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TESTIMONY
OF GEN (RET.) BARRY R. McCAFFREY
BEFORE THE SENATE COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
ORGANIZING
THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT TO EFFECTIVELY PROTECT AMERICA’S
HOMELAND AGAINST TERRORISM
October 12, 2001
Chairman Lieberman, Ranking Member Thompson and Members of the
Committee, thank you for the invitation to appear before you
today to discuss how we can best organize our nation to
effectively deal with the threat of terrorism to our homeland.
Mr. Chairman and Senator Thompson, allow me to also thank
you for the hard work, good counsel and strong support that you
have provided over the years in the fight against terrorism.
This Committee helped lead the Congress and the country
in responding to the terrible atrocities of September 11th,
2001. The entire
nation appreciates your leadership in the face of this crisis.
Before turning to the substance of today’s hearing allow me to
recognize Rob Housman of the law firm Bracewell & Patterson,
who served as my assistant director for strategic planning at
the White House Drug Policy Office.
Rob’s firm has generously allowed him to help me
prepare this testimony.
INTRODUCTION
The Bush Administration deserves enormous credit for how it is
taking the fight to these terrorists.
The President and Secretary Powell have reached out to
the international community to secure the backing of the
civilized world for our just actions. The FBI and the rest of
law enforcement and intelligence community are patiently
unwinding the webs of terror back to their sources. The
brave men and women of our Armed Services are now methodically
dismantling Usama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network and the Taliban
regime. We
will attempt to attack their communications systems, alternately
listening, jamming, and spoofing them.
We
will freeze their funds. We
have begun to destroy their airfields and anti-aircraft
installations. Our
planes now operate around the clock with near total impunity
dropping ordnance on any target of value that dares to raise its
head. Through
food, medicine and leaflet drops we are reassuring the suffering
Afghan people that our quarrel isn’t with them, but with the
terrorists and those who aid and abet them.
These dangerous fanatics are being forced to scramble for
survival and prevented from regaining command and control of the
terrorist network. In
the coming months and years, our forces will attempt to isolate
and eliminate this threat to the American people and our Allies.
Today, many Americans take comfort in the roar of our fighter
jets flying air CAP patrols in the skies over head.
Usama Bin Laden and his terrorists now are also hearing
the thunder of our fighters and bombers—only the roar has a
vastly different meaning to them than it does to us Americans.
The Administration should also be credited for understanding
that the 40-plus government agencies that have a role in
fighting terrorism need a new level of coordination in order to
respond rapidly and effectively to this threat.
The general idea of providing a single office to shape
our Homeland Security policies and ensure we are capable of
deterring, preventing and defeating terrorism is not only sound,
it is long overdue. The
President and his team should be congratulated for moving so
swiftly to form the Office of Homeland Security.
Governor Ridge is superbly qualified to head this new agency.
He is a highly decorated, combat-tested Army infantry
sergeant who served on the frontlines in Vietnam—my own
personal experience in Vietnam reminds me that it was our
dedicated young NCO’s, like Governor Ridge, who safeguarded
the soldiers under their command and pushed ahead to fulfill the
missions required of them.
The Governor is also a lawyer and a former prosecutor.
He knows full well what justice requires in the face of
acts of terror. He
brings great political savvy and executive experience from his
service in the Congress and as the governor of Pennsylvania.
Governor Ridge has the confidence and commitment of not
only the President and the Administration, but of the Congress
and both parties. Most
importantly, the Governor enjoys the complete support of the
American people.
In addition, the recent appointment of retired General Wayne
Downing fills me with added confidence in our future security.
He is the single most knowledgeable, resourceful and
battle hardened special operations leader in America today.
The purpose of this testimony is to discuss how this new Office
of Homeland Security should be structured to enable Governor
Ridge and his successors to most effectively discharge their
responsibilities. Part I provides an overview of the
challenge we face in securing our homeland from the
threat of terrorism. Part
II discusses why the Office of National Drug Control
Policy’s framework provides a sound model for this new office.
Part III outlines the basic elements necessary
for an effective Office of Homeland Security.
