<DOC>
[107th Congress House Hearings]
[From the U.S. Government Printing Office via GPO Access]
[DOCID: f:86640.wais]
HOMELAND SECURITY REORGANIZATION: WHAT IMPACT ON FEDERAL LAW
ENFORCEMENT AND DRUG INTERDICTION
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON CRIMINAL JUSTICE,
DRUG POLICY AND HUMAN RESOURCES
of the
COMMITTEE ON
GOVERNMENT REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
JUNE 17, 2002
__________
Serial No. 107-203
__________
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
______
86-640 U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
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
JOHN SULLIVAN, Oklahoma (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 Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources
MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana, Chairman
BENJAMIN A. GILMAN, New York ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois
JOHN L. MICA, Florida, BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont
BOB BARR, Georgia DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois
DAN MILLER, Florida JIM TURNER, Texas
DOUG OSE, California THOMAS H. ALLEN, Maine
JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia JANICE D. SCHAKOWKY, Illinois
DAVE WELDON, Florida
Ex Officio
DAN BURTON, Indiana HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
Christopher Donesa, Staff Director
Nicholas P. Coleman, Professional Staff Member
Conn Carroll, Clerk
Julian A. Haywood, Minority Counsel
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
Hearing held on June 17, 2002.................................... 1
Statement of:
Kramek, Admiral Robert E., (Ret.), former Commandant, U.S.
Coast Guard; Donnie Marshall, former Administrator, Drug
Enforcement Administration; Peter K. Nunez, former
Assistant Secretary for Enforcement, U.S. Department of the
Treasury; Douglas M. Kruhm, former Assistant Commissioner
for the U.S. Border Patrol, Immigration and Naturalization
Service; Sam Banks, former Acting Commissioner, U.S.
Customs Service; and Stephen E. Flynn, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick
senior fellow for national security studies, Council on
Foreign Relations.......................................... 8
Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:
Banks, Sam, former Acting Commissioner, U.S. Customs Service,
prepared statement of...................................... 46
Flynn, Stephen E., Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for
national security studies, Council on Foreign Relations,
prepared statement of...................................... 52
Kramek, Admiral Robert E., (Ret.), former Commandant, U.S.
Coast Guard, prepared statement of......................... 12
Kruhm, Douglas M., former Assistant Commissioner for the U.S.
Border Patrol, Immigration and Naturalization Service,
prepared statement of...................................... 40
Marshall, Donnie, former Administrator, Drug Enforcement
Administration, prepared statement of...................... 20
Nunez, Peter K., former Assistant Secretary for Enforcement,
U.S. Department of the Treasury, prepared statement of..... 32
Souder, Hon. Mark E., a Representative in Congress from the
State of Indiana, prepared statement of.................... 4
HOMELAND SECURITY REORGANIZATION: WHAT IMPACT ON FEDERAL LAW
ENFORCEMENT AND DRUG INTERDICTION
----------
MONDAY, JUNE 17, 2002
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and
Human Resources,
Committee on Government Reform,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:30 p.m., in
room 2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Mark E. Souder
(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Souder, Miller, Cummings, and
Schakowsky.
Staff present: Christopher Donesa, staff director and chief
counsel; Nicholas P. Coleman and Jim Rendon, professional staff
members; Conn Carroll, clerk; Tony Haywood, minority counsel;
and Earley Green, minority assistant clerk.
Mr. Souder. The subcommittee will now come to order.
Good afternoon. Today's hearing is the first we have held
since President Bush announced his proposal to create a new
cabinet Department of Homeland Security. In that respect, we
will be breaking new ground as we begin to consider how best to
implement such an ambitious and important reform proposal prior
to considering it in the full Government Reform Committee in
the coming weeks.
This is not, however, the first time we have considered the
important issues of Federal law enforcement organization, drug
interdiction, border security, or their interrelationship with
increased demand of homeland security. We have held six field
hearings on border enforcement along the northern and southern
borders of the United States. I have personally visited several
other ports of entry, and we have had two Washington hearings
on the implications of homeland security requirements on other
Federal law enforcement activities. This is in addition to our
ongoing oversight of America's drug interdiction efforts.
Our work as a subcommittee has made very clear that the
U.S. Customs Service, the Immigration and Naturalization
Service and the U.S. Coast Guard, which are among the most
prominent agencies in the proposed reorganization have critical
missions unrelated to terrorism which cannot be allowed to wane
and must be fully maintained. The House has to carefully
consider the interrelationship of these law enforcement
missions with the demands of homeland security.
The administration has defined the mission of the proposed
new department solely as one of preventing and responding to
acts of terrorism. The concept of homeland security has to be
defined more broadly to include the many other diverse threats
to our Nation which are handled on a daily basis by these
agencies as well as other law enforcement activities. It is
clear that there is simply too much else at stake for our
Nation to define issues solely as ones of terrorism.
Let me illustrate my point with a brief but very clear
example of the risks which could be posed when resources are
allocated single-mindedly. This map illustrates the deployment
of Coast Guard assets prior to the September 11th attacks. They
are balanced and allocated to a number of important missions
such as drug interdiction, illegal migrant interdiction and
fisheries enforcement. I believe it is apparent here that a
vigorous forward American presence had been maintained in the
Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific for counterdrug missions and
law enforcement.
The second map shows how the resources were temporarily,
and correctly I should emphasize, deployed after the attacks to
respond to the terrorist attacks. It is evident here that the
enhancement of immediate homeland security had to come at the
price of customary missions of the Coast Guard. The chart also
shows the redeployment of our assets from the front lines to a
goal line defense centered on the East and West Coast of the
United States itself. In the critical transit zone of the
Eastern Pacific, for example, the deployment went from four
cutters and two aircraft to a lone cutter.
This is not a criticism of the tremendous response by the
Coast Guard or, by extension, of any other agency. Most would
agree that the approach taken was wholly appropriate over the
short term and redeployments have then subsequently moved the
picture much closer to an equilibrium today. However, I believe
that these charts are a clear illustration that an intensive
focus on homeland security cannot be maintained over the long
run without coming at the expense of other tasks. This lesson
is equally applicable to every other mission of every other
agency that will potentially be affected by the reorganization
plan.
However this reform emerges, it is inevitable that there
will be a profound impact on Federal law enforcement activities
unrelated to terrorism on our Nation's drug interdiction and
border patrol efforts and on operations at several Federal
departments within the subcommittee's jurisdiction. Our
challenge as we move through this process will be to determine
how best to ensure the continuation and preservation of these
missions within the new department. We also must optimize the
organization of other agencies, such as the DEA, the FBI and
law enforcement in the Treasury Department, which share tasks
with agencies destined for the new department. And finally we
must consider the many incidental benefits and synergies which
will arise from the President's proposal. These include
increased operational coordination of narcotics and migrant
interdiction efforts among agencies that will now be united as
well as a significantly improved focus on the links between
drug trade and international terrorism.
This afternoon we have an outstanding panel that will be
able to discuss these important and complex issues with the
benefit of great personal experience and the freedom to speak
forthrightly as private citizens. I thank all of you for coming
today on short notice to share your insights as we prepare to
take up this legislation in the full committee.
We are joined by retired Admiral Robert Kramek, former
Commander of the Coast Guard, Commandant of the Coast Guard;
Mr. Donnie Marshall, former Administrator of DEA; Mr. Peter
Nunez, former Assistant Secretary of Treasury for Enforcement;
Mr. Douglas Kruhm, the former Head of the U.S. Border Patrol;
and Mr. Sam Banks, former Acting Commissioner of the U.S.
Customs Service. It is also a pleasure to be joined by Mr.
Stephen Flynn of the Council on Foreign Relations, whose
writings have provided the subcommittee with many important
insights on border security. We look forward to your testimony.
We've heard much in the media over the last few days, and it
will be interesting to get your combined perspective on how to
consolidate some of these issues.
Congressman Miller, do you have any opening comments you'd
like to make?
Mr. Miller. No.
Mr. Souder. If not, before proceeding, and when Mr.
Cummings arrives we'll have him give his opening statement at
that point after the first panel if he would like. Before
proceeding, I would like to take care of some procedural
matters first. I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5
legislative days to submit written statements and questions for
the hearing record and that any answers to written questions
provided by the witnesses also be included in the record.
Without objection, it's so ordered.
Second, I ask unanimous consent that all exhibits,
documents and other materials referred to by Members and the
witnesses may be included in the hearing record and that all
Members be permitted to revise and extend their remarks.
Without objection, it is so ordered.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Mark E. Souder follows:]
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Mr. Souder. We now move to our distinguished panel. I want
to again thank you. You are all experienced witnesses so I know
that it is more for the audience's benefit, but you have 5
minutes. The full statement will be in the record. We may do a
couple of rounds here, depending on the timing, and as you also
each know because you have been in front of this committee,
it's our standard practice to ask our witnesses to testify
under oath, and if you will rise and raise your right hand I'll
administer the oath.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mr. Souder. Let the record show that the witnesses have all
answered in the affirmative. We will now recognize each of you
for your opening statements and, once again, in the years I've
been in Congress I appreciate the leadership that each of you
have given in the departments. We've worked together on lots of
different issues and this is arguably the most challenging time
for us in government to figure out how to continue to provide
the service when they've added a whole new supplementary
mission, which was a secondary mission that's now a preeminent
mission inside homeland security and how to make sure we cover
the other missions and get the synergy and don't accidentally
wind up with more committee meetings and less actual efforts on
the ground.
With that, I'd like to yield to Admiral Robert Kramek for
his opening statement.
STATEMENTS OF ADMIRAL ROBERT E. KRAMEK (RET.), FORMER
COMMANDANT, U.S. COAST GUARD; DONNIE MARSHALL, FORMER
ADMINISTRATOR, DRUG ENFORCEMENT ADMINISTRATION; PETER K. NUNEZ,
FORMER ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR ENFORCEMENT, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF
THE TREASURY; DOUGLAS M. KRUHM, FORMER ASSISTANT COMMISSIONER
FOR THE U.S. BORDER PATROL, IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION
SERVICE; SAM BANKS, FORMER ACTING COMMISSIONER, U.S. CUSTOMS
SERVICE; AND STEPHEN E. FLYNN, JEANE J. KIRKPATRICK SENIOR
FELLOW FOR NATIONAL SECURITY STUDIES, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN
RELATIONS
Admiral Kramek. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the
subcommittee, for the opportunity to appear before you today.
You've specifically asked me to testify on the impact of the
proposed agency on Federal law enforcement activities and
narcotics interdiction. As the former Commandant of the Coast
Guard and the U.S. interdiction coordinator for the war on
drugs, I welcome that opportunity and am prepared to answer
your questions, and you've already indicated that my written
statement will be included in the record.
Thank you.
Often in response to significant events there's a rush to
propose organizational and bureaucratic solutions as an
expedient rather than implement new policy and strategy that
counters threats to our national interests. Terrorism today is
the most significant threat to our national interests since the
end of the cold war. And the lessons of history have taught us
to rationally and carefully focus our policy, strategy and
resources to eliminate threats to national security. I
compliment you and your committee for taking the appropriate
time to do this.
This is not the time, however, to strengthen just one
aspect of our national security at the expense of weakening
others, rather an opportunity to strengthen all, so we've
eliminated recognized security vulnerabilities of this great
Nation, a Nation that depends on a robust global economy and a
maritime transportation system for its well-being and for its
defense. As important as the maritime is to this what I have
always called an ``island nation,'' it's the least secure of
our borders. We have over 95,000 miles of open shoreline and a
maritime transportation system that accounts for 95 percent of
our overseas trade. Ninety percent of the material for support
of any war that we fight goes by sea.
For over a decade improvements to the security and
efficiency of our maritime industry and coastal defense have
languished and have been relegated to a lower priority in our
policies and our budgets. Coastal defense is a Defense
Department mission and was last in the priority of all defense
missions, and less than 2 percent of the Coast Guard's budget
was allocated to the mission of maritime security.
The events of September 11th have changed all of that. As
you've indicated in your slide, by the 12th of December the
Coast Guard had reprioritized its resources so that 50 percent
of all its resources were focused on maritime security. The
Coast Guard 2003 budget now proposes 22 percent of all its
resources be allocated to this mission and at the same time the
Department of Defense is standing up a CINC, Commander in Chief
for Northern American Defense.
These are certainly popular and seemingly rational
responses to the threat, and you and numerous other committees
of our Congress are investigating their purpose and usefulness.
With respect to the Coast Guard I offer the following: It has
11 primary mission areas, all which contribute to national
security. The Coast Guard is the only agency in any government
that's a member of the Armed Forces and a law enforcement
agency. This is probably the most important characteristic
that's made it such an effective instrument of national
security.
The Coast Guard is one of the most efficient and effective
agencies in U.S. Government, developing to its present state
over 220 years and returns $4 in benefits for every dollar it
spends. As a multi-mission agency, it's instantly ready to
adapt and concentrate forces and resources on any one of its
mission areas, as was demonstrated after the September 11th
attack and previously in the war on drugs, the Haitian and
Cuban migration programs and significant defense, search and
rescue, and environmental safety programs.
The fundamental maritime expertise as a seagoing service is
common to all mission areas but cannot sustain increases for
long periods of time in any mission area without deleterious
effects to others. For decades the Coast Guard has been
underfunded and resourced with less people and equipment to do
the missions the American people request and deserve. It's only
this last year, particularly since September 11th that these
resource inadequacies are being addressed in the areas of
operating expenses and replacing aged equipment.
Specifically, I note the following in the fiscal year 2003
budget submitted by the Coast Guard to the Department of
Transportation and by the administration: That non-
counterterrorist law enforcement missions are reduced
approximately on an average 5 percent overall. Examples as a
percent of operating budget from fiscal year 2002 and 2003 are
drug interdiction is reduced from 18 percent to 13 percent;
migration interdiction, 5 percent, 4 percent. Very disturbing
to me that maritime safety, which is our whole port State
control system for merchant vessels of foreign nations coming
into our waters, reduced 13 percent to 5 percent. And on and
on. Fisheries enforcement, 16 percent to 12 percent.
While there's no question that an immediate response to the
terrorist threats and these changes were necessary, they should
not be for the long run. Drug interdiction, migrant
interdiction and maritime safety are integral to maritime
security of our country. I know that the administration has
asked for no funding to startup the new department and
spokesmen have gone on record about savings expected by
combining various agencies together and they'll be used for the
purpose of setting the new department up. I do not agree with
this notion. If we're serious about the success and purpose of
the new department, then the following needs to be
accomplished:
The new department strategic plan should be promulgated,
goals should be set, objectives outlined and resource
requirements identified to meet a proposed end-state level of
increased security, not just increase the security but an end
state that is specified. In the case of Coast Guard I contend
that the synergies realized during the past several decades of
the agency be preserved and strengthened. In my opinion, the
American public would disagree with the Coast Guard being
disassembled in any way and that the Coast Guard is the best
agency to provide maritime security. It can function as well in
the Department of Homeland Security as the Department of
Transportation. But this should remain a multi-mission agency,
both a member of the Armed Forces and a law enforcement agency.
The Commandant of the Coast Guard should remain as he is
today, the drug interdiction coordinator for the United States,
and that mission's funding should be fully restored. After all,
illegal drugs funded terrorist organizations in Afghanistan as
well as those in Colombia, Peru and other nations as well, and
I think you'll hear from my colleagues on the panel today about
that in more detail.
The integrated deepwater acquisition that will restore the
Coast Guard's vessels with DOD compatible command, central,
communications, computers, intelligence and surveillance and
reconnaissance, known as C4ISR, should be accelerated. This is
probably the most important tool needed to increase maritime
security effectiveness.
In summary, the placement of the Coast Guard in this new
department will not have a detrimental impact on other law
enforcement missions if the agency is adequately funded and
kept as a multi-mission armed force and law enforcement agency.
However, in my opinion, as presently planned and funded, the
impact will be detrimental. I know that neither you nor the
American people want that. In my opinion, the reorganization is
secondary to providing adequate resources to accomplish the
mission the Coast Guard's' already presently tasked with.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Kramek follows:]
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Mr. Souder. Thank you very much for your testimony. We'll
now go to Mr. Marshall.
Mr. Marshall. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Cummings
and subcommittee members. It is indeed an honor and a privilege
for me to appear before you again, this time as a private
citizen, to share my views on how the proposed reorganization
of the--and consolidation of agencies into the new Department
of Homeland Security might impact law enforcement activities
other than terrorism, particularly drug interdiction and
investigations.
