Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in
collaboration with the Department of Defense, implemented what
they've referred to as drop-in surveillance, that is, ad hoc
capability where the local hospitals, using an Internet and
Web-based connection, were on a daily basis reporting certain
information about syndromes that they were seeing, certain
characteristics of patients, that information not--being
recorded and not only returned to that particular hospital but
looked at regionally for patterns for possible outbreaks of
activity. That's a forerunner of the kind of thing we would
like to see routine, and I know that's a high priority for the
Office of Homeland Security to see us achieve that kind of
electronic surveillance. We're not there. We're not close. It's
certainly doable within the technology. It will require the
will and the investment to follow through and make it happen.
Mr. Shays. I'll just say that of all the concerns expressed
before this committee, the greatest one was the biological. It
wasn't chemical, wasn't nuclear, wasn't conventional. It was
biological. And it would strike me that the long way off has
got to be a concern to us because I don't believe that we have
the capability to deal with an outbreak that we didn't see
early enough. Counsel has--OK. Basically I'm going to just be
true to my word at 4 o'clock and just ask is there anything you
wish we had asked that you had prepared to answer and that you
would feel good knowing that you were prepared to be--is there
anything you would like to respond to before we close the
hearing, any question you would like to ask yourself and
answer? Mr. Greene. Mr. Caruso. Mr. Burris. Mr. Raub.
Dr. Raub. No, sir.
Mr. Shays. Mr. McHale. Mr. Verga.
Mr. Verga. I would--would only say that when you talk about
homeland security for the Department of Defense, the biggest
and best contribution, of course, that we are making is in fact
the global war on terrorism and we look at--we look at
everything that we do in the Department of Defense as homeland
security because that's the mission of our Department.
Mr. Shays. I think that's pretty clear. I appreciate your
making that point. I appreciate all of your contribution today,
particularly your patience in having a large panel, but I think
it certainly helped us out a lot and I appreciate that. And if
there's no further comment, we will call this hearing
adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 4 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]