Part IV sets out a number of key issues that
the Office of Homeland Security will need to grapple with early
on.
I. THE CHALLENGE
OF EFFECTIVELY RESPONDING TO TERRORISM
On September 11, 2001, simple boxcutters struck down two of the
world’s greatest skyscrapers and cut a hole deep into the
symbol of American military might.
More than 5,000 innocent Americans were killed without
warning or reason. Our enemy demonstrated the ability to use the machinery of
our prosperity and the openness of our democracy as weapons
against us. Never
again.
That simple commitment—that this shall never happen again on
American soil, or to American citizens—should not be taken
lightly or absent a full understanding of the tasks ahead.
Preventing this from ever happening again is a major and
difficult undertaking.
The movements of a free people in an open society provide
ample cover for terrorists:
America is a nation of over 281 million people, who live
across more than 3.7 million square miles of territory.
Our borders span almost 20,000 miles, ranging from barren
deserts to isolated coastlines to inner city blocks shared by
sister-cities.
Last year, there were roughly 475 million crossings of
individuals through our 301 ports of entry. Each year, roughly
23 million people enter the United States legally on tourist
visas; 500,000 on student visas; and 250,000 on temporary work
visas.
An additional four million people are now illegally in this
country. Roughly 2
million of these illegal aliens defied the law and went to
ground at the end of their visitor or student visas.
Incredibly, thousands of today’s illegal aliens entered from
nations known to harbor terrorism on student visas provided by
our Department of State to allow them to study subjects like
nuclear physics, chemical engineering, and commercial aviation.
The basic infrastructure and economy of our society provides
countless soft targets for terrorists:
Last year, more than 1.6 million airplanes passed through
the airspace of Washington, D.C. alone.
Amtrak operates over 22,000 route miles of track.
Amtrak’s New York to Washington corridor each day
carries enough passengers to fill 121 airline flights.
The average annual ridership of the New York City subway
system is 1.3 billion. Any
plane, train, or bus could be used by terrorists to inflict
damage and instill fear.
We have more than 2,800 power plants, including 104 that are
nuclear powered.
Our energy infrastructure relies on more than 19,000 miles of
interstate natural gas pipelines.
Our industrial base includes tens of thousands of chemical
plants and other manufacturing facilities.
On the Internet and in public reading rooms we post the extent
of the damage that can be inflicted by destroying each of our
individual plants—handing terrorists a veritable “Dummies
Guide” to attacking us. To
the terrorist, our massive industrial base is a soft target rich
environment with which to do harm to America.
Americans rely on roughly 54,000 individual community water
systems. These
systems generally have little more than a night watchman and
cyclone fencing to safeguard us against deadly chemical and
biological attacks.
We have countless skyscrapers, stadiums, monuments, churches,
temples and other places of worship.
These structures are where we work, play, congregate,
cheer and pray; to the terrorists these gathering places are
potential killing fields.
We are dependent upon the Internet for everything from banking
and stock trades to massive business deals.
Many of these networks remain vulnerable.
Vast quantities of critical information could be gone in
the click of a cyber terrorist’s mouse.
Our government is ill organized for this task:
The task of getting the scores of involved bureaucracies to
set aside bureaucratic considerations and pull together is
itself a major challenge.
More than 40 federal agencies have a role in the fight against
terrorism. The combined federal counter-terrorism budget is
approximately $9.3 billion in fiscal year 2001.
On Capital Hill, 26 full committees and 17 subcommittees deal
with homeland security matters.
At the same time, the Department of Defense has no office to
assist in the defense of America’s homeland.
America’s domestic military defense is made up of the National
Guard units of each in the 54 states and U.S. territories.
These units are incredibly dedicated and yet modestly
trained and inadequately equipped to combat the real threats of
terrorism to our domestic population.
At the state and local level, thousands upon thousands of law
enforcement, fire and rescue and emergency management personnel
are the frontline units in this battle.
However, the lines of coordination between the federal
government and these state and local units are ill-defined and
remain largely untested.