Before I go into my statement I want to thank you, Mr.
Chairman, and indeed all of the members of this subcommittee,
for your very consistent support over the years to law
enforcement and particularly for your support to the dedicated
and courageous men and women of my former agency, the Drug
Enforcement Administration. Before I left DEA, actually in
December 2000, I testified before the House Subcommittee on
Crime about the threat posed to our country by the convergence
of organized crime, terrorism and drug trafficking.
Well, a lot has happened since December 2000, and since
then we think in this country we've all become a lot more aware
and able to recognize the threat of terrorism against our
country. But I'm afraid that the general public still does not
fully understand the important connection between international
drug trafficking and global terrorism. This connection that I
refer to is really not a new connection because for a long time
we have seen terrorist groups in places like Colombia and Peru
connected with drug trafficking and we've seen drug trafficking
in places like Colombia, Mexico and Southeast Asia use
terrorism to further their drug trafficking activities.
I have given a detailed history of the various connections
between drug traffickers and terrorism in my written statement.
But since my time is limited here right now, I will just say
for now that those connections between drug trafficking and
terrorism are very real. They are very significant and they
will grow in importance as our war against global terrorism
proceeds over time.
I believe that through that war against terrorism that
ultimately we will be successful in denying State sponsorship
to terrorists to the extent that they enjoy it today and as we
do that, terrorists won't give up but they will have to turn to
alternative sources of funding for these evil conspiracies, and
the place that they will likely turn for that funding is crime
and particularly drug trafficking. In fact, I believe very
strongly that if we are to succeed over the long term against
terrorism we must also succeed in our struggle against drug
trafficking and organized crime.
Therefore, I believe that it is imperative and even urgent
that as we proceed in this war on terrorism that we also
maintain a very robust and even a greatly increased effort
against organized crime and drug trafficking. We really cannot
afford to get behind the power curve on this effort. Otherwise,
we could wake up in this country 1 day and find that the
connection between crime, drugs, violence and terrorism is out
of control. It's happened in other countries and it could
happen here. In fact, it almost did happen here in the days of
the cocaine cowboys in south Florida in the 1980's.
Now, the challenge that we face right now is one, I think,
of organizing and acting to meet the most immediate threat that
we face today, and that's the threat of preventing further
terrorist attacks and destroying the terrorist organizations
that seek to conduct those acts. The most urgent and difficult
challenge I believe in pursuing that mission is ensuring that
we have an effective and an efficient capability to collect,
analyze, disseminate and act upon relevant information.
Now, those are precisely the same skills that we need for
effective law enforcement, now and in the future. So as we
create the new Department of Homeland Security, we must
buildupon existing information sharing capabilities and even
create new ones where necessary. We must ensure that we have an
effective system to promote cooperation and information sharing
and, equally important, we must ensure that the leaders of
homeland security agencies and other Federal, State and local
law enforcement agencies, that those leaders must ensure that
there's an atmosphere and a spirit which facilitates that type
of cooperation.
The cooperation that I refer to, while not perfect in the
year 2002, is already in fact quite strong among our law
enforcement agencies. So I believe that we already have a solid
foundation for accomplishing these goals. We have to be careful
in the creation of our counterterrorism efforts that we build
on those strengths and be careful that we do nothing to
diminish these existing capabilities.
In closing, I would like to once again thank the
subcommittee and all of the Members and staff for your
continuing work to make our country safer. I know that our
leaders in Congress and the administration and in State and
local governments across the country have a tremendous
challenge ahead in meeting this terrorist threat, and I hope
that my comments, my statement and my response to your
questions today in sharing my viewpoints are in some small way
perhaps helpful in preserving our freedom and our values.
I would just like to say at this time may God bless America
and may God bless and assist our Nation's leaders as we begin
this struggle against terrorism and for the safety of our
country. Thank you, and I'll be happy to answer any questions
at the appropriate time.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Marshall follows:]
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Mr. Souder. Thank you very much.
Mr. Nunez.
Mr. Nunez. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Mr. Cummings,
members of the subcommittee. I would like to add and supplement
the written statement that I have made today with a few related
points.
First of all, I think this is clearly a historic, perhaps
once in a lifetime opportunity for Congress to fix a number of
problems within the Federal law enforcement community that have
existed for many, many years, and I think it is very important
that we take as much time as is possible to make sure we get it
right. I understand the President's desire to get a bill before
the end of the year, but it is more important that this be done
properly than that it be done quickly.
I guess after many years of thinking about the interaction
of all of these different Federal agencies, the transformations
that have taken place, it is clear to me that there is no
perfect solution to the reform and reorganization of Federal
law enforcement. It may never be possible to come up with a
logical plan that applies equally well to all agencies and all
missions and goals.
There are good arguments that can be made in favor of the
single mission agencies, if you will, there are good arguments
for large multi-purpose agencies. I think what's more important
is that the objective is how we balance the competing concerns
of, on the one hand, maintaining a focus on high priority crime
problems and, on the other hand, how to do so while maintaining
some flexibility with our resources, with our budgets and doing
all of it as cost effectively and efficiently as possible.
The best way to ensure that a priority is being dealt with
properly is to create an organization whose primary purpose is
to pursue that objective and then hold it accountable for the
results. I assume that is part of the reason why this new
Department of Homeland Security is being created.
I think in the past the creation of DEA in 1973 is a
perfect example of identifying a major problem and
concentrating the resources in one agency. DEA has one
priority, that's drugs. The FBI, on the other hand, has been
the opposite example. Multiple missions, multiple priorities,
too many things are competing with each other for priorities.
It's almost a flavor of the month.
I recall going to meetings back in the late 1980's, early
1990's with the Attorney General, suggesting to the FBI that we
needed--that we were going to identify a new priority, and the
FBI would say, fine, we can do that but tell me what to stop
doing. Everything can't be No. 1. And when you look at the
FBI's agenda they clearly have a lot of work to do in areas
that we care about.
The major concern is that by bringing so many different
agencies together in this new department that their non-
terrorism responsibilities can get lost in the shuffle. For
example, the Secret Service has criminal law jurisdictions
having nothing to do with terrorism: Counterfeiting, credit
card fraud, other investment fraud or financial crimes. INS
clearly has missions beyond terrorism, certainly related:
Customs, trade facilitation and enforcement. There are drug
enforcement issues, money laundering issues. There's all kinds
of criminal law priorities or interests that need to be
protected.
The choice in the past has really been between
consolidation and cooperation. We can merge agencies or
consolidate them in a way to refocus the resources, and again,
1973, that was the method that brought DEA into creation. But
this has also proved in the past to be the most difficult way
to do things. It requires a huge effort to overcome the
bureaucratic and political obstacles. It is very difficult to
do. Since then cooperation and coordination among agencies and
departments is the way we have chosen to address these
problems.
This is the way the Federal Government has proceeded since
the early 1980's with the creation of various multi-agency
tasks forces and HIDTA programs and various cross-designation
programs. There's a multitude of examples, the Office of
National Drug Control Policy itself, this focus on combining
the resources of various agencies toward priority objectives
without changing the agencies themselves. As I said, it takes a
lot of effort but it has been done successfully in the past.
But I should point out that transferring different agencies
into one department does not necessarily solve the problem or
end the debate.
During my time at Treasury in the early 1990's, I was
amazed at how often the four principle Treasury agencies
managed to keep themselves separate from their sister agencies.
They all had their own budgets. They all had their own cars,
uniforms, radios, radio frequencies. I mean everything was
different. Everything was separate. They had separate offices
in every city where they were located. They had in some cases--
I remember going to Thailand in the early 1990's, and there was
one Secret Service agent and one Customs agent and they had two
separate offices, two separate secretaries, two separate xerox
machines. Everything was duplicative, with jurisdictional
overlaps between Customs and ATF and various other agencies.
And it is not just at Treasury that we've seen this. The
same problems exist within the Justice Department, where the
FBI seems always to have come out better than its sister
Justice agencies in the budget battles over many, many years.
INS, on the other hand, always seems to have been at the bottom
of the food chain, the stepchild of DOJ for many decades.
So just putting everyone in the same department does not
necessarily lead to equal or fair treatment or effective law
enforcement. Every agency has a constituency and a support
structure, including here in Congress. These entities push the
parochial needs of their own agencies without regard to the
needs of others. So coordination within this new department may
be as difficult as coordination between agencies in different
departments. The fact that the FBI and INS were both part the
Justice Department on and before September 11th doesn't seem to
have helped them share information or work together to deal
with the threat of terrorism.
Consolidation of inspectors is another issue. I've
discussed that in my written statement. I won't go over it any
more. I mean, there is, it seems to me, a certain logic to
taking Immigration inspectors and Customs inspectors and
combining them in a generic special force. They are already
cross-designated at most ports of entry. They do the same work,
yet we have two separate chains of command, two separate
everything, and my experience in the U.S. attorney's office in
San Diego for many years was that it was quite ineffective to
try to bring these two inspections forces into some sort of
balance.
So I believe that some kind of consolidation of the
inspection services makes sense. But the critical thing is to
try to do it in such a way that the agencies that rely upon
them, whether it's Customs or Immigration or DEA, the FBI, that
there is a mechanism in place to ensure that the inspection
agencies can communicate properly with the agencies they
support.
The creation of this new Department of Homeland Security
and the transfer of dozens of agencies from other departments
is obviously a huge undertaking, involving a whole range of
issues, some advantages, some potential disadvantages. The
issue is whether the subjugation of the mission, original
missions of all of these disparate agencies to the priority
mission of homeland security can be done without damaging the
purposes for which these agencies were originally created and I
think for which really we continue to want them to perform.
So can traditional law enforcement's function survive this
new priority? The answer has to be yes. The question is how do
we do it?
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Nunez follows:]
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Mr. Souder. Thank you very much.
Mr. Kruhm.
Mr. Kruhm. Chairman Souder, members of the subcommittee,
thanks for inviting me to speak this afternoon on agency
missions and their new responsibilities under the proposed
Department of Homeland Security. I will abbreviate my prepared
text to stay within my allotted time. I trust you will get an
opportunity to review my comments, and if you have any
questions at a later time I will be willing to assist you in
any way that I can.
I am aware of your and your staff's concern that the new
department and its suborganizations will be so counterterrorism
focused that they will lose their ability to continue with
their historical missions. I don't believe that will be the
case. What I see as an inhibitor of mission performance is the
same issues that have plagued the agencies for some time. For
the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the U.S. Border
Patrol it is the continued attempt to respond to the dual
system of immigration, one legal, one illegal. It hasn't
worked, and I do not believe it ever will.
The tragic consequence of the dual system is the
dehumanization of the migrants, the facilitation of other
criminal activities, and the adverse impact on organizations
like DEA, Customs, Coast Guard, Federal prosecutors and others.
I don't feel these other organizations can be truly effective
until the impact of illegal migration is resolved.
In the case of the Border Patrol, their mission is to
interdict whatever attempts to enter this country illegally
between ports of entry through its activities on the border and
in other operations. They have done a good job in the face of
an immigration policy designed for failure.
Consider what they have been up against with the statistics
of the Border Patrol making their 40 millionth arrest late in
fiscal year 2000 or early 2001. Drug smugglers, terrorists,
criminals and other nefarious characters have been intermingled
in those 40 million people. The Border Patrol has arrested a
lot, but many have eluded detection. Over time the bad guys
have learned to use migrants as cover for other criminal
operations. They also take away the migrants' humanity through
extortion, robbery, rape and murder.
Sixteen migrants were found dead this past week in the
desert near Tucson, Arizona, a mother and two children this
weekend. That is just 1 week in just one location. In addition,
the migrants provide the smugglers with the cashflow to
maintain their operation so that they can make even greater
profit from others who want illegal access to the United
States.
So you see counterterrorism operations, at least for the
Border Patrol, has always been part of the mission. The job of
the Border Patrol is to interdict whatever enters illegally. If
it is not a migrant case, then the Border Patrol hands the case
off to appropriate investigative organizations, whether it be
Customs, DEA, FBI or other responsible agencies or departments.
An issue that Congress and Homeland Security should be
concerned about is mission creep. I do not believe this
government can afford to have all of the interested border
agencies lined up on a bluff, sitting in their cars, waiting
for their individual case to come along, nor do we need two
armed enforcement groups in the same area unknown to each
other. Homeland Security's leadership will only be effective
when it has a clear mission statement, one that ensures the
protection of our free society and its citizens, a mission
statement that understands each independent role and the common
responsibilities of its organizations. It must allow this new
department to be precise, responsive and agile, not a massive
organization, rather one able to respond to the needs of and
ensure the success of the appropriate organizations already
established.
I would hope the Department of Homeland Security would be
as Mohammad Ali described his boxing style, float like a
butterfly, sting like a bee.
Again, thank you for this opportunity to discuss some of my
observations from working with many of the agencies involved in
the security of the United States of America.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Kruhm follows:]
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Mr. Souder. Thank you very much.
Mr. Banks.
Mr. Banks. Chairman Souder, Mr. Cummings, members of the
subcommittee, I want to thank you for this opportunity to
testify. My remarks are going to reflect a perspective of
having spent 28 years in the U.S. Customs Service and having
the opportunity and the pleasure at times of working with every
one of the agencies and the people at this table.
It's my belief that the proposed consolidation of the
border and transportation security agencies, including Customs,
into a new Department of Homeland Security would be a positive
step for the protection of this country and the American
people.
Now, as much as I support the concept of this
consolidation, I think your subcommittee is absolutely correct
in being concerned about the effect that this reorganization
could have on the vast array of law enforcement issues,
terrorism, narcotics and a huge number of other things that are
important for the security of this border and the American
people.
Customs enforces a whole variety of laws. They look for
weapons of mass destruction, they do money laundering, they do
narcotics and narcotics investigations. But Customs also
enforces some 400 laws for 40 other agencies at our borders,
and many of those laws concern public health and safety issues.
Many concern trade laws and even collecting $20 billion in duty
every year. It is absolutely essential that these activities
continue into the future under any reorganization.
I believe there are just a few critical factors that really
need to be kept in mind as the review goes forward about this
new Department of Homeland Security and an amalgamation of
these agencies in order to ensure that all of these missions
are sustained under a consolidation.
The first and foremost point is that--now, this is Customs.
Customs is a complete entity that needs to be moved intact into
the new Homeland Security Department. There have been
discussions of perhaps trade issues or investigative issues or
other things could be potentially split apart or moved out of
the agency. Well, I guess my recommendation to you is that the
field units and the work in Customs all focused on border is so
inextricably intertwined that it would be a huge mistake to
split this apart. The trade components, the trade experts in
the agency, and the investigative components all share vital
information across all of those organizational lines and share
intelligence. The criminal investigators and trade experts are
so interdependent that if you separate them you really do
serious harm to the total enforcement picture. Splitting the
agency as well would only fragment operations.
Is there then going to be another agency that you're going
to deal with at the border and that the international trade
community and that the international airlines would have to
contend with? So No. 1 is take it over whole as a component to
support border security in cooperation with the other agencies
represented here.
The second point is that Customs runs many of the
automation systems that are critical to our borders. These are
the systems that perform all the enforcement screenings of
virtually every person, virtually every piece of cargo,
virtually every conveyance that crosses the U.S. borders. These
automation systems support not just U.S. Customs but also INS
and a whole series, like 28 other law enforcement agencies
within the U.S. Government. These automation systems are so
important that they run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days
a year, and they are absolutely essential, not just for
enforcement but also to ensure that trade and travelers are
facilitated across our borders.
So I guess the point that I would make to you is this is a
fundamental critical issue to sustain those information
systems, to support the entire border, and they need to be
taken over into this new agency as well.
The third and last point that I would make to you is that
U.S. Customs Service has established longstanding partnerships
with the business community that is engaged in international
trade. Now, these partnerships have been essential to make sure
that trade flows smoothly across our borders, because even a
few hour delay at our land borders can shut down manufacturing
plants. But these partnerships have also been instrumental in
improving the enforcement at our borders. Customs has reached
out to the airlines and the ocean carriers to improve the
security process of their international supply chain, and
companies as a result of these partnerships have added more
resources to improve the security of the whole process.