For example, our first response to a chemical or biological
attack relies heavily upon some 54 state and territorial
agencies utilizing more than 3,000 state and local health
agencies, with minimal federal coordination
If Governor Ridge has only a small staff of detailees; no
federal legislation outlining his job and the mechanisms by
which he is to coordinate policy; no separate budget and budget
certification authority; and, if he and his principal staff
aren’t legitimized by Senate confirmation, then,
notwithstanding his own tremendous personal credibility and the
commitment of the President, within one year he will be
relegated to head of the Homeland Security speakers bureau. This
job will require the legitimacy of power conferred only when a
government agency is created and given a specific warrant of
authority by Congressional legislation.
Any other solution will soon lose its focus, bureaucratic
leverage and independence of action.
II. THE ONDCP/AGENCY
MODEL
A useful model for this Committee and the Congress to consider
as it begins the process of strengthening the Office of Homeland
Security is the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP)
or “Agency” model as found in ONDCP’s reauthorization Act
of 1998 (21 U.S.C. §§ 1701, et. seq.).
A.
APPLICABILITY OF THE ONDCP/AGENCY MODEL
The ONDCP/Agency model is worthy of consideration because of the
striking parallels between the inter-related threats of drugs
and terrorism:
Both threats require the careful coordination of large numbers
of federal agencies, with well-established jurisdictional turfs.
Responding to each of these threats also requires coordinating
nonfederal efforts, including both the public and private
sectors.
The threat of terrorism and the threat of drugs both have
international and domestic components.
In addition to domestic efforts, an effective strategy
against each of these threats requires a multinational response.
The primary vehicle for preventing, deterring and responding to
individual acts of drug crime and terrorism is intelligence and
law enforcement, backed by occasional but enormously important
support from the military.
Each of these threats are inter-related and feed off each other.
Drug monies from the sale of opium and heroin fill the
coffers of the Taliban and bankroll terrorist organizations
around the world. The
same financial institutions launder the ill-gotten gains of
terror and drugs alike. This triangle of criminal trade
exchanges money, drugs, and guns to fuel international violence
and black markets.
B.
BENEFITS OF THE ONDCP/AGENCY MODEL
The ONDCP model as currently found in that office’s
authorizing legislation, was the long-term product of at least
two separate Administrations—one Democratic and one
Republican—working in close collaboration with the Congress.
In fact, a number of the members of this Committee have
played a significant role in crafting the new ONDCP of today.
This model has evolved over time and proven effective.
The key elements of the ONDCP/Agency model are:
A strong Cabinet-level agency within the Executive Office of the
President.
The agency is led by a director and selected senior staff that
are subject to Senate confirmation.
The director is also a member of the National Security
Council for drug-related matters.
The senior staff of ONDCP is required by law to be wholly
apolitical.
The agency is responsible for producing the Nation’s Drug
Control Strategy, and the accompanying counter-drug budget.
The director of ONDCP is provided the authority to decertify any
agency’s budget that fails to meet the requirements of the
National Drug Control Strategy.
The agency is also responsible for producing a performance
measurements of effectiveness (PME) system to track progress in
reducing the threat of drugs to our nation.
ONDCP is independently accountable to the Congress and the
public and must regularly report out on how it is carrying out
its responsibilities.
The agency is provided the resources necessary to get the job
done through its own budget and dedicated staff (including, in
particular, its own strategic planning, budget, public affairs
and Congressional affairs staffs).
The director is empowered to call inter-agency meetings to
address critical issues and threats.
And, most importantly, all these powers and responsibilities are
specifically set out in statute.
Over the last five years this model has worked remarkably well,
especially given the nature of the drug threat:
According to 2000 data, drug use among children ages 12 to 17
declined 21 percent in just three-year’s time.
The number of drug-related murders fell to the lowest point in
over a decade—reaching a low point of less than half the 1989
high water mark.
The number of drug courts jumped from a dozen to over 700
operating or coming online.
We dramatically increased the number of federal drug-related
arrests, yet cut the number of arrests for low-level simple
possession—in other words we better focused our enforcement
resources on the upper echelons of the drug trafficking
organizations.