Most recently, Commissioner Bonner launched something
called a Customs Trade Partnership Against Terrorism, and the
whole idea is to have international companies involved in the
transportation and the shipping of international goods, focus
on how to improve the security to make sure that nothing
illicit gets put inside those containers on board those vessels
or on those aircraft. These sorts of partnerships work both
ways. They support both the enforcement side and they support
the trade side.
So in summary, I guess I would say that going toward the
Department of Homeland Security should achieve greater
efficiencies, should achieve greater information sharing,
should eliminate a lot of duplication. But in order to do this,
in order to reach its real potential, I think it's absolutely
essential that this thing be done thoughtfully and that the
best practices that exist within all of these departments are
carefully screened and incorporated into this new department so
that we really do serve to improve the enforcement at our
borders.
Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Banks follows:]
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Mr. Souder. Thank you.
Dr. Flynn.
Mr. Flynn. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is a privilege to be
here today to talk about this very important topic. I think I
come to you by way of spending the last decade looking at
issues, many of which have come before this committee, with
regard to organized crime as a professor at the U.S. Coast
Guard Academy and other places and also with work that I did
with the Hart-Rudman Commission specifically on the issues of
homeland security. If there is one thing I took away from that
experience with that commission, it is that what we saw on
September 11th is how warfare will be conducted in the 21st
century, that one of the ironies of the end of the cold war has
made it such that going toe to toe with America's conventional
military force is a fool's game and America is the Goliath and
our adversaries are going to be creative Davids.
And how do they do this? What's the format of the warfare?
The format looks a lot like organized crime. As we've heard
already by some of the other distinguished members here, it is
essentially the lubricant for conducting your terrorist--for
both raising the cash for the terrorist campaign as well as
getting access into the United States. There is a real
convergence on that issue. The nature of organized crime, as we
found in the 1990's, is that it's rare that criminal
organizations are monolithic or mono-focused. They tend to
diversify. And what we see is that Colombians are not only
involved with cargo theft but they're involved with narcotics
trafficking in south Florida, but they're involved with things
like cargo theft, high technology, moving from a free trade
zone to the Port of Miami. Similar convergence with Chinese
gangs that are not just in the business of smuggling heroin
into the United States but move migrants and also move pirated
software and a whole sundry of other things.
So if we're going to have a war on terrorism, we really
have to be looking at organized crime as very much linked with
that. And if we're going to talk about combatting organized
crime, we have to see it as much broader than just narcotics
interdiction, and that leads us to who are the front line
agencies who are going to be wrestling with that, with those
challenges, and they are in fact many of the agencies that the
administration has recommended be put under this new home, the
Office of Homeland Security.
I would say we've seen three key developments here with
regard to organized crime in the 1990's. One is the
diversification I mentioned. The second is globalization, and
the third is the crime terrorism-guerrilla nexus. Now, these
are important relative to the subject of the hearing today for
the following: The challenges of terrorism and narcotic
interdiction simply cannot be isolated from the issue of
organized crime or generally. And the corollary that flows from
this conclusion is that many of the enforcement activities that
target crime, such as cargo theft, tax evasion, migrant
smuggling, and Internet fraud, will reap important dividends in
fighting narcotics smuggling and terrorist activities in the
U.S. homeland.
Now the complexity of the Homeland Security agenda I argue
requires developing the means to identify transnational
activities and actors that pose little or no risk to the United
States so that limited regulatory enforcement and security
resources can be targeted to those which present a high risk.
Such an approach places a premium on good intelligence and
developing the capacity to practice what cyber security experts
call anomaly detection.
Now, in the computer industry anomaly detection represents
the most promising means for detecting hackers intent on
stealing data or transmitting commuter viruses. The process
involves monitoring the cascading flows of computer traffic
with an eye toward discerning normal traffic. Once that
baseline is established software is written to detect aberrant
traffic. A good computer hacker will try to look as much as
possible like a legitimate user, but because he is not
legitimate he inevitably does something different. Good cyber
security software will detect that variation and deny access.
For those hackers who manage to get through, their breach is
identified and shared so that abnormal behavior can be moved
from the guidance of what is normal and acceptable.
Now, in much the same way the overwhelming majority of
cross-border traffic that moves through the global networks to
the United States and the global community on which they depend
moves in predictable patterns and is the front line agencies
like the Coast Guard and Customs and INS and Border Patrol that
are there monitoring that day-to-day traffic and that have the
relationships with the private sector players, who are
legitimate players, who are part of those processes that
ultimately are going to inform us about something's good, bad
or indifferent.
Now, the key with stressing the importance of anomaly
detection as a tool for identifying and intercepting criminal
or terrorist activity highlights the fact that an important
element of homeland security mission requires that these
frontline agencies must have the means to do well that which
they were traditionally tasked to do; that is, in pursuing
their day-to-day work that they would develop the expertise,
the relationships, and the process and possess the authority to
stop and intercept that which they discover to be aberrant.
Coast Guard men and woman that are out on daily patrols to
interdict drugs and illegal migrants, protect fisheries,
advance safety among recreational boaters and monitor the
movements of hazardous materials on ships or within ports, it
is these folks who are going to have a physical presence and a
requisite presence of mind and authority to pick up on other
nefarious activities. Similarly, it's the Customs inspector who
routinely examines the shipping manifest to ensure compliance
with the U.S. revenue laws that is going to be best positioned
to spot a shipment that makes no commercial sense, such as a
very low cost commodity moving on a high cost conveyance.
Based on the above, getting homeland security right
therefore requires three things, the first a paradigm shift
that moves away from a gates, guards, and guns approach to
security and toward a network risk management approach for
mitigating the threats associated with catastrophic terrorism;
second, that the capacity of the agencies who play the role of
first detectors and first responders in these networks must be
commensurate with the responsibilities they shoulder; and third
and finally, that the work of these agencies must be supported
by enhanced communication and coordination with the national
security intelligence communities.
The obvious question this ambitious agenda raises is can it
be accomplished without a major realignment of those agencies?
I would suggest that the past and post-September 11th
experience to date would answer, would suggest the answer is
no.
In the end, organizing homeland security is really a subset
of the broader challenge of how to work to ensure security is
an organic part of global networks that, one, criminals and
terrorists will increasingly target and exploit and, two, upon
which the United States and the international community
depends. The events of September 11th should have fatally
undermined the prevalent myth of the 1990's that less is more
in advancing globalization. Managing complex, concentrated,
interdependent systems requires protocols and a means to ensure
those protocols are being abided by. Done smartly, this can be
accomplished.
The American people should be able to look forward to a
two-for by combining many of the frontline law enforcement
agencies into the Department of Homeland Security. One, they
will get a more robust capability for detecting and
intercepting terrorists before they arrive or carry out their
attacks on American soil. Second, they also get more capable
agents and agencies in combatting crime. Any effort to tradeoff
the one for the other would only be self-defeating.
Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Flynn follows:]
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Mr. Souder. Thank you. Before moving to questions, I yield
to Congressman Cummings, if you would like to do an opening
statement.
Mr. Cummings. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
In the 9-months that have passed since the tragic attacks
of September 11th, a great number of our government agencies
have shifted their priorities and resources to better position
themselves to fight the war on terrorism. Many of them,
including those tasked with border security, domestic law
enforcement, and drug interdiction, fall within the oversight
and jurisdiction of this subcommittee. Among them are border
agencies such as Customs Service, the Border Patrol, the
Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Coast Guard may
be said to serve on the front lines as they regulate the flow
of people and materials into the United States.
The President's proposal to create a Department of Homeland
Security, like the Lieberman/Thornberry legislation, as the
basis for this direct proposal, would merge the border agencies
and many others into a single cabinet level department. The
reorganization of these agencies will entail substantial
adjustments in addition to those made within each agency to
date. The reorganization will have further ramifications for
the agencies not included in the proposed department, most
notably, the FBI and the CIA.
Already, the FBI is undergoing a major restructuring plan,
as a result of the of which 518 agents have been transferred to
counterterrorism activities, 400 of them from drug
investigations.
Similarly, the Customs service has moved counterterrorism
to the top of its mission and priority list. For the Coast
Guard, post-security has supplanted search and rescue and drug
interdiction operations as its top mission priority. Also,
reflecting a shift in priorities toward anti-terrorism, the
Border Patrol has shifted substantial resources away from the
U.S./Mexico border to the even more vast northern border. And
the Drug Enforcement Administration has contributed hundreds of
agents to the Sky Marshals program, even as intelligence
reports suggested warring roles for a drug trafficking in the
financing of terrorist groups and activities.
Over the past several months, this subcommittee has held a
number of hearings to assess the impact of the heightened
security focus on these agencies and their nonterrorism-related
functions. These include a series of field hearings at border
crossings and sea points around the country. According to some
testimony the subcommittee has received, the heightened focus
on terrorism may actually be helping efforts to discover
illegal drugs and other contraband, since that focus calls for
heightened security scrutiny of persons and materials entering
the country generally. But whether the cumulative effect of the
resource shifting will continue to be positive for the U.S.
counternarcotics efforts and whether other nonterrorism-related
functions will similarly benefit is far from clear, and hardly
a foregone conclusion.
What should be clear is that the war on terrorism must be
waged in a way that does not compromise other vital missions
that homeland security agencies carry out. Ensuring this result
will require careful evaluation and planning, and this
subcommittee and others of the Government Reform Committee have
an important role to play in exercising our jurisdiction over
the proposal to create a Department of Homeland Security.
First among our objectives should be ensuring that the new
department actually streamlines communication and cooperation
between and among the new department's diverse components as
well as the department and other Federal, State, and local
agencies. The importance of efficient intelligence gathering
and information sharing to the homeland security mission has
led some to suggest that the FBI and CIA should also be merged
into the new department. At the same time, the FBI's law
enforcement function has been cited as a reason why the agency
should be kept separate, even though numerous other agencies
with domestic law enforcement responsibilities are included in
the Bush and Lieberman/Thornberry proposals.
So, there is much for us to sift through and to sort out,
and we are fortunate to have a panel of witnesses before us who
possess a wealth of wisdom and experience as former high
ranking agency officials and experts in the areas of homeland
security. I welcome them. I find their--already, their
testimony to be quite interesting, and I look forward to the
questioning phase of our hearing.
Again, Mr. Chairman, I want to thank you for holding this
hearing. I think it is quite timely, and certainly quite
appropriate.
Mr. Souder. Congresswoman Schakowsky, would you like to
make any opening statement?
Ms. Schakowsky. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for convening this
hearing today to examine the possible impact of the creation of
a new Department of Homeland Security. The effect that it will
have on our Federal law enforcement and drug interdiction
efforts.
Since President Bush's June 6th announcement of a proposal
to create a new Department of Homeland Security, numerous
questions have been raised by Members of Congress and the
American public and the media. One question that is worthy of
considerable discussion--and we have had some today, and I
appreciate your input--is the impact the creation of this new
agency will have on critical nonhomeland-security functions of
the agencies the President has proposed for inclusion in the
new department.
For example, among the many duties of the U.S. Coast Guard
is performing search and rescue operations and facilitating
travel for commercial vessels; the Immigration and
Naturalization Service provides numerous fee base services for
legal immigrants; other agencies that may be folded into the
new department are tasked with interdicting illegal drugs and
collecting tariffs. Some have raised concerns that these
critical services may not receive the attention they deserve
from a cabinet secretary whose primary charge is to protect the
homeland. Moreover, some have questioned the wisdom of placing
multiple and possibly competing missions within the same
department.
Another issue worthy of considerable discussion again
raised earlier is the administration's decision not to include
the CIA or FBI in the new department. Some have asked how this
new agency would have prevented the kind of intelligence and
communications failures that led up to the September 11th
attacks. It is not altogether clear whether creation of a new
Department of Homeland Security will guarantee that crucial
intelligence and analysis would make it to those who most need
to be familiar with it, or whether the new agency will simply
add another layer to the top of an already dense bureaucracy. A
fundamental question each of us has and will continue to ask
ourselves and the proponents of the new department is: Will it
make us safer?
To answer that question, we must first take the necessary
steps to identify just what went wrong, and how similar
failures of our system can be prevented in the future. Then we
must make a determination as to whether this new proposal
addresses the problems.
I am not convinced that our first priority ought not to be
addressing those clear failures that led up to September 11th
before we address what may be longer-term problems. I am also
concerned about what impact the transition process alone would
have on existing security and non-security operations of our
various agencies and their employees, and hope to get to some
of those answers through our question-and-answer period. So, I
thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Souder. Thank you. One is, is that what I would like to
say first off, is that hopefully you will each be available to
our staff and us in the next 14 days. I am not saying this is
on a railroad track; railroads don't move this fast.
It looks like for a number of reasons this full committee
is starting this week and will be moving prior to break. It is
clearly in an election year. If we don't move this through the
House before the August recess--which will be an extraordinary
pace, given the multiple jurisdictional and possible select
committee oversight, it is going to be very difficult to get
this conferenced before the end of the session. The goal,
obviously, would be to try to have this done before the
election; if not, then in a special session after the election.
And you can realize that when you are dealing with this many
committees and two bodies, the first steps are coming really
fast. So, we need relatively rapid answers.
It is also clear that we are going to be doing oversight
over this for the rest of our careers, because whenever you
move fast, it means you are going to make some mistakes. The
truth is, however, if we don't move fast, the bureaucratic
inertia may take over here, and we will lose the ability to
move. So, this is a very difficult tradeoff, but it does mean
we have a lot of pressure on us in the next 2 weeks that the
hearings that we had in the--in Congressman Shays' and Weldon's
committee last week on the Thornberry and Lieberman bills were
the--kind of the start of our oversight. And it is also clear
that everybody is tippy-toeing around certain of the things,
and part of the reason we brought you in here today is to try
to see if we can reconcile or treat head-on some of these
questions. And I appreciate your frankness, and I am going to
start to move into some of these questions right away.
And I will like to move through one assumption that Dr.
Flynn--and I want to understand what you had in your testimony.
You said that--because clearly I like the way you said
catastrophic terrorism. In other words, that's what's really
the change here. And the question is, is how much emphasis are
we going to put on catastrophic terrorism versus kind of the
day-to-day terrorism. And, in fact, at this point the numbers
don't equate.
In other words, the risk to our economy, the risks on
narcotics, the risks on child trafficking is far greater than
the catastrophic terrorism. How would you factor that in to the
psychological battle that we are in right now? Because, really,
the tradeoffs we are talking about is, how many resources are
going to catastrophic versus the day-to-day challenges?
Mr. Flynn. Well, I think if we are talking about the
prevention of catastrophic terrorism acts, then the point that
I guess--you know, if I could distill my testimony to a single
sentence, is you cannot do kind counterterrorism, you cannot do
homeland security without basically dealing with a broad range
of crime that has bedeviled us for quite some time. They are
completely intertwined. And so the opportunity there is that by
doing well the traditional crime problems, you are, in fact,
enhancing your capacity to deal with terrorism. You know,
terrorism isn't an enemy; it's a form of warfare. The form of
warfare is, how do I basically take on an adversary that has
complete dominance in the conventional military realm. I have
to try to blend in to the real estate to get at it and look for
the soft underbelly. That's precisely what criminals have been
doing for a long, long time.
And I guess the second piece of that is that one part--the
goal--there is military value in engaging in catastrophic
terrorism. It is not just killing Americans in large numbers
and toppling landmarks; it is getting the subsequent
disruption, the economic disruption, and the societal
disruption that flows from the event. We did to ourselves more
were harm on a power basis than what the terrorists did to us
on September 11th by closing all our seaports, closing our
borders, effectively, and grounding all our aviation. We
essentially imposed a blockade on our economy as the only tool
we had to manage the risk associated with that event. That's
because the agencies, the former heads of which are represented
here--the only tool they had in the tool bag in this crazy
world we are in here is to turn off the world to make it more
secure.
So, enhancing their capacity to do their job both helps on
the detection ideally of bad people doing bad things initially,
but it also helps us to deal with the postmortem, to turn the
system back on again, and therefore start to chip away at the
military value of doing these kinds of horrific acts. Again,
it's a two-fer you get. But, if you try to isolate these
things, it is self-defeating for homeland security, and it sure
as heck will be self-defeating for these other vital interests.
Mr. Souder. What was your reaction to, I think it was Mr.
Nunez's statement that, to have an agency that focused on anti-
terrorism, and not have the FBI, who has been designated as to
be the focus on anti-terrorism, not in that agency? How do you
reconcile that?
Mr. Flynn. Well, it is clear that intelligence is a very
key part in being able to identify what limited resources
should target; and the FBI has some command on that
intelligence on domestic ground. But it also is that much of
the intelligence comes through some of the things that Mr.
Banks laid out here: It's the day-to-day monitoring of
commercial data. If the Customs agent says, what are we doing
importing cement posts from Colombia when there are cheap and
affordable cement here in the United States, that leads you
into drugs or could lead you into a weapon of mass destruction.
So, part of, though, the focus, I think, of the rationale
was in the Hart-Rudman Commission on this issue, was that
ultimately they would--at least a stepping point, a stepping-
off point is if we can bring together, hobble together what I
call the meeters and greeters of people, conveyances, and
cargo, the folks who are most likely to become the first
permanent cross to say, who are you and why are you here, the
authority to basically examine them and make sure they are
tethered back to the national security apparatus. Those
agencies right now are orphans of their parent departments.
They have not been well served by their committee oversight in
general on the Hill, and they sure as heck have not been well
served by the Office of Management and Budget.
So, we are talking about, potentially at least, an advocate
for their core functions that, if the synergy is there, can
provide us homeland security. It's the strip-away elements of
it to do the gates, guards, and guns, then it's just foolery.
Mr. Souder. So I understand--let me, before I yield to Mr.
Cummings--you are really arguing that the idea of leaving the
FBI out was, is this is supposed to be the Department of Border
Security.
Mr. Flynn. Clearly, what the President put up front was
that was one of the four elements, was to bring together the
border and to bring rationale to them. That makes a good deal
of sense to me. He also puts emphasis obviously on intelligence
within that, that keeps the FBI and CIA out.
Now, some of the--I'm of mixed views on it, but I think
overall there is a lot of intelligence that's collected from
open sources, from regulatory data and so forth that right now
nobody can connect, and bringing it together and fusing it
would give us a great deal of what I was trying to say in my
testimony, anomaly detection to say, wait, this isn't right. We
need to examine that.
We also need a way to funnel in the intel. I mean, the
challenge is that homeland security become all the U.S.
Government at some stage. So the FBI, should it be in there? I
think the same rationale is true, that many things are done for
counter-crime and law enforcement and the intelligence goes
with it, it's good for homeland security. It can fit within the
construct, but there also is some rationale for bringing--for
just the existing proposals of--because these really do
represent the meeters and greeters for people conveyances, and
cargo. They are, at least, being put under one roof.
Mr. Souder. That's a step in the right direction basically
needed.
Mr. Flynn. I mean----
Mr. Souder. In other words, that could include an airport,
it could include a port. But, basically, you are talking about
some sort of crossing into an American zone. That's what you
mean by meeters and greeters?
Mr. Flynn. That's right. Border patrol, INS for people,
Customs and agriculture for goods, and for Coast Guard for
conveyances, and TSA for airplanes and the rest of the
conveyances as well.
Mr. Souder. Mr. Cummings.
Mr. Cummings. Mr. Flynn, again, I have got to ask you this.
As I was listening to you, I was just trying to--you know, one
of the things that you learn from being in government is that
you can set policy but you still have got to deal with people.
And I was just wondering, as you see it, if you were to bring
all the agencies together, do you--you think it would be very
difficult to get the kind of cooperation that's necessary to
make it work? And, what kind of safeguards would you put in to
make sure it does work?
Do you follow what I'm saying? If people are used to doing
things independently--I mean, I just look at some things that
happen in--like in neighborhoods, in small areas, where people
have their own turfs, and then just the whole idea of sharing
just doesn't fit into what they have been doing all their
lives--all their careers, rather. And I was just wondering, you
know, how do you--how do you make sure--and I believe it can
work; I'm just wondering, how you make sure that you get
maximum cooperation for all the things that you talked about,
communication and etc?
Mr. Flynn. Well, I guess as a starting point, I would say
I'm not sure how things would be more dysfunctional than they
are right now with regard to, you know, these agencies
cooperating and coordinating, precisely because they have to
answer to so many different parents, whether it's the committee
oversight that security is not their priority or many of their
other missions, or whether the departments who have largely
been, say, not only kind and gentle to them as they have gone
about and done their business.
Could the system we have right now created a gaping hole
for the people to do what they did on September 11th; and I
argue we are in a more dangerous time post-September 11th than
there because of the example of that. They made it look easy,
and they also demonstrated the profound disruption we will do
to ourselves when faced with these catastrophic events.
So need--if this were a crisis that were going to go away
in another year, then I would say reorganization would be a
fool's game. But we are talking about essentially, as I argue,
a warfare we'll be conducting in the 21st century.
Reorganization is going to be a part of that. People will be--
people will be conservative. They'll be difficult. But part of
the challenge is getting them to see that they are all pulling
together toward the same end, which is providing the safety and
security for the American people while still allowing us to
connect and engage to that broader world out there.
I think with somebody who is a first-year cabinet secretary
advocating for them, and--that the prospects for that
coordination are going to improve. But there's going to be some
omelet-making. There's no question about that.
Mr. Cummings. Now, we've heard several opinions as to some
people say we need to--I think the President sees it as a very
urgent matter, and I think a lot of people do. Others say well,
let's--and it's been said here today, let's go slow and go
careful. Do you think the folks who did their analysis for,
say, the September 11th attack, when they see what has happened
post September 11th--I mean, when you take all of that into
consideration, do you see that--this to be a very urgent thing,
or do you think in their eyes it's something that they would
want to take advantage of before we got this together?
Mr. Flynn. I think it's absolutely urgent that the U.S.
Government come to grips with the profound challenges that
homeland security present us, and that includes reorganization;
one, because another event will happen. But, second, it will
happen, and the American people are going to be much less
forgiving of the government's inability to protect itself from
it, and that will challenge the core legitimacy of the
government. If it looks in the postmortem that we are still
doing like we are right now, chatting in Long Beach and L.A.,
where 44 percent of all the containers headed to the country
come into, where we are chatting about who is going to pay the
sentry to check an ID card and that's the state of homeland
security 9 months into this, then I think the people are going
to want to throw out the whole thing and start anew.
So I think there is a real urgency because of the threat,
but real urgency as well, because this is an issue of
government legitimacy. Can we organize ourselves to deal with a
new threat? We have a national security establishment that was
built for an away game, to basically solve security problems
water's edge out. The bad guys have changed the playbook; they
have come here, and will continue to come here, and we have got
to look at how we can organize ourselves to confront this new
warfare.
Mr. Cummings. When we heard a few weeks ago Vice President
Cheney say that further attacks were inevitable and that there
was not a whole lot we could do about it, do you think that
statement would be much different if we were--we had this
Office of Homeland Security--and I'm not trying to get you to
speak for him; I'm just asking you your opinion.
Mr. Flynn. Sure.
Mr. Cummings. If it were intact and it was working and the
coordination going on, I mean, do you--you see attacks, you
just said that, coming in the future. Do you think we increase
our ability to counter them through this effort? And, if so, to
what degree, assuming we had it up and running at the max.
Mr. Flynn. I think the heart of the issue is that, how much
security is enough? That's what we are really wrestling with
here and how much--how we organize ourselves to provide that
security. I think the key is this threshold: That inevitably we
will have incidents. This is--Americans were not perfectly
secure prior to September 11th; they are not going to be
perfectly secure post-September 11th. We will have incidents.
The key is how to respond after that incident. If the
conclusion is this was a result of a correctable breach in
security versus the conclusion being the absence of security,
then the Americans--the response by American people is much
different.
If the assumption is this was the result of a correctable
breach in security, you'll do the analysis to fix the breach
and get on with life. If the view is the absence of security,
you'll shut the thing down and insist on--basically, you start
anew. And that's where the terrorists' goal is in this and the
military value, is get that profound disruption.
So our objective I think is getting sufficient capability
that, one, we can actually do a postmortem when an event
happens, but second, demonstrate we have the capacity to repair
breaches to security. And I think the organization that the
President proposes gets us further down that pike. I worry very
much that if an event happens very soon with the current
infrastructure and we do the postmortem, then the American
people are just going to be enraged at what they see.
Mr. Cummings. Thank you very much.
Mr. Souder. Congresswoman Schakowsky.
Ms. Schakowsky. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Flynn mentioned how--the importance of meeters and
greeters being part of this whole security apparatus, but I'm
concerned that meeters and greeters--particularly, I'm looking
at the Immigration and Naturalization Service. I have a
district that is rich with immigrants from all over the globe.
It is kind of a gateway to the United States, the north side of
Chicago and some of the suburban areas there. And about 80
percent of the calls that come to my office deal with basically
inefficiencies of the INS, dealing with the service aspects of
it.
And I am concerned that the overall message of including
immigration functions such as deciding asylum cases or handling
unaccompanied minors or processing citizenship, etc., becomes
lost in an agency that has a new focus, and in the meantime, we
have done a whole bunch of work that this House created
actually eliminated the INS, put it in the Justice Department,
separated the two functions; and now it looks like we are
scrapping that idea and putting it into this new homeland
security.
I am concerned about these essentially non-security
functions. The people who call me already are made to feel lots
of times like criminals or terrorists when they are here
legally and trying to get through the system and become
citizens. So, I am concerned about this merging, and would like
Mr.--is it Kruhm?--to respond to that.
Mr. Kruhm. I think the issue for INS is dealing with the
numbers. At a minimum, every year they touch in some way, form
or manner over 500 million people. It is just an incredible
job. What people don't understand is when we extend a benefit
to a whole new group of people, in a lot of cases people who
have gotten here by either fraud coming through the ports of
entry, or, more likely, by getting here illegally. We extend a
benefit to those people, and they eventually get a legal status
in this country; then they can apply for benefits for family
members. And it's like reading the Book of Exodus out of the
Bible.
Ms. Schakowsky. That's my whole problem with it. There are
lots of people here who are here perfectly legally and who are
finding that the INS can't handle--it takes 4 years to get an
answer and to get a date for their swearing in ceremony, etc.
And it's precisely that sort of attitude that views many of
these legal immigrants who come here for a better life. And
that's what America is about, and that presumably is what we
are fighting for here. I am concerned that function gets lost.
I understand what you are saying; there are people who come
here illegally; we need to address that issue. But I am talking
about the service function of the INS now being in an agency
that directs itself to security and law enforcement, etc.
Mr. Kruhm. Just, if I may respond very quickly. When INS
sets its priorities and parameters and its workload for the
future, it's based on X number of cases to deal with. And when
the--when an unknown additional group gets thrown on them, the
resources don't flow with that or flow as quickly. And so it
immediately creates backlogs, and these backlogs fester and
continue on and on. We need a legal system of immigration. We
need that rich heritage to remain with this country. But the
adverse impact of illegal immigration or illegal migration is
enormous. It creates a whole new culture in vast areas of our
borders, and this whole new culture is exacerbating. It's
adding to the load of INS, and on a daily, minute-by-minute
basis, they get further and further behind. And, in my opinion,
our government needs to address this issue. It needs to set
what legal immigration is and allow that to happen, and no one
else gets legal status, no matter how they get here.
In addition to that, INS, even if they do arrest somebody
and run them into the deportation process and a final order of
deportation is issued, nothing happens. There are--and I don't
have the exact figure, but I know somewhere between 350- and
375,000 final orders of deportation to remove people from the
United States, and no one is going after them. It just
compounds itself. It's one on top of another on top of another.
And when you have these things occurring, and then--pardon me--
but if Congress or the administration extends a benefit, gives
authorized employment or gives an amnesty program, then the
people waiting, then the host countries or the source countries
see a reason why they should also try the illegal system
because the end result is the same. And if you look at what is
occurring on the border--and in my prepared text I talk about
criminal enterprise zones. You have kids who are going to
civics class in high school in the daytime and smuggling at
night. And they start off with smuggling migrants; they
graduate to smuggling drugs, and they will smuggle anything for
money. And this whole issue of illegal migration needs to be
addressed because it just is so intertwined.
Ms. Schakowsky. Let me just say, your answer is compounding
my concern about this. The President of the United States
believes that those two functions should be separated, service
and the law enforcement aspect. I think it needs to, in order
to serve well the many immigrants who legally come to embrace
this country for what it is. Thank you.
Mr. Souder. Thank you. If it is OK with the other Members,
what I think I will do is go to 10 minutes to the next round;
so, if you want to get into a question, we can go a little
longer. I have got a series of things.
One is that, I want to ask you this general question, and
then I'm going to immediately move to another one. But, if you
could get back to us--with any suggestions you have on this--by
Friday. If there are parts in the homeland--let me first say.
What's unusual about the Government Reform Committee and the
way this is going to be referred in oversight is that we have
cross-jurisdictional concerns. Every other subcommittee can
only deal with the things inside their committee; so, Judiciary
will deal with judiciary; Agriculture will deal with
agriculture, Energy and Commerce will deal with energy and
commerce. But we can offer amendments to the full bill that
have to do with anything when it comes to this committee.
So, if there are parts in this homeland security bill that
you think we ought to debate taking out or things that we ought
to debate putting in, would you clarify that for me? I am
interested and I presume other Members would be interested,
based on your experience.
Now, let me give you one example. And I will continue with
Mr. Kruhm. Are we saying your name correctly?
Mr. Kruhm. Yes, sir.
Mr. Souder. Is that pronounced right?
One of the things that every Member of Congress deals with
is with our embassies, because on legal immigration questions,
we deal with the embassy, even if we started dealing with the
INS in a regional office. In my case, it might be the Omaha
office that my staff person deals with. Why, if we are trying
to get control over tracking terrorists and/or other illegals
who are dealing with criminal trafficking, wouldn't that first
desk clearance be included under this agency?
Mr. Kruhm. The immigration process requires a visa to come
in the United States. And there is a very important role by the
U.S. State Department. So, it's for--in order for a person to
come here legally, they go through a review process--it's a
marriage of both justice and State--and obtaining the visa.
They bring the visa with them when they come to the port of
entry, and then they are processed by the Immigration and
Naturalization Service. So--and when you are looking at
Homeland Security, you know, I looked at the proposal and they
said this agency is in, this agency is out.
When you look at all of government that has--that touches
homeland security in some way--as I was talking to one of the
other panel members before we came in, our Federal prison
systems are going to have to be an incredible source of
intelligence. Where do they fit in this process? Who brings
them in? Who consults with them? Who ensures that flow of
intelligence comes in to where it has to go and is processed
and acted on if necessary? So, it is an incredible task, but--
and what we need to do is be concerned whether we create a
large ponderous organization, or one that is very agile.
Mr. Souder. I want to get back to this, because it is an
example of a specific thing that I don't understand. I
understand that we have a huge intelligence question here. In
other words, we have attempted to put some of the agencies
together, but we have actually left out the biggest part of
intelligence; and, intelligence is critical when you are with
the Customs agents or INS or Border Patrol agent at an airport
or wherever you are at. If you don't have the intelligence, the
whole system breaks down. But we are going to apparently have
not all that consolidated. But what I don't understand is if
you are checking, as I understand, at the border someone who is
coming through, the first step is, do they have a visa? Right?
Mr. Kruhm. They have to have a visa in order to come into
the country as an immigrant or as a visitor. Now, there are
some countries that----
Mr. Souder. Then why wouldn't that be in this department?
Mr. Kruhm. You are going to have to ask someone over at the
White House.
Mr. Souder. Do you have--Dr. Flynn.
Mr. Flynn. Yes. I am strongly of the view that Consulate
Affairs should be included in this precisely because of that
role. You know, the average consulate official is spending
under a minute reviewing an application, and then here we face
mounds of time and expense trying to sort things out after the
fact. It is the orphan of the State Department, which is the
orphan of the National Security Establishment. So, it is not
a--particularly robust capability. It needs to be. And that
would be one player that I see as a glaring omission that
should be included in this.
Mr. Souder. I mean, and all of us have visited embassies
and we appreciate how hard the people are working through. I
mean, they are lined up early in the morning, they stand there
at the embassy; it's often the junior people at the embassy
that are standing there trying to sort out whether the
different people have legitimate forms or not. And we also--we
are not going to resolve in this bill this legal/illegal
question, but we need to do that, because I think almost all
Members of Congress have this frustration that we get involved
trying to argue whether somebody can come over and visit for a
wedding when we have millions of people coming in illegally.