Since fiscal year 1996, we increased the federal spending on
drug prevention programs by 53 percent and on drug treatment 35
percent. During
this period our overall federal counter-drug budget grew from
$13.8 billion to $19.2 billion
This record of success demonstrates why the ONDCP/agency model
is worth considering as the Congress and the Administration put
in place an effective Office of Homeland Security.
C.
THE ONDCP/AGENCY MODEL VERSUS THE DEPARTMENT MODEL
Over the last few days, a tremendous amount of attention has
been brought to bear on whether this new office should be an
agency (charged primarily with coordinating policies and
overseeing budgets) or a department (charged with a series of
operational responsibilities and made up of various other
existing federal agencies brought under its umbrella).
There is no single bureaucratic solution to the threat of
domestic terrorism. However,
there are multiple options that might ensure failure.
This office can be effectively conceived of either as an agency
or a department, so long as it has the basic tools it
needs to succeed, as described in the following section of this
testimony.
That said, allow me to sound a note of caution. The United States faces the immediate, real and substantial
threat of additional acts of terror even as we carry out our
justified and measured actions to eliminate Usama Bin Laden and
his terrorist network. Reconstituting
vast elements of our federal government, incorporating complex
federal agencies, with broad responsibilities and thousands of
public servants, into a new department that can function
effectively will take time.
Such an exercise would divert the energies of this
Committee, the Congress and the involved agencies away from
defeating the terrorists and to what promises to be a bitter
intramural battle over radically changing our complex
government.
If the Congress determines that the best possible way to deal
with these threats over the long-term is to reconfigure broad
elements of our government to create a new and important
department, there will be time to do this in a reasoned and
considered matter: when the dust has settled and the terrorists
are a chronic not acute threat to our society.
For the immediate term, as we wage war against those who wish
our nation harm, we should focus the bulk of our attentions on
defeating this enemy.
III. REQUIREMENTS
FOR AN
EFFECTIVE OFFICE OF HOMELAND SECURITY
A. THE FORCE OF LAW
There can be no doubt that President Bush is firmly
committed to the fight against terrorism and strongly supports
Governor Ridge in his new position.
However, as President Bush has rightly and repeatedly
said, this is a long-term struggle that will transcend
administrations.
Our government does best when it establishes institutions for
the long haul, that are based on rationality, not personality. If we are committed to safeguarding our nation against
terrorism now and forever—and not just punishing Usama Bin
Laden and his ilk for their past barbary—the Office of
Homeland Security needs to be designed with the future in mind.
The terms of this office—how its leadership is
appointed, where its monies come from, what powers it wields,
who it is accountable to—must have the permanence of law.
Any Cabinet member, current or former, will tell you how
important it is to have the Commander-in-Chief in your corner.
However, when push comes to shove it is even more
important to have the law on your side.
B. THE TOOLS
NECESSARY TO SUCCEED
In order to succeed, this new office needs to be able to:
develop the nation’s Homeland Security Strategy; oversee the
budget; coordinate the development of federal policy; and,
mobilize the American people and the Congress.
And, it needs the assigned resources to carry out these
three tasks.
1.
The Ability to Effectively Coordinate all Homeland
Security Policies and Programs
The ability to coordinate the actions of the many involved
federal agencies requires five core components:
a.
Responsibility for the National Strategy
The National Homeland Security Strategy proposed by President
Bush should become the critical organizing mechanism by which
our nation develops a unified approach to fighting terrorism.
However, the purpose of this document is more than just
coordination and organization.
This Strategy should be viewed as a set of policy
priorities, agreed to by all the involved agencies and crafted
with the input of the Congress, nonfederal actors and the
American people. These
markers can then be used as a powerful tool to hold the feet of
individual agencies and our government as a whole to the
fire—to drive home a common commitment and force action.
b.
Responsibility to Craft an Effective System for Tracking
Progress
The Office of Homeland Security must also be able to hold the
entire federal government responsible for real results.
With a threat as great as terrorism it isn’t enough to
talk about inputs, we need to show output functions.
For example, Secretary of Health and Human Services
Thompson has committed to ensuring that the nation has 40
million doses of fresh smallpox vaccine available by next
summer. At present,
the Customs Service inspects less than 10 percent of all
containers entering the United States.