And it's almost like the INS's position is: Since we can't
do anything about this over here, we are going to really come
down hard on here because it's a real person we can actually
talk to, because we can't figure out how to deal with the
other. And then politically and economically in this country,
clearly we are going to continue to be inconsistent on our--if
we--how we sort through those deportations is going to be a
long-term challenge, because if we deported everybody we would
collapse our economy; on the other hand, by not doing it, we
are encouraging more people to come. We are going to need--the
President started to address that; September 11th set us back.
I think you have raised some questions today that long-term we
have to deal with.
I want to raise in another line here with Mr. Marshall, if
I can. The FBI has announced that basically they are pulling
out of drug enforcement; that goes over to DEA now. What
precisely does that mean for DEA? What was FBI doing that DEA
wasn't doing? Presumably, I would hope, not a lot of overlap,
but I presume there was some overlap. What would be some
differences? It looked to me like giving them multiple tasks
that we had already given the FBI, and they were drowning from
everything from S& Ls to, as was alluded to here, to other
types of things.
We already had the FBI pretty well loaded up, and they
seemed to be, as you boosted the number at DEA regional offices
and task forces, letting DEA--for example, in Indiana, DEA took
over the lead in the task forces, which, a few years ago,
everybody would have been scrambling to be the head of a task
force; and, that the FBI might have had some of this occurring
already.
Could you give us a concrete example of how you see this
playing through? Does this mean more DEA agents in the United
States as opposed to overseas a disproportionate amount of
requests in that area? Intelligence? Is it that you kicked over
in some cases, if it became a larger systemwide thing, you
worked at busting and bringing them down, and then the FBI
tried to bring the networking together, which was part of the
theory of organized crime? How do you see this, and what do we
need to be looking at for what is DEA going to need to pick up
the FBI functions?
Mr. Marshall. Well, let me start out by saying that the
theoretical concept and framework for drug enforcement in our
country was, and still is, the Presidential Reorganization Plan
Number Two, which created DEA, and made DEA the lead single
mission agency in the area of drug enforcement. Now, over the
years, we came to see very clearly that there are many other
types of crime, and now terrorism, that relate in some lesser
or greater fashion to drug trafficking.
In the particular arena of the FBI, they were dealing with
crimes of all sorts, organized crime, many other types of
crime. And basically you look at a reality--the reality of a
situation is that crime breeds crime; and, where you find one
type of crime, you often find some other type of crime.
So, I think the difference between the DEA and the FBI and
many of the other agencies that are in the drug arena is that
the DEA has the single focus and the lead role in drug
enforcement. I think that you look at the other agencies as
having a primary mission with the mission of drugs as probably
an ancillary thing that they focus on in the context of
pursuing their other primary missions.
Now, in reality, there was a great deal of cooperation,
continues to be a great deal of cooperation between DEA and the
FBI and a lot of other agencies as well, for that matter.
But I think as this thing plays out, Mr. Chairman, what we
need to ensure is that we have a framework--and a good model
would be that Reorganization Plan No. Two--we have a framework
which allows for DEA to continue in its role and even enhance
its role, I would say, as the lead anti-drug agency.
I would also comment that as we look to the FBI diminishing
their role in drug enforcement, if the same thing could happen
in Customs or the Coast Guard and many of the over agencies
that are involved in some way in drug enforcement, as those
resources may diminish to go after more and more of the
homeland security mission, I believe that those resources
should have a corresponding issue within DEA. And, if the issue
is organized crime, there should be a corresponding increase
there; if the increase is weapons, there should be a
corresponding increase there. Because all of the crime and
drugs and violence and terrorism are so intricately intertwined
that if you don't focus on a total law enforcement picture and
fight a total law enforcement struggle against crime in
general, then you are not going to be able to make too much
impact on the terrorism issue as well.
Mr. Souder. Mr. Cummings.
Mr. Cummings. I just want to followup on that. I want to
just bring it to a local level so I can set the framework for a
question, Mr. Marshall.
In Baltimore, what we saw right around September 11th is
that there was a lot of emphasis placed on security, trying to
guard outports. You know, we were just kind of up in the air.
Nobody knew what to do, really. And what we also saw is, in a
short period of time, our murder rates skyrocketed in a short
period of time right around that time. And I guess, you know,
when I look at--I think all of us agree, we have got to do
something about terrorism, we have got to deal with this. And I
think the entire Congress feels very strongly about that.
But at the same time, as you kind of--I think all of you
have heard from us in our questions, in our statements, one of
the fears is that while we are fighting terrorism--which we
must do--how do we make sure that the domestic front, which we
are supposedly protecting--and this is what I hear from my
constituents, they want to fight terrorism. But they keep
hearing this stuff like what the chairman just asked you about.
And they have got drugs deep into their neighborhoods. And
they'll say, yeah, we are really concerned about folks flying
planes into buildings, but at the same time we are fighting--in
their words--terror every day, where people, young people are
being shot down and drugs destroying their neighborhoods.
So they see this every day. They see New York--and they
consider it very serious, but they see New York as something
that happened; it was very catastrophic. They feel bad about
it. But then they say, right here where we live, we deal with
it every day destroying our children.
And so I guess what I'm trying to go to, Mr. Marshall, is
when we move those--we start putting that emphasis on
terrorism. And some of you all--others may want to help me with
this one.
But let's say bringing all of this stuff under this
homeland security department. Do we--do we, in fact, minimize
the possibility or probability that we don't truly cover the
domestic piece the way we have been? And, if that is so, then
how do we, in structuring this office, do we make sure? And it
may have to be an individual--you know, each one of you, the
places that you represented, may be an individual agency kind
of thing. But how do we make sure that doesn't happen? Because
I'm telling you, I think a lot of the American people are
really struggling with this whole thing, because they worry
about their day-to-day situation, but they are also worried
about terrorism.
So, why don't you take a stab at that.
Mr. Marshall. I think you are right on target, Mr.
Cummings. In fact, with the comments that you just had, I think
you could have written 15 or 20 percent of the statement that I
provided to this committee.
You have to look at, I think, terrorism on a couple of
different planes. And I believe it was Mr. Flynn, in either his
statement or one of the questions who referred to catastrophic
terrorism. And we have to address certainly terrorism on that
level, and that is the most visible, I think it is the most
perhaps psychologically damaging to the Nation as a whole. But
then you have this whole other level of terrorism going on in
our country, and it's gone on for a long, long time, and that
is, criminals who impose terrorism on their very neighborhoods.
I went to--here, not too long ago when I was still
administrator of DEA, I went to a neighborhood called the
Badlands in Philadelphia. And the things that I saw there just
absolutely stunned me. I could not imagine in my--I mean, in my
worst nightmare I could not imagine raising my family in
circumstances like that, where good and decent people were
literally held prisoner in their own home, afraid to walk the
street, afraid to go to the corner grocery store, afraid to go
out to dinner or to a movie, those kinds of things.
And it seems to me, and in the months after September 11th,
that kind of terrorism is every bit as real as the
macroterrorism or the catastrophic terrorism that we are
seeing. And the terror that is imposed upon an elderly woman
who is prisoner in her own home and can't go out on the
sidewalk for fear of getting mugged is every bit as real to
those people in those neighborhoods as the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon images are to the country as a whole.
Now, we need to look at that and fight the terrorism on
both planes, and we have, I think, for a long time been
reluctant to admit that drug crime and violent crime is
terrorism, but in fact it is. And out of the proper duty to our
citizens, we have to fight that. But as a more practical
matter, in fighting that kind of terrorism, we also are able to
impact the catastrophic terrorism, because, after all, it is
much of what goes on in drug consumption neighborhoods and
venues that fuels much of the catastrophic terrorism that we
see, and in the future, will fuel it to a much greater degree
than we see now.
Mr. Cummings. But does this legislation do that? In other
words, how does this--how does this bring everything under the
Homeland Security Department? How does it--how do we make sure
that we still strike that balance?
Let me tell you what happens in my neighborhood. And I live
in the inner city. And I can tell you, when they heard about--
when they heard what some of these--the bad guys heard about
September 11th--it's just like when people see like the thing
that happened in Watts a few years ago, when they take
advantage of a situation. But when they heard that we were
trying to secure the city, they said, oh, oh. This is the time.
The policemen are now--they have got to be--our resources are
limited and so now they are doing the security thing. And so
the next thing--you know, I think that's why the murder rate
goes up. And that's just my theory.
But I'm just wondering, how do we make sure that we, in
crafting this, don't send that same message out that we have
now sort of gotten away from the domestic peace and
concentrated and--you know what I'm trying to say. And we are
just concentrating on the catastrophic but not concentrating on
the other stuff? Because drugs is a major deal.
Mr. Marshall. Congressman, here is how I think we do it. I
think the reorganization is, and properly so, constructed to
deal more with the catastrophic terrorism events. But, as I
said in my verbal statement opening and I elaborated on my
written, in my written statement, we have to, at the same time,
ensure that we have a continued robust law enforcement, if not
an increased--and my vote would be for an increased--law
enforcement capability.
And, at the same time, we are addressing the catastrophic
issues, we have to be addressing crime and drugs and violence
in cities and towns and neighborhoods and schools throughout
this country. And if we don't, then ultimately we are going to
fail on the catastrophic terrorism issue as well, not only
because it's the right thing to do and because it is terrorism
in our neighborhoods, but also ultimately, it feeds the
catastrophic terrorism. And let's not overlook the fact that if
we have these criminal groups that are continued to--allowed to
continue to operate, that becomes, just as Doug Kruhm referred
to the prison systems, those crime areas and those people that
are doing that crime, they are going to become targets of
recruitment for our external enemies, the catastrophic
terrorists. So, we have to address it all just as aggressively
one as the other.
Mr. Cummings. Mr. Flynn, did you have something? I thought
you were going to jump out of your seat.
Mr. Flynn. Well, let me just, really, you know, very much
in sympathy with the views that you have laid out here. For me,
what's been frustrating over the last 10 years watching the
crime dimensions percolate up, none of these agencies have run
real well at the budgetary trough over the last decade. I mean,
INS has been plugged up, but basically other agencies are
barely holding their own while the bad guys got much more
capable. And the fact is, but by not doing well what they have
been given to do, they have created a fertile climate that very
evil people with much more malicious intent can exploit.
And so now to suddenly just focus on going to terrorism as
the source is going to miss that reality. We have got to walk
and chew gum at the same time. We have got to deal with these
issues in terms of the capacity. The administration has talked
about coordination and communication, but there are three Cs;
capacity is the third one. These agents--this is not going to
come cheap. It's not just getting together and getting them to
sing Kumbaya. It is going to require resources so they can do
their traditional jobs well, and that allows them to build the
relationships with the community.
So those folks who have eyes and ears out there say, hey,
there is something here that just don't look right. Or it is
going to allow, like in the Coast Guard, it's dealing with the
fishermen and deputizing them while they're out there. Hey, you
see something going on out there fishing, we can't patrol
everywhere. Now, why does a fisherman talk to a Coast Guard?
Because we rescue them once in a while, and because we regulate
them.
The same thing is true with Customs' relationship to trade
and so forth. So, if you try to strip away their domestic
capacity in order to do counterterrorism, is form over
substance. It is the substantive day-to-day job they do that is
going to give us the capacity on both the needs the American
people have--legitimate needs--plus deal with the terrorist
threat. That's going to be the key to navigating this new
department.
Mr. Kramek. We are missing a couple of pieces here in
response to Mr. Cummings' question and to the chairman's
question. For the past 6 years, the Department of Defense has
recognized the type of warfare that Dr. Flynn spoke of. It is
non-traditional warfare. If you were to read the joint military
strategy that some years ago General Shalicashfeli put together
and is now still part of the national strategy, it is not
classified; it is published. It recognizes a non-traditional
warfare and terrorism were the biggest ones as the type of
warfare for the future.
And the Department of Defense has taken a lot of--paid a
lot of attention to that. They have paid a lot of attention to
it in the defense intelligence agency, DIA. Nobody has
mentioned that here. But DIA, NSA, CIA run together in the
national assets that we have at our disposal. And then we have
domestic law enforcement agencies that sometimes receive
actionable intelligence from that type of thing.
In terms of prospective, how are we going to do it all, the
Department of Defense budget defense, defense is standing up a
new thing called of Defense of North America and Defense of the
Homeland. Not Homeland Security, but Homeland Defense. Defense
budget's grown to $360 billion. This new agency is 10 percent
of that. Ten billion--it's $36 billion, thereabouts. And those
budgets, we all testified today, are already--the budgets of
the existing agencies that are insufficient to do what they
have to do now.
In essence, no new resources have been put to this new
homeland defense agency. Rather, no resources have been put to
it, and people have made statements, written pieces, and gone
on the record by saying the synergies and savings they are
going to get from putting all these agencies together is going
to be enough to improve the situation. And I don't subscribe to
that one bit.
So we have grown Defense to $360 billion. This budget is
$36 billion from a bunch of agencies that are underfunded to
begin with. Mr. Cummings wants to know what we do when we are
all turning 25 percent toward a new mission that's coming from
the other things that are not resourced properly now.
We are going to have to put some money where our intention
is to make sure that this is done right. If we are going to
reorganize, find out what the goals are, the objectives are,
how we are going to measure it, and then fund it properly to do
it. It's not going to cost $360 billion, but it's going to cost
more than $36 billion, because that's just the existing budgets
now.
Otherwise, as Dr. Flynn relates, someone is going to be
successful at finding our soft underbelly. We are talking about
moving blocks around on the playing board without increasing
the number of blocks. We need to increase the number of blocks
that we have; we will not be successful and people will
continue to take advantage of us.
One final comment on intelligence. My colleagues at the
table and I worked hard over almost a 10-year period to try to
do something about intelligence in law enforcement related to
the war on drugs. I would tell you that over 10 years ago, 90
percent of what was done in drug interdiction was based on
border security, trying to be in the right place at the right
time. With the proper application of actionable intelligence, I
would tell you that, in my opinion--and certainly Donny and Sam
add to this or correct me--perhaps 85 percent of the actions
that are taken in the drug interdiction now are based on some
sort of intelligence and knowledge.
And intelligence centers have been set up using national
assets from the Department of Defense, using the DEA's assets,
using that from Customs, using that from NSA, CIA, FBI into
intelligence centers that fuse the intelligence--and this is
the idea of this new agency, supposedly--and then providing
those law enforcement officials that are required to take
action, actionable information and tactical information so law
enforcement can take place. Unless we use every aspect of the
intelligence community, both international, domestic, and
defense, the DIA, we are selling ourselves short.
I would tell you some of these agencies already have set up
quite robust counterterrorism cells. I would also tell you,
because some of the law enforcement agencies aren't subscribers
to the National System, that they won't know about it unless
they are told, and that methods and sources have to be scrubbed
to protect agents, which is always a major issue.
So just talking about the FBI, my point is, is
insufficient. We need to talk about the entire intelligence
system for the United States, if in fact, this is the new
warfare that we should be protecting ourselves against at least
for the next 20 years, if not for this century, as Dr. Flynn
relates. Thank you.
Mr. Souder. Ms. Schakowsky.
Ms. Schakowsky. Thank you, all of you, for your very
important input. I really appreciate that.
Dr. Flynn talked about the importance of doing postmortems.
You were talking about the difference between breaches of
security and total absence of security. And then you gave an
example of, who will inspect containers? And, that if we are
still here months or years from now questioning whether who is
going to--you know, who is really inspecting containers and we
are not, then we have failed in our mission.
And then Mr.--is it Nunez?--was saying that just putting
everybody together without changing the agencies themselves is
not necessarily going to guarantee either better law
enforcement, drug interdiction, or anti-terrorism activities.
And I'm not quite sure exactly what that means, but I think I'm
getting the gist of some of it here.
My concern is, should we be making first things--first out
of the gate a laundry list of things like, are we inspecting
containers? I mean, I am just wondering if we are--I'm trying
to think--if my house were robbed, I think the first thing I
would do is try and figure out if I need new locks on the doors
and a security system, and then figure out if it's a
neighborhood watch and if we have to bring together the police
and, you know, the more structural things.
I am wondering if we have done a postmortem that looks at
very--in a clear-eyed way, what were the holes? Do we need to
add more resources to doing those functions?
You know, I'm certainly not against the Department of
Homeland Defense, but I'm wondering if we, first of all, don't
assess exactly what went wrong in a very clear way, if that
isn't the first thing that we need to do, and maybe do address
those things first.