These numbers must be increased dramatically.
These are examples of benchmarks by which we can and
should measure progress.
The Homeland Office must be charged with developing a system to
demonstrate progress in preventing, deterring and responding to
terrorism. Over the
long-term, this system of tracking progress will help this new
office keep other, larger and longer-serving agencies on focus
with the strategy and committed to this fight.
c.
Responsibility to Report Out on Progress and Impediments
The Homeland Security Office must be required to independently
report out, through the President, to the Congress and the
American public on: the progress that is being made in
protecting the American people from terrorism; and, any
impediments to progress—whether bureaucratic, logistical,
budgetary or technological.
Such a report should be made on an annual basis.
Every American has a stake in this fight; every American
should know where we stand.
d.
Authority to Convene Meetings for Inter-Agency Policy
Formulation
The director of the Homeland Security Office should be
empowered to convene meetings at the Cabinet and sub-Cabinet
levels. This
ability is vital to bringing all the involved agencies to the
table to ensure that critical issues are addressed.
2.
Authority to Review and Certify Budgets
I had the honor to serve under General Powell when he was the
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
In one of his many useful tutorials he told us:
“don’t show me your programs, show me your budget.”
A strategy without the resources is not worth the paper
it is written on. The
director of the Homeland Security Office needs the authority to
independently decertify any agency budget that does not provide
the resources needed to combat the threat of terrorism.
This authority should only be subject to interventions by
the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, as the
President’s current plan provides.
Not only are budget certification powers required to ensure
sufficient resources, they also play a critical role in
policy-making. The
ability to decertify an agency’s budget is the nuclear weapon
of policy-making—it isn’t something you can use often, but
the mere fact that it is in your arsenal guarantees you are
taken seriously. If
you want to see another agency get with the program fast, just
articulate the possible decertification of its budget.
3.
The Indigenous Resources Required to Fulfill These
Missions
To fulfill these missions of the Homeland Security Office,
this new agency must have its own staff and its own budget.
If the bulk of its staff is made up of detailees who
carry with them the baggage of their home agencies, and whose
future job promotions rest with their home agency superiors, the
Office of Homeland Security will be seriously hamstrung.
Similarly, if this new agency is dependent upon the
budgetary whims and largesse of other government offices for its
own funding, it cannot be expected to effectively tackle
contentious issues. This
office requires its own Congressional relations, public affairs
and strategic planning staff.
There are those who rolled their eyes when Governor Ridge
requested, first off, a speechwriter and spokesperson.
Rather, they should have applauded him for his foresight
and encouraged him to go further.
He will be the principle spokesperson for the President
to the Congress and the American people.
IV. PRIORITIES
FOR THE OFFICE OF HOMELAND SECURITY
As this Committee and the Congress provides the Office of
Homeland Security with the legal standing and tools it needs, it
is also entirely appropriate for the legislature to give
guidance about the priorities it sees for the office.
The following suggestions outline what some of those
priorities might be.
A.
SECURING OUR NATION’S BORDERS
The federal law enforcement presence along the thousands of
miles of international border between the United States and our
neighboring states, Canada and Mexico, lack anything but a
modest capability to simply monitor the millions of illegal
entrants who flood into the nation each year. While most
migrants come in search of freedom and economic opportunity,
many of them come with criminal intent.
Our federal border law enforcement agencies are asked to enforce
our laws in cooperation with our global economic partners. These
men and women are well-trained, dedicated professionals, who
work tirelessly to protect us under frequently appalling
conditions of personal danger. However, these agencies are grossly undermanned, under-funded
and lack the necessary technologies and intelligence support.
Their organizational structures and doctrine are woefully
out of step with contemporary security challenges.
Although we have doubled the size of the Border Patrol in the
past decade, this agency is still incapable of enforcing law and
order on our frontiers. We need a Border Patrol of 40,000-plus
uniformed officers instead of the fewer than 10,000 officers we
currently employ.
Our Customs Service is dedicated but poorly organized and
resourced. They are overwhelmed by the requirements to enforce
more than 400 U.S. laws and 34 international agreements on
behalf of 40 other federal agencies—let alone ferret terrorist
contraband from the millions of shipments entering our nation.