So, whoever wants to answer them. Mr. Nunez.
Mr. Nunez. Can I start with a brief response? I'm sure that
Customs and INS have all kinds of figures, any figures you want
on how many containers come and what percentage of them gets
searched and what the criteria are. It's all routine. We know
that. I mean, I don't know that I can tell you off the top of
my head, but I think that information is available. But let me
give you an example from what I have seen for over 25 years, I
guess.
There are people on the border, inspectors from Customs,
INS, there's Border Patrol agents, some agriculture inspectors
that are there. They are doing their job. But they have been
told for the last 25 years that it is more important to keep
the traffic moving than it is to find drug dealers or
terrorists or illegal aliens.
The average time to inspect a vehicle in San Ysidro, which
is the largest border crossing in the world, is 45 seconds.
Since September 11th, the inspectors have slowed things down
and started spending more time inspecting every car and every
person coming across. That's good. It's good for law
enforcement. It's good for security of the country. It's good
as an anti-drug message.
I mean, the caseload in the Federal court in San Diego has
dropped precipitously because the drug dealers aren't stupid.
They know that there's greater scrutiny at the ports of entry.
So that's good too.
So in some cases, we just need to let our inspectors do
their job unimpeded by, you know, the industries that just want
the goods to come in as quickly as possible, as few questions
being asked as possible. It doesn't necessarily. Now if you
added more inspectors, obviously you could speed that process
up a little bit; inspect more containers. Instead of looking in
the trunk of every 100th car, you could look in 2 out of 100.
You know, you could do a lot with a relatively modest
investment in inspectors. But it has always been a battle on
the border between facilitating trade and commerce and the flow
of people, immigrants, and the inspection of visas and, you
know the airlines used to call every summer when I was at
Treasury and complain about how long it took people to clear
Customs and INS. You know, they take a 10-hour airplane flight,
they land in the United States, and then they have to stand in
line for 4 hours.
Well, you know, sometimes it takes as long as it takes. And
I think now, since September 11th, we're more aware of the fact
that prudence may be more important than facilitating some of
this cross-border activity. There's a cost to industry. There's
no question about it. There's a cost and inconvenience. I mean
people who want to go down to Tijuana to play golf or have
lunch or have a beer, they're not going to go as often. People
from Mexico who come into the United States to buy goods at
Wal-Mart in San Diego are not going to make as many trips
anymore, so it has an effect on commerce. So we have to be
willing to balance those competing problems.
Mr. Banks. Indisputably, we need more resources in order to
contend with all of this. But quite frankly, we're not going to
work our way out of this with brute force. As Mr. Nunez says,
we know some of those numbers. A container drops off a vessel
every 16 seconds in Long Beach. There is no way you can inspect
all of those containers. They only examine a fraction of the
containers that come in. But the real issue comes down is are
you examining the right ones? Are you using the data sources
and the knowledge management and the technologies to really
focus in on the ones that you want to go after.
So it's one thing for resources. It's another thing to try
to deal with some of this with greater scrutiny. But one of the
things that has to happen as a process, at least in my
estimation, is we all need to rethink this paradigm a little
bit. We need to build the information technology tools in order
to be able to make sure if we're only checking 2 percent,
absolutely the right 2 percent. What you need to know is you
need to know who touched that freight? Who owned that freight?
Who shipped that freight? Who transported that freight, and all
the individual places along the line in that international
supply chain. That is what you need to know.
Customs and all of the other agencies need that information
in order to be able to identify the high risk potential, high
risk parties that are involved in that process. But some of
this is also building the partnerships with industry. Industry,
the international trade community, the international business
community, has spent billions in improving what they call their
supply chain management systems. They want total visibility
from the time of manufacture all the time to the point that
they sell it to the ultimate consumer. They know who touches
it. They know when it's coming. They know who manufactured it
and what we also need is we need to build some partnerships
with those people to leverage some visibility into their
international supply systems.
The government doesn't have to spend the money to build
those information systems. Industry has them. What we've got to
do is be able to reach into some of that critical information,
build those partnerships and where necessary, even legislate
requirements so they provide some of that information to us to
be able to do a better job. We need to rethink all of this
process.
Is it correct that we should be doing it at our borders?
Commissioner Bonner says you inspect a nuke in a box at our
border, it's too late. What we need to do is we need to push
our borders outward. We need to start looking and providing
these large x-ray systems and large gamma ray systems so that
was we start doing checks, even as it's overseas before it
departs for the United States.
We need to be able to select what are our high risks
targets before they hit the water on their way to the United
States. That's one of the things that we need to do. So I don't
disagree with everyone here that we've got--there needs to be
more resources. There needs to be more focus brought to bear on
this exercise. But we also need to sit down and we need to
force everybody to go back and rethink how we're doing business
so that we do business a smart way.
Ms. Schakowsky. Thank you.
Mr. Souder. I have some specific questions I'm going to try
to go through here, and then I want to make this open-ended
that if any of you who want to submit written comments on
anything you heard today in whatever detail you want, we will
go through them. We are crashing hard and every question you
answer raises some more. But there are a couple I want to zero
in. What do you think, Admiral Kramek, of one of the things
that is been floated out, vis-a-vis the Coast Guard that
Chairman Young is talking about doing in his committee is
fixing the percent?
Obviously, I don't favor fixing the percents because, in
fact, we're plussing up Homeland Security. If you fix the
percents, you could, in fact, increase the fisheries proportion
as you increase the budget. One of the things that I've thought
about is a hold harmless provision, possibly at 90 percent of
current saying there will be some efficiencies.
What's your reaction to some kind of provision like that
would force Congress then to say there is a hold harmless
provision unless you explicitly waiver reductions because of a
risk? Let me give you one other specific piece of information.
Not counting the supplemental, while drug interdiction dropped
from 18 to 13 percent, the amount of dollars didn't drop that
same percent because there was a slight increase in the budget.
In fact, with the supplemental, it might be very similar at 13
percent. But maritime safety dropped from 456 to 223, so
clearly, even with the supplemental maritime safety took a big
hit in the budget, that under a hold harmless provision at 90
percent, that would go up and we would either have to address
the maritime security or have a specific waiver and transfer
from fisheries, excuse me, from maritime safety to that, in
other words, acknowledge what we're doing. Do you have other
suggestions of what we might do in the overriding bill to make
sure that we clarify what exactly we're doing when we make
these authorizing statements?
Admiral Kramek. Yes, I do, Mr. Chairman because we have a
system of government that should properly take care of that,
and it's especially meted out here in the House of
Representatives and in the Senate with the both authorization
and appropriation hearings that take place. And by that, I mean
performance of standards have been set for all agencies in
government to do what the executive branch, the American people
and the Congress have tasked them to do.
Search and rescue is a good example. Performance standards
have been set that any search and rescue case called in should
be responded to in 30 minutes. 90 percent of the lives shall be
saved and enough resources shall be provided in the maritime
area for the Coast Guard to do that. There's no performance
standards set for this new agency. And so it's hard to tell how
much more we need.
I would agree with Sam that--Sam Banks, that we can
certainly work smarter. But you cannot, in my opinion, set a
hold harmless clause and say, well, everybody's got to be
resourced at 90 percent. In the numbers that are used, the
numbers that we see in the media and everywhere else compare
the 2002 enacted budget, to the 2003 request, which hasn't been
approved yet and I understand it's put on the back burner while
you deal with emergency supplemental No. 2.
So, I mean, we're dealing with a 2003 request that I don't
think has even been heard in the context of the new Homeland
Security department and, in fact, needs to be certainly acted
on this summer sometime. But those numbers are not real to me
because all they have done is re-rack some moneys, and we have
to look at the 2003 request, not what was enacted with the
supplemental. Supplementals are there for particular reasons at
particular times.
The budgets put together based on performance standards for
every mission on what the executive branch and Congress have
decided should be performance of a particular agency. They
should be resourced to those performance standards, and right
now we're borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.
Mr. Souder. As a practical matter you have been through
this budget. That isn't going to happen. What we're going to
have happen here is that authorizing is going to be done on the
appropriations bill or unauthorized appropriations, and
therefore, it comes down to who's paying attention and who's
got the most leverage at the end if we don't do it in this
homeland security bill.
Admiral Kramek. Now, it maybe--it may be, I remember one
hearing not too long ago when I was asked how many people would
perish at see if we took away 10 percent of the search and
rescue money from the Coast Guard and put it toward drug
interdiction. And so I told him exactly. I think it was 1,500
people. And the answer from Congress is that even one is
unacceptable, and so that funding was restored, and so those
performance questions we need to ask ourselves. How many
foreign flag vessels do we want to allow to come into our
harbors that are not properly inspected under the Marine Safety
Program?
By the way, every passenger vessel that visits the United
States is a foreign flag vessel, every single one, carrying 6
million U.S. citizen passengers a year. How many of those do we
want to cut back on the safety inspections, the liquid natural
gas ships going to places like Cove Point which, is supposed to
reopen up in, oil tankers? How much do we want to cut back on
all that and to put at risk other things that we're all
responsible for, whether it be the marine environment or the
safety of the vessels or hazardous materials.
I think the answer for the American public was we don't
want to cut back on any of that, but we want you folks to take
care of Homeland Security, too. So, what's that going to cost?
The agencies all have a number. It's all in their budget. It's
not very, very much more than what was originally asked for
before September 11th. So my pitch, again, is let's look at the
Delta on what it takes to do Homeland Security, if we're
serious about it in this country let's provide it so we can
take care of the other things that you and Mr. Cummings are
concerned about, your constituents are concerned about that we
still need to do.
Mr. Souder. Mr. Banks and Mr. Nunez, one other category,
let me talk a little bit about Treasury. That in the Department
of Homeland Security, we already don't have ATF, which is left
over in Treasury. And what is your reaction, first, Mr. Banks
then Mr. Nunez, of why shouldn't some of the financial missions
of Customs be consolidated into and kept in Treasury, combined
with ATF and some of the others? In other words, money
laundering is a critical function here partly--well, let me
first ask, why shouldn't the financial services be left over
and tariff functions, financial missions money laundering be
combined over in Treasury as opposed to in this agency?
Mr. Banks. OK. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. All the money
belongs in the Treasury. But quite frankly the money laundering
enforcement issues, if you take a look at the primary
investigative tool they use to even track down some of the al
Qaeda network, was all money laundering investigations. If you
take a look at where DEA works on the narcotics, it's heavily
engaged in money laundering. What's driving all this
international criminal enterprise that Dr. Flynn's talked about
is money to some extent and money laundering. I think it would
be a serious mistake not to have a money laundering component
within that Office of Homeland Security.
Mr. Souder. Let me interrupt you a second and get back,
because it's not compelling to argue that money laundering is
one of the primary ways we catch bad guys. Obviously that is
true. But under that argument, we would put DEA in, we would
put ATF in, and we would move it. You made an earlier argument
that we shouldn't break up Customs. Could you separate how, if
we started to separate all--because I've wondered a long time
ago why money laundering operations aren't consolidated more.
What would it do as a practical matter inside Customs if you
tried to separate money laundering?
Mr. Banks. I think you--again, what you would take away
from the investigators that are trying to do the money
laundering is the inside knowledge they need to have in terms
of what's happening within trade. What you've got is the trade
experts that know all of these multi national corporations,
they know the corporate structure, they know the ownership of
those organizations.
That is absolutely fundamental to the investigators that
are trying to do this job. They actually see the flow, and even
when you get into the black market issue, they see the flow of
illegal goods that are basically the outgrowth of money
laundering. So that is where I get nervous about the
separation. Do all the of the money laundering responsibilities
have to be centralized anywhere? I don't know if that is true.
I guess what I'm suggesting to you is I think that there is a
money laundering component that should be part of the Homeland
Security process.
Mr. Souder. Are there any more money laundering things
elsewhere that would relate directly to homeland security that
you would put into this department?
Mr. Banks. Good question. I'd have to think about that a
little bit, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Souder. Will you chew on that a little bit because if
we're going to leave--there should be a primary place where
this is done and then there may be secondary.
Mr. Nunez.
Mr. Nunez. Yes, Mr. Chairman, first of all, I agree also
that--I think I agree, that Treasury needs to maintain some
sort of investigative function within the Treasury Department.
One of my predecessors, several years before I got there, had
proposed a plan to consolidate Treasury law enforcement into
what would, for lack of a better phrase, be called the Treasury
Bureau of Investigation, multiple agencies, where all the
investigators from Customs, IRS, Secret Service, ATF whoever
would be involved in one bureau focusing on all the missions of
the Treasury Department. And they would be responsive and
supportive of the underlying structure.
That plan never advanced. But I happen to think that it was
a good plan when it was proposed and, you know, circumstances
never developed to allow it to go forward. But I think it
deserves some study at this point. You could take all of the
financial crimes investigations, if you will, done now by
Treasury, consolidate them. I don't think it makes sense to
move secret service out of Treasury into Homeland Security if
you're going to leave the FBI out. I mean, the secret services
role in terrorism is pretty limited. I mean, certainly they
have an interest in the intelligence. They need to protect
their protectees, but they don't have to be in Homeland
Security to benefit from that information.
One of your specific questions, in 1989 we, Treasury
created FINCEN. Specific purpose was to analyze money
laundering trends and to investigate the Bank Secrecy Act
violations and to feed that not--but their intelligence and an
analytical function. Their function is to then feed the
information to DEA, to Customs, to the FBI, to whomever, to go
do the criminal investigation. That model works fine.
So you could, I think, combine and consolidate a lot of
these forces, make it more efficient and more effective. I--you
know, I happen to believe that the FBI is way overstressed with
too many priorities. I mentioned that before. I think now is
again the time to take away from the Bureau those things that
they don't need to do that someone else can do. They've got
2,000 agents. Well, they didn't get 2,000 new agents, but in
1981 when the President gave them drug jurisdictions overnight
with the stroke of the pen, 2,000 more agents were added to the
war on drugs.
What's happened to those 2,000 man hours or man years since
then? I don't know. I mean, did they get siphoned off to go do
other things? If they exist, give them to DEA. Let DEA absorb
all of their expertise their knowledge and continue the work.
There are FBI agents working cases today or they were on
September 10 that were not--that are not working them anymore.
So clearly the drug enforcement effort within the Bureau
was reduced. And if they are going to reduce it more by, I
forget what Donnie said, 500 or 600 or 700, 400 agents you
know, that's 400 man years of cases that are not going to be
worked anymore. Are all of the agents in the FBI now going to
be working on counter terrorism? I don't think so. So let's
simplify the bureau's mission for it, transfer those missions
to DEA or to secret service or to ATF or to Customs and let the
FBI focus on what it's highest priorities are, and bring them
into Homeland Security.
Mr. Souder. Mr. Flynn would you comment on why secret
service and Customs would move in but not FBI and other ATF and
other financial tracking if it's organized crime is behind a
lot of the money laundering.
Mr. Flynn. What's clear is there's no clean line between
open source intelligence and then intelligence collected by the
traditional intelligence community. And of course, that's
gotten fuzzier as organized crime and terrorism itself is
merged, and we get the national security and law enforcement
mix. It's an uncomfortable one that is difficult for the
bureaucracy to handle well.
I think the guts of most of the data we need to detect bad
people doing bad things is often in the open source realm, and
that is almost in the regulatory realm and information is often
collected by the cop on the beat versus that is squirreled away
in Langley.
And so the notion of trying to consolidate some of that
oversight in one place is where I think the President is going
with the recommendation that he has in terms of the fusion of
intelligence function within the new department. But by
definition, there's blurred lines. So the Coast Guard now is a
member of the intelligence community so it will have access to
the traditional mass security intelligence apparatus. Customs
is not.
Secret Service has also a very splintered line there that
makes this difficult to do. You know, well, some of the
function of all the U.S. Government is providing for the safety
and security of its people. You know, it's a challenge to say
where do we stop this line. But I think what's just as an
illustration of the kind of dilemma we're facing and why I
think there's some need for due attention on getting largely
nonclassified information under one roof and effectively fused
is an illustration of--let's--I had talked some time ago about
the container, weapon of mass destruction being put in a
container and moving through the inbound system and potentially
posing a real threat.
An equal one is, let's say a year from now, we have al
Qaeda II and the President, this time we have human
intelligence. We have an intelligence operative in the network
and he says we have just loaded a weapon of mass destruction in
a container and it's heading down the street in a truck toward
a barge. So it's hard intelligence and it comes to the
President, and the President convenes a national security team,
and he turns to the Commissioner of Customs, and says, well,
where's the box? And the Commissioner says well, it could be
coming into Vancouver, or Seattle/Tacoma or San Francisco,
Oakland, or L.A./Long Beach or maybe coming through the canal
or any of the other ports. But we hope to get the paperwork
right after it goes through.
I'm not saying that's not--there may not be a way--there
may be a chance that we'll catch it, but the system right now
is so porous that you have hard intelligence that's coming, and
you have nowhere to pinpoint in the system where the heck it
is, and under the current construct, if it comes into L.A./Long
Beach, it has to go 14 miles inland to get inspected, because
GSA couldn't afford to buy the real estate in the port. So the
most densely populated part of the country.
I mean, this is the mess we're in right now that is going
to make the need for, and I think the President quite properly
says at least we should get that house in order. And the
agencies who collect that information, and you can diffuse it,
that's with regard to people, with regard to conveyances, with
regard to cargo. Let's at least get a full picture of that. It
gives us a base line and then see if we can tether in more
effectively to the national security establishment. That, I
think, is the thinking behind this.
Mr. Souder. Let me pursue just a couple of other things
with that baseline of--in effect, you've continued to come back
and defined this more or less as a border homeland security
agency, because the truth is, everything has some degree of
homeland security, and you could have the whole Federal
Government under it. So if we do that, why isn't EPIC in this?
You used an interesting term. You said non classified
intelligence. Why isn't EPIC in RISS, for example?
Mr. Flynn. I don't have a clear answer for that. You know,
clearly, again, folks are struggling with how much to fit under
this roof and still not to lose form. I think that it does make
sense that the--EPIC I think is an omission that could, you
know, certainly be entertained as it's put in here overall.
Mr. Souder. Any other comments on EPIC or RISS or why you
wouldn't put those in?
Mr. Marshall. Mr. Chairman I think that when you talk about
EPIC and RISS and I would put perhaps the NDIC in that same
category you have a good model for intelligence sharing. I
think it would work equally well, perhaps, to build on those
models as intelligence sharing mechanisms or to create a
parallel mechanism.
You could make an argument for or against the wrists and
EPIC and NDIC for that matter, and then I would like to make
just one more comment. Mr. Flynn mentioned the cop on the beat
and the kind of information that they come up with. I think one
thing has been probably overlooked more than it should in this
whole reorganization, and that's the value of our State-local
law enforcement counterparts out there. Nobody knows the
communities like State and local law enforcement.
The Federal Government is never going to put together a
mechanism that matches that capability. State and local law
enforcement have numbers out there that the Federal Government
is never going to match. And if we put this thing together
without some inclusion and considerable thought about the role
of State and local law enforcement in this whole homeland
security issue, we're missing the boat big time.
Mr. Souder. Admiral Kramek, on your era, you wanted to make
sure that the, or suggested that the Coast Guard should
continue with the coordination of the drug intelligence center.
Do you see, in other words, if we, in effect, ideally we would
have a model like that for terrorism like we do for narcotics
to the degree that they're separated? But without the,
initially the NSA, the different defense agencies, without the
CIA, without the DEA, without the FBI, we have certain pretty
big centers of intelligence not in a homeland security agency.
Would you see in this department the potentiality of at
least using the model on drug intelligence for all the--whether
it's nonclassified, if that is a term we use or all the other
things that collect intelligence other than the big ones that
basically can't be hugged in at this point, and then this
agency then share, like the drug intelligence does with the
other agencies so that there's at least some coordination.
Would you see an assistant secretary? Could you think about
that a little bit and how we might use your model and how we've
done drug intelligence to somehow pull some of the other
intelligence in? Because we--intelligence, as all of you know
and have said at different times, you can never catch a
criminal if we didn't have intelligence, and yet we are setting
up an agency that's missing so much of it.
And to the degree it's in there, it's not clear to me how
these things are going to get to synergism if Customs stays
intact, Coast Guard stays intact, the Border Patrol, INS stay
intact underneath that. Clearly, we got a warning sign the
other day in our hearing because Senator Lieberman, Senator
Specter says, of course we are for this merger as long as the
employee unions aren't merged. And that's off the table to talk
about employee structures. That's a pretty big thing to have
off the table, that this presents big things if we don't have
the intelligence.
Do you have any initial comments on the intelligence? Then
I have one more line of questions.
Admiral Kramek. Well, I think the administration's proposal
proposes to put a fusion intelligence center in the new
department. And I assume when they say that they're modeling
things we've done elsewhere. In the war on drugs, for instance,
all of the agencies involved in that, some 32 Federal agency
need information and intelligence. Some have intelligence from
the Defense Department, and so in its wisdom, the United States
tasked the Defense Department, with standing up interagency
task force in the east and the west, which is really a
communications and intelligence fusion center that we all
participated in and all the data goes there from all agencies.
Everyone participates. DOD, Coast Guard, Customs, DEA, NSA,
CIA and all of it is fused into an actionable result that's
given to an operator, whether it be Coast Guard, Customs, DEA,
to go out and interdict, if you will, and stop the drugs from
either coming into the United States, or better still, take
down the entire network that finances the whole thing and
arrest everybody on both sides.
That model has been used in lots of other instances. But
what intrigued me was when DEA stood up EPIC, and stood up the
National Drug Intelligence Center. Those were all good things.
But until we really started to be able to use the sources from
the Department of Defense from the things that they could see,
and from the things that they did, and from CIA, and brought
all that together, we had a much more complete picture. Is it a
total picture? No, using all the national resources the picture
got clearer, though, however, and I would say that 85 percent
of our effort was based on some sort of then knowledge and
intelligence.
The same type of model can be used for Homeland Security.
All those agencies don't need to be in the Department of
Homeland Security. What they need is an intelligence fusion
center who gather all of the actionable intelligence from the
other agencies and get their recommendations, and they make
heads or tails of it. And then they decide what warning to put
out to various agencies of the United States to protect us for
national security. You don't need to merge all of these
intelligence agencies in there. They're all working and can
work very well by themselves. But should they share more? Yes.
And should they be consolidated? Yes. But you will have to deal
in closed session and in closed committee with the threat that
doing that has to sources and methods in our intelligence
infrastructure.
Mr. Souder. Compromising the more people.
Admiral Kramek. We have to be very, very careful because
we're talking about, you know, a domestic agency for homeland
security using intelligence that we're collecting for our
defense, and there's a strong connection there, but we have to
decide on intelligence and the law with that respect. And there
are lots of scholars who have a lot to say about that, and I
would recommend, Mr. Chairman, that you take a look at that a
little bit. Because I think it's paramount to what type of
intelligence center you would want to have in the new homeland
defense agency.
Mr. Souder. We get a synergy for effectiveness, but we
don't get a cost synergy when what we are adding are new
coordination centers, and that's how important in how they're
putting this agency together, because if we're putting together
new groups to coordinate, that's not a net reduction. That's
another layer.
Let me ask one last thing regarding the drug czar which was
alluded to, I believe, by Mr. Nunez. That if we look at this as
primary focus based on the agencies that were put into this as
a border, primary focus is border, secondary focus is other
things, defining the border loosely, meaning it could be
preclearance of cargo in Singapore. It's the Customs Office in
Fort Wayne, Indiana at the airport. It's the INS State
Department clearances overseas. And if we see the drug
interdiction efforts of Coast Guard and of Customs and of
Border Patrol put inside this agency, and if we see the nexus
of the financial sources and the long sought-after goals of
organizing the border, better that were being done, not to
mention intelligence clearing, which interconnects with HITA,
what precisely do you see the role of the drug czar in this
network to be, and are some of the functions here should we
look at different ways of configuration of that because a lot
of this is what the drug czar is supposed to be doing?
Admiral Kramek. No, I don't see the role of the drug czar
changing. If you were to look at the national drug control
policy strategy that's put out annually, possibly 40 percent of
it or less is interdiction. The majority is treatment programs,
local law enforcement programs, all of those other things. Now,
that's not to say that the interdiction piece--and when I was
the interdiction coordinator, couldn't be coordinated more
efficiently by having all of my colleagues at the table, and we
were all working for the same boss. That may be. But the
initial drug control policy only has a piece of it as far as
interdiction is concerned. Education is an important piece of
it. Treatment is an important piece of it. And so having all of
that, thinking about putting that in the new homeland security
I don't agree with that at all. I think it needs to be separate
and again, perhaps the interdiction piece could be more
efficiently accomplished, and there would be some synergy to do
that. But I don't see it changing the drug czar's role at all.
Mr. Souder. Mr. Nunez.
Mr. Nunez. The concern that I have is if the drug czar
continues to have the function that he's been given for the
last decade or more, of certifying the budgets of all of these
agencies, wherever they are, whether they're in Treasury,
Justice, or the new homeland security agency, his mission is to
make sure the Federal Government is paying attention to the
drug war. If there's a conflict, if the Secretary of Homeland
Security says, well, I've only got so much money I can put in
my budget this year, and so I have to take some away from this
drug interdiction or drug enforcement or drug treatment, you
know, area, to--in order to fund some other terrorism thing, I
mean, then you've got a conflict.
Mr. Souder. Well, what was the answer to that question by
the way.
Mr. Nunez. I'm sorry.
Mr. Souder. We know the answer to that question, by the
way, which is why the next question I asked is important.
Homeland Security is going to win, which means that we've
changed the mission of the drug czar but not acknowledged it.
Mr. Nunez. We subordinated it. We've created a priority.
We've said homeland security comes first. Drugs are second. And
maybe that's right. I don't know. But I suppose the President
ultimately, and the Congress, get to decide how to balance
those two high priority issues.
Mr. Souder. Do you have a comment, Mr.----
Mr. Flynn. Again, the overarching rationale, and this has
been difficult because, you know, unfortunately, the
organization came out before there was a strategy, and the guts
of how this thing should be done--we should have a strategy
first. But the overall thinking behind the Hart-Rudman's
Commission's recommendation was the strategy is that the
traditional national security establishment deals with
terrorism at its source; that it is trying to run in the ground
bad guys when we found them.
But once they're on the move, that is, there in our
international transportation and travel corridors that we need
the means to be able to detect and intercept them, and there is
a real problem with coordination there.
The second piece is some of those guys will get through and
they will take on our critical infrastructure. So having the
capacity to make sure that infrastructure doesn't melt down,
that there's some protection is the next stage to limit the
disruption.
The third piece is there still will be consequences and the
ability to have a quick postmortem and put things back
together, again, is going to be the key to having an overall
approach to managing the risk of terrorist catastrophic
terrorism threat directed at American soil.
And so the President has hit all those pieces. He said the
border stuff up front is key. He's put critical in the
infrastructure protection. He's talked about FEMA because FEMA
has relationships with localities and States for the response
and is very much the lead agency for dealing with those first
responders, and he said you've got to get the intelligence
right. That's not all of homeland security. Homeland security
is a core mission, again, of government. But it's one right now
that is woefully inadequate in trying to deal with that issue.
The amount of money we are spending on going to terrorism
source is huge numbers. And it's appropriate when we know bad
guys to get there, but just like we can't eliminate drugs at
its source, we need a layered approach developing the capacity
for the agencies of debt, you know, represented here today, to
be able to play that increasingly prominent role in national
security. We have to have a conversation about this in terms of
the organization, but ultimately about the resources. We're not
going to get to where we need to go if we're not willing to
open up that box and carry on that conversation.
Mr. Souder. Well, thank you for your patience, Mr.
Cummings.
Mr. Cummings. Thank you very much. First of all, I want to
thank you all for your testimony. You know, as I sat here and I
listened, I started to ask myself the question, are we going to
be better off or worse off? That is, in listening to what the
Admiral had to say, I'm wondering if we put together a
department that doesn't have the adequate resources, are we
better off? I don't think so. And I worry--I'm concerned that
we will--that, first of all, I think this is such an important
issue that if we're going to do it, we need to do it right. I
understand what you were saying, Dr. Flynn, when you were
saying that we need to--since September 11th, we're sending--we
need to send a very strong message, not only to outside
enemies, but to ourselves that we've got it together.
But I'm telling you, the more I listen to what you all have
said, it just seems like there are so many issues, and it
doesn't seem like something that you can do overnight. Trying
to bring all of these--this together. So what we're trying to
do is coordinate agencies, we're trying to coordinate
information, trying to, I guess, coordinate effort so that we
can protect this country.
We've got some big problems. Going back to the State and
local situation, you're absolutely right. Boy, I have got--I
have been sitting here too long. I don't have my glasses.
Mr. Marshall, you know we had an incident in Maryland where
they just weren't--the mayor came up here, and the mayor of
Baltimore came up and complained that we weren't getting
information from right after September 11th, that there were so
many things we were eyes and ears all over the place, but yet,
and still we didn't have the information to act on it.
Apparently they had stopped somebody involved in this whole
September or connected with the September 11th events, and
didn't have enough information from--if other agencies had been
cooperating with locals and State folk, they possibly could
have at least detained this person.
So it just seems as if we've got a lot here. And I--and so
then I go back to the Admiral and when he talks about this--
these intelligence centers.
And I'm wondering, when you take all of what I just said
into consideration, I'm going to tell you, I mean I have been
here 6 years and I don't--I think--I don't think the Congress
is going to give up the money that it really needed to do this.
I mean, I want to be optimistic, but I don't think that's going
to happen. I want to believe it.
So if we try to put together this agency with insufficient
funds, is it better that we go to what the Admiral talked
about. I know you're not advocating it. You just talked about
maybe having something a little less than what the President is
talking about, and clear me up if I'm misstating, and having
some kind of way, having some of these folks coming under this
umbrella called the Homeland Security Department. But then
having another piece, another arm that says this is going to be
our center where we bring together information. Is that
accurate, Admiral, is that what you are talking about?
Admiral Kramek. You can do it that way.
Mr. Cummings. Fusion center.
Admiral Kramek. That's the way the Department of
Transportation was initially organized in the mid 1960's.
Mr. Cummings. But is this too big? I mean, is this too--do
you understand, Admiral?
Admiral Kramek. I understand what you're saying, you see
it's a matter of choices are we going to improve things with
the new department. In my opinion, we will improve homeland
security with the new department. But the way it's set up now,
at the risk of not doing other things that we thought were
important before because homeland security has taken a higher
priority.
Now, if it's all right with the President and all right
with the Congress, and all right with the American people that
we don't pay as much attention to maritime safety, to drug law
enforcement, to the other things these agencies were doing,
then that's something that they vote on and they--we determine
as a democracy to do.
Right now I think we all clearly know what mission No. 1
is, and I think that will improve if we put all of this in the
new department: But some other things will go by the board and
I think that's what I said today and what I've heard some of my
colleagues say, and a lot of the questions you're asking have
some great concern about that.
Mr. Cummings. How would the Intelligence Fusion Center--is
that your own term?
Admiral Kramek. No. We call it fusing intelligence, when
you know, sometimes when you find out where the bad guys are
and you have to go take action on them, and your agent has to
go into court in open court, we don't want to let everybody
know how we found out where it came from or who found out, and
we have to go into closed session, or we have to keep that
classified, and so therefore, a fusion center takes all sources
of intelligence, fuses it together, it's been called that for a
long time, maybe a decade, maybe longer than that.
It's the concept that EPIC was put together on, and the
concept that the Joint Intelligence Tasks Force has been put
together on the war on drugs and other intelligence centers
where everybody is there and they all look at it and they
decide yep, it's met criteria 1, 2, 3, so we need to act. We'll
give it to that member of the Department of Defense or we'll
give it to that law enforcement agency. But it has to be
protected as to sources and methods. But they can take action
on it intercept that person or to do whatever needs to be done
to carry out proper law enforcement. That can be done, in my
view, quite simply in the Department of Homeland Security on
those issues that have to do with Homeland Security.
Mr. Cummings. And how would that differ, then, what you
just said, how would that differ from what the President is
talking about?
Admiral Kramek. I don't think it'll differ very much. It
certainly wouldn't move the FBI into the Department of Homeland
Security or the DEA into Homeland Security. I don't think any
of those agencies should be in there. They have other things to
do.
Mr. Cummings. But you still get the benefit of the
information.