At current levels, the Customs Service inspects less than
10 percent of all containers entering the United States—an
individual terrorist, drug trafficker, arms runner or other
criminal stands a 90 percent chance that his contraband will
clear Customs unimpeded. With
the use of new technologies, such as real-time tracking of
U.S.-bound containers, and the cooperation of the legitimate
shipping industry, the rate of inspections can be greatly
increased and enforcement resources can be better targeted at
the highest risk shipments.
Such a system could be implemented for as little as $200
million annually.
Similarly, the enormously professional and courageous men and
women of the Coast Guard are struggling with obsolete ships and
aircraft, and severe budget and personnel shortfalls.
One of the simplest ways a terrorist group could deploy a
weapon of mass destruction against cities like New York,
Washington, D.C., Miami and San Francisco, would be to simply
sail it into port.
Revitalizing the Coast Guard is critical to better protecting
this nation from the threat of terror.
Typically, the Coast Guard has employed about ten percent
of its fleet to guarding America’s ports; today, the Coast
Guard is devoting two-thirds of its on station ships to that
task. In the past,
the Coast Guard has required little in the way of pre-screening
for vessels entering American ports; today, the Coast Guard is
checking crew manifests and ship registries for all ships making
port calls. These
expanded efforts are already over-taxing the resources of the
current Coast Guard fleet.
Still, the most significant shortcoming in our air-land-sea
border defenses is the total lack of a conceptual framework and
the leadership to integrate our federal law enforcement effort.
At each port of entry, on each sector of our land border, and in
every maritime approach, there is no single federal officer in
charge. Neither foreign officials nor U.S. local or state law
enforcement officials can put their finger on a map and
determine the name of a single federal coordinator for
operations at that place. There is no common organizing scheme
to the many federal agencies that are charged with these
missions; no integrated intelligence or communications network;
no common multi-agency infrastructure-development plan.
While the situation has improved markedly during the past five
years thanks to increases in manpower and resources,
institutional rivalries among our federal law enforcement
agencies leave us with a fragmented security apparatus under
uncertain leadership. Our borders are still dangerously porous
to international criminal and terrorist organizations.
B.
OVERSEEING AND POLICING IMMIGRATION
In addition to better securing our borders from contraband and
illegal immigration, we must also increase the ability to
monitor and oversee legal immigration.
The State Department must revisit to whom it grants
permission to enter this nation legally and for what purposes.
It is beyond comprehension that a person from a
terrorist-sponsor state can obtain a student visa for courses of
study in disciplines like chemical engineering, nuclear physics
and civil aviation.
Similarly, the Immigration and Naturalization Service must be
equipped to deal with both those who enter legally but under
false pretenses and those who over stay or otherwise violate
their visas. Today,
we can track a car license plate or a credit card receipt, but
our authorities cannot tell us that an individual from Iran or
Sudan is now illegally in this country, has gone to ground, and
is inquiring about how to fly a crop duster.
This is nonsensical.
Congress can help here. The
INS has developed, at the request of the Congress, a system
called Coordinated Interagency Partnership Regulating
International Students (CIPRIS), which would allow the INS to
better track foreign student visa compliance and to make this
information more readily available to the FBI, Border Patrol,
and other agencies. However,
this program has never been funded.
Absent the tools it needs to get the job done, it is
difficult to place much of the blame solely upon the INS.
C.
STRENGTHENING AND REORGANIZING OUR DOMESTIC MILITARY
CAPABILITIES
With respect to the threat of terrorism to our nation’s
homeland, the major shortfall of our domestic military response
capabilities is that our superb National Guard is structured to
be called up and deployed in the first days of a high intensity
conflict. The
National Guard, by and large, is well equipped and modestly
trained for this overseas combat role, which costs the nation
$15.2 billion in fiscal year 2001.
However, this is a role that was originally intended for
military reserve components.
In contrast, the original purpose of the National Guard was to
serve as joint federal-state domestic military response to a
variety of threats, such as terrorism.
(In fact, it wasn’t until after the Spanish-American
War that National Guard units could lawfully be deployed beyond
the United States proper.)