Admiral Kramek. Sure. You know, if DEA is onto a tremendous
narcoterrorist network, they have information that this is
going to result in terrorism somewhere that is going to affect
us or fund it in some way, shape or form, that should go into
that fusion center, so that then Homeland Security can properly
act on that and it becomes a national security issue. It
shouldn't be just kept within the agency who found it out.
Mr. Cummings. Anybody else? Yes, Dr. Flynn .
Mr. Flynn. I just want to say when we get to budget issue,
the situation right now as illustrated by the President's
budget next year, is these agencies within their parent
departments are dealing with a tradeoff of budget dollars, and
Homeland Security is going to get a bigger chunk. That's going
to continue to be an issue as long as bad guys continue to do
bad things here.
The parent departments for these agencies right now are not
effective advocates for giving them sufficient resources. I
think the silver lining I see in the Department of Homeland
Security is you have a first tier cabinet officer who is
advocating for those agencies, they have to be plussed up.
The key will be will he recognize that it's, in doing their
core business, the one that exists now that will give them the
capacity to provide the Nation true homeland security, or are
we just talking about cosmetic homeland security of having, you
know, guys in uniforms hanging out in front of baggage
terminals. That's the key juncture we'll have to cross.
But it's these agencies doing their day-to-day job by
community policing provides us the capability to deal with
crime in the neighborhoods, not guys sitting in precinct
houses. That's what we have to come to, I hope, with Homeland
Security. I don't see how the existing budget model where they
sit is going to get us where we want to go.
I see the atrophying of these agencies traditional
missions, and I know not enough value added on the homeland
structure.
Mr. Nunez. Just a note from my experience at Treasury,
every year the budget process would go forward, and Sam Banks
and the people at Customs would send into Treasury a proposed
budget, and all the other law enforcement agencies and Treasury
would send them in, and then the people in the Treasury Budget
Office would look at it and not understand probably half of
what they were reading and cut it.
So one of the advantages of moving many of these agencies
into an agency operated by someone who understand law
enforcement is that they're going to get better treatment
within that department. And with all due respect to the various
Treasury secretaries over a number of years, you know, they
don't get that job by knowing much about law enforcement. And
so that sometimes has been a problem in getting the Treasury
law enforcement dollars, you know, even through the OMB
process, let alone through Congress.
Mr. Cummings. Just, I mean, Admiral, if you had just some
advice to give us, I mean, if you just had, in a warning, what
would be with regard to this legislation?
Admiral Kramek. In my----
Mr. Cummings. You may not have any.
Admiral Kramek. Well, it's kind of what I summarized in my
statement and put in my written testimony. We're being very
reactionary to the events of September 11th, even though it was
a little over 9 months ago now. And we're being reactionary and
we're trying to look at what happened and reacting to it. If we
want a new Department of Homeland Security, it has a mission,
the executive branch has defined. It does not have a strategy,
does not have goals, does not have objectives. It has not said
this is the resources we need to do the job right, based on
raising the level of homeland security to a certain level that
you can hold congressional hearings on and determine if that's
enough, if that's adequate.
You know, what is it? What is homeland security? What's the
level that we want to have? Do we want to make sure that 100
percent, we can guarantee that 100 percent of all containers
that come into the United States don't have anything that will
affect our security that could be done at a cost, everyone of
them would have to be inspected by us before it left its port
of origin probably, and then sealed in a certain way. What
level do you want? And then what resources is it going to take
to do that? We're rushing toward a conclusion without giving
ourselves a performance measure or fully understanding what we
want to do. And so I would do that just a little bit more
carefully.
Mr. Cummings. Anybody else?
Mr. Marshall.
Mr. Marshall. Yes, sir. I think the advice that I would
give would be basically four items. No. 1, create the
Department of Homeland Security I think that will add to our
capabilities against the catastrophic terrorism. No. 2, do not
create Homeland Security at the expense of standard traditional
law enforcement in this country, maintain that robust, and if
possible, even increase the individual agency's law enforcement
roles.
Third piece of advice I would give is take advantage of our
State-local law enforcement partners out there, and perhaps key
piece of advice I would give would be really don't expect to do
this at no budget increase. We must have additional resources
to make it all fit together and do the job that we need to do
on all fronts.
Mr. Cummings. Mr. Banks.
Mr. Banks. My recommendation, again, is consolidate,
consolidate these agencies, look for those economies of scale.
When I say bring them over intact, I don't mean everything has
to stay intact. You have got to look for those economies of
scale and push for that information sharing and take some of
those best practices that are out there. Don't throw the baby
out with the bath water. Don't start as if you're starting all
from a whole new cloth again in building this thing and build
it incrementally.
Mr. Cummings. Again, I just want to thank all of you for
your testimony. It's been extremely helpful to us. We have a
major job to do as you well know. And it's people like you who,
through your experiences and what you have seen and experienced
and your knowledge that you have gained, to help us do what we
have to do. I think it's important that we--and we will take
this very seriously, because the future of America depends on
it and generations yet unborn. So I just want to just say thank
you very, very much to all of you.
Mr. Souder. Would you--what's your reaction to designating
an assistant secretary for either narcotics or assistant
secretary for reduction of financial resources for terrorist
inside this department?
Mr. Marshall. Was that directed at me, Mr. Chairman, or----
Mr. Souder. Any of you. Because here's my concern. We know,
we don't have to guess. We aren't going to have enough
resources to fund current activities at the current level plus
this department. We're already seeing it in the process and we
know that's true because unless we get hit by another terrorist
attack. In other words, we've got artificial goals, we don't
have goals. The goal is to have 100 percent elimination of any
catastrophic event. That's our goal and that's, I believe, what
the Vice President was trying to say is that's not an
achievable goal.
We can work toward it and we hope to achieve it, but it is
a standard that's--is it a 1-year goal? Is it a 5-year goal? Is
it 100-year goal? And we know that the resources are going to
go up and down, just like they do in the narcotics war and
child abuse and missing children; that when you have a crisis
people run toward it. To the degree you fix the crisis, they're
ready to address another one.
If we don't get hit by a terrorist attack by October, there
aren't going to be very many senior citizens asking me about
terrorism, they're going to be asking me about what happened to
my prescription drugs that you were going to pay for. This is
part of life in government and in a democracy. And part of the
thing here in the narcotics committee that we're watching is
that anybody who's ever dealt with a narcotics issue knows that
politicians have somewhere between 2- and 4-year attention span
to this issue.
It's not that the issue goes away anymore than any other
social problem goes away, but then you reconfigure. That's
partly how so many agencies got into narcotics, and part of the
question here we're moving several of the major narcotics
agencies into Homeland Security that we all agree, I believe,
that there is going to be increasingly a narcotics nexus to
funding terrorism as well as other illegal--and the question
is, should somebody in this department be either looking at
narcotics directly to help coordinate those agencies within and
make sure it gets some attention, or should we look at it as
funding of terrorists, which gives us the nexus for looking at
that and child traffic and other things so that there is an
awareness of the interrelationship.
Because the danger here is because I'd had really thought
this through today, but it's clear. The real fundamental
assumption behind this is catastrophic terrorism. Yet we're
throwing agencies in whose primary functions are day-to-day
functions, not catastrophic, and unless we figure out how to
blend the day-to-day with the catastrophic, we're going to see
a major reduction in the day-to-day because of the goal of an
almost 100 percent on catastrophic, and we need to figure out
some ways to try to make sure that everything isn't obliterated
in this bureaucracy when we started out, that in fact everybody
doesn't see because I'm sure, also by the way that the
Secretary of this agency is going to see their predominant
mission is that their, what's their measurement of failure.
On what grounds would you be removed as a cabinet
secretary. It won't be on whether computers got across the
border; what the wait was at the border; it won't be whether or
not there was a reduction in narcotics. It won't be whether a
sailboat person was rescued. It will be did something blow up
while you were secretary? And I just would like to ask your
reactions about where we might deal with this to make sure
there's somebody inside Homeland Security that's watching some
of these other missions.
Admiral Kramek. Mr. Chairman, there's a significant
distinction between this new department and all these other
things that have been done before, which are the normal jobs of
these agencies such as drug interdiction or immigration or
border patrol. And that is, that Homeland Security, because of
what happened, is now one of our vital national interests
because we've had a significant threat to our national security
to our freedom. And this is the new warfare that Dr. Flynn
described. Usually, almost all of those missions are addressed
usually by the Department of Defense nowadays. This one is not.
This is not called Homeland Defense.
It's called Homeland Security, and it's to our vital
national interest. Therefore, it takes priority, No. 1, at
least I think that's what a lot of people in our country
believe. Given that, the other missions and the other things
that we've done are secondary to that. If we don't want it that
way, and we want to still keep doing those things, then it has
to be resourced. But the distinction here is that this is in
our vital national interest for survival of the freedom that we
enjoy, and it is now something that deserves a good focus of
our national strategy on how to deal with it.
It's different, I think, than the war on drugs. We made it
pretty important, but it wasn't in our vital national interest
on something that we'd go to war for because that was always
the--that was always the criticism. The war on drugs was a
misnomer. We never really went to war on it. We tried like heck
to interdict it, to stop it, to educate and to do all of those
things, but it was never a real war. But this is, and so
there's a distinction that has to be drawn.
Mr. Souder. Maybe we can just go down and have any other
concluding comments, because I appreciate your patience here,
and if there are any other things you want to touch on, and
then we'll finish the hearing.
Mr. Marshall. In my view, Mr. Chairman, it would be
tempting to make an argument to put much more under this new
department than is presently configured. But also, in my view,
I think it would be a mistake to put too much under this new
department. I think a good compromise and good approach for
right now is really pretty much where we have gone, and that's
to put the meet and greet agency the first line of defense
agencies under the new department. You could make an argument
for putting FINCEN for DEA, FBI, the intelligence fusion
centers in law enforcement, the RISS and the EPICS and things
of that sort.
But I think, as I alluded today in previous questions and
certainly in my written statement, I think if you do that, you
run the risk of diluting all of those other day-to-day single
mission law enforcement agencies and their missions. And if you
dilute that too many times, if it's under the Homeland Security
Department, and it's a question of an immediate terrorist
threat versus a large cocaine shipment coming into the United
States, and it really is a choice between these two, then the
choice is properly going to be made in favor of the terrorist
threat.
But if do you that for too long a time, bearing in mind how
much I've talked about the connection between terrorism,
organized crime and drug trafficking, if you do that too many
times over a sustained period of time, then ultimately you
impact negatively on the catastrophic terrorism and your
ability to deal with that.
So I think we need to resist the temptation to put too much
under this new department.
Mr. Souder. Mr. Nunez.
Mr. Nunez. I guess just in conclusion, I'm concerned about
if I detect what's been going on here today, the notion that
this somehow is going to be primarily or exclusively a border
homeland security thing. That troubles me. I mean, I think it
doesn't make sense to have a whole department devoted just to
border security.
I go back to what I said before. You know the FBI is the
king of the hill in terms of antiterrorism. They've got the
ball. They are the link to State and local law enforcement in
regard, with regard to terrorist issues and many other issues.
So it seems to me that the FBI has to be inside this department
for the department to make any sense. They've got the FBI and
then connect to State and local law enforcement through its
field offices to all of the other agencies that are involved
and to the border.
The feedback, the information can flow both ways. It just
seems to me, you know, clear that we can't--we shouldn't
separate the FBI from the border agencies and everybody else. I
mean, we've got--you look at the chart of everybody else from
agriculture and all these other places they're not specifically
border agencies.
So I guess that's my sort of biggest point is that somehow
the Bureau has to be brought into that, if that means carving
it up and disseminating parts of it to groups that are not in
it, so be it.
Mr. Souder. Mr. Kruhm, do you have any closing comments?
Mr. Kruhm. I think there's some lessons to be learned with
the creation of ONDCP. How they organized, how they worked with
State and local agencies, and all the frail agency and some of
the stonewalling that took effect; their lack of clout for
example, and they worked very hard at trying to improve the
government's performance in the drug war.
So, if you have a chance to study some of their
experiences, I think it would be very beneficial. I still feel
that this organization, if at all possible, should be as agile
as possible. It shouldn't be so large and cumbersome that it is
going to lose its very great ability of all of these individual
sources.
And one last thing, I think it is very interesting that
this panel independently put together testimony that has a lot
of common points in it.
And I hope the committee takes that into their
consideration that we feel very strongly on a lot of common
ground here. I think it would be great if we could all get
together and come up with a master plan ourselves, but I guess
that's not in the cards. Thank you very much.
Mr. Souder. Mr. Banks and Mr. Flynn.
Mr. Banks. And I guess I would also share the concerns
about this department being too large and not being focused. I
think those are issues that do need to be of some concern.
Quite frankly, if the FBI and the anti-terrorism
intelligence center isn't part of it, I think this Department
can survive. If FINCEN for the financial intelligence is not
part of it, doesn't mean they might not need money laundering
investigators, but the FINCEN piece and that support could be
done, the same thing attempted, and does it need a kind of a
drug assistance secretary, just like Admiral Kramek talked
about with an interdiction coordinator--you could have an
interdiction coordinator here--crosses a lot of the same
agencies that did before. It doesn't mean that they necessarily
have to act as a competitor to DEA, but instead maybe a
compatible point of contact with the Drug Enforcement Agency.
And the only other comment I would make is, you know, I
still think it's the right thing to do. And I know the
timeframe is very short. I certainly share Dr. Flynn's view; it
would be nice to have a strategy before you had an
organizational box put together, but that doesn't mean you
can't get this off the ground and begin working this. There
have been studies for a decade about some of the border
agencies; they all recommended consolidation. We still don't
have that at this point. I'm not so sure that a lot of thought
hasn't been given to this over the years.
Mr. Nunez. Actually, the House published a book and it goes
back to 1908. It's the chronological history of attempting to
organize the border. And, to date, I don't believe they have
been successful.
Mr. Flynn. I may just add to that, that while I can
appreciate this committee feeling very much under the gun in
terms of trying to develop how to approach this, Hart-Rudman
Commission and the U.S. Commission on National Security spent 3
years with 14 of the most distinguished Americans, seven on
both sides of the aisle, thinking about this issue. They just
came to the conclusion that the No. 1 threat to the United
States for the foreseeable future is an attack on our homeland,
and that we are fundamentally not organized to deal with that
threat.
I was here in the Mansfield Room when they rolled out that
report a little over a year ago. Not a single media outlet came
to report the event. We have had a lot of data about the
problem and we have had some serious people put some thinking
into the solution; what we have is no action in addressing it.
And I worry about this clock ticking, which is the bad guys
figuring out how open we are and how disruptive they can be.
And I think it's important that we get on with it. Thank you
very much, sir.
Mr. Souder. Well, thank you each for your patience this
afternoon, because I don't think there is any question that we
are going to move something and it's going to--I don't think
there is any question we are going to continue to work at it. I
don't think we are under any illusions that it is going to
solve any problem, particularly if the all the major
intelligence agencies aren't part of it and are still competing
with each other.
And I don't know how we address those kind of questions.
But, it's a step. And I thought it was part of the goal of this
hearing and in what we are trying to draw out is, look, there
are tradeoffs here. And resources--reorganization does not
cover resource shortages. And I also think the point was made
that having a cabinet member who is focused on these particular
agencies should help, but I am very concerned that narcotics
and, for that matter, trade, which moving people across the
border, are going to be lost in this debate if we are not very
careful and don't make sure that, for example, if we are going
to have catastrophic terrorism be the driving thing of concern
at the border, that then we don't say, look, that means more
bridges, more agents, more machines to clear it through, more
at the ports, all these kind of things.
Because what will happen is, is that the second we don't
have a catastrophic event, we will go right back in to every
Member of Congress who is along the border being concerned
about the trade; it's fine for law enforcement people to say,
well, they won't be coming over to eat as much. By the way, the
100 crossings involved--my hometown is roughly 150 to 175 miles
from the border crossing in Detroit, but the pick-up plant in
my hometown has 100 border crossings involved in each pick-up.
And it's one thing to say that catastrophic terrorism right
now is the focus, but we all remember Tip O'Neill's holding
that all politics are local and jobs are local. And, that
ultimately, if we don't get the balance right with this, we are
going to see the support for the agency decline, just like
other categories did, if, in fact, it is successful. And that's
our challenge here, and thanks for being part of that. And
please get back in touch with us if you have any specifics as
we start to look at the amendment process probably next week.
Thank you all for your patience. And, with that, the hearing
stands adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 5:36 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
[Additional information submitted for the hearing record
follows:]
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