However, the Guard, as currently structured is not well
prepared for this mission.
The Guard should be reorganized and its force structure
should be changed to best meet the requirements of a state-level
response to terrorism and other domestic threats.
A restructured National Guard should become an integral
component of our domestic emergency response forces.
The Guard should be trained and equipped at the national
level and then returned to the command and oversight of the
individual governors (except under what should be rare and
special circumstances where they are called by the President to
federal duty). Over
the long term, it will serve us well to have 54 state and
territorial governors who wake up each day worried about the
readiness of the Guard units under their command.
We must effectively respond to the types of threats that
these state leaders believe they are most likely to face.
For this reason, we do not need a “national” National Guard
force, whereby, for example, aviation assets are located in one
state and chemical, biological, and nuclear assets are in yet
another lone state. Instead,
the Guard’s force structure and numbers should be determined
in relation to the general populations and expected needs of the
individual states and without regard to political pressures.
Rather than equipping state National Guard units with
significant numbers of, armor, artillery and attack
helicopters—which are not likely to be used in the domestic
context—each state’s Guard package should focus on the more
immediate needs of the states, such as:
Site protection by military police and light infantry battalions
capable of ensuring order.
Light ground and aviation reconnaissance capabilities to provide
federal, state and local leadership with a fuller understanding
of any evolving threat.
Medical support with field hospitals and medical staffs capable
of stepping in when civilian assets are destroyed or overloaded.
Transportation units, including both truck, airlift, rotory lift
and small boat/LCU to provide mobility;
Communications units to provide secure communications to allow
for a coordinated response to any threat.
Combat engineering to reopen transportation routes, ports and
airfields.
Fighter support to safeguard airspace, metropolitan areas and
other potential terrorist targets.
Logistics units to provide emergency life support to domestic
American refugees.
Chemical, biological and nuclear reconnaissance and
decontamination units to counter any use of weapons of mass
destruction (WMD).
Additionally, recognizing that there may be times when we need
active duty military units to respond to a terrorist attack on
our homeland, we need to ensure that our military is prepared to
handle this contingency. For
example, a biological attack on our homeland would likely
require the immediate deployment of at least certain active duty
units.
At present, the Department of Defense lacks a homeland command.
The answer to this shortcoming, however, is not to go
about creating an entirely new joint command and 4-star CINC to
lead it. Instead
the U.S. Joint Forces Command located in Norfolk, Virginia
should be dual-hatted. The
Army component of that command, FORSCOM, should be given the
lead role, with North American Aerospace Command (NORAD), the
Navy’s Atlantic Fleet and the Air Force’s Air Combat
Command, in key supporting roles.
Moreover, the Posse Comitatus Act (18 U.S.C. § 1385), which
limits domestic use of the military, may need to be reexamined
on a limited basis in light of this possibility.
While there are legal gymnastics we can do to avoid a
literal violation of the Act, perhaps we should consider the
issue more directly.
D.
INCREASING OUR ABILITY TO RESPOND TO A WMD ATTACK
As the events of this week have underscored, the state-by-state
deployment of an effective, domestic response to the use of WMD
is of particular urgency. In
my judgment, we must have this capability fully operational
within one year in order to be ready to address a WMD attack to
this nation. We
should expect—and plan to prevent and respond to—such a WMD
attack on America to occur sometime within the coming ten
years—if it hasn’t already occurred on a small-scale in
Florida.
We would be foolhardy not to take this threat seriously.
New evidence suggests that Usama Bin Laden has been
training his fanatics in the use of chemical and biological
weapons. The Iraqis
are one of five state sponsors of terrorism who have actively
researched and developed programs for biological, chemical, and
nuclear warfare. They have previously murdered thousands of
their own Kurdish population with chemical agents and employed
chemical warfare in massed attacks against the Iranians during
their seven-year war. We should expect these groups to actively
consider the use of these weapons against us, our allies, and
their regional neighbors.
Secretary Thompson is to be commended for his commitment to
increase our stockpiles of small pox vaccine by 40 million doses
by next summer, up from 2004 as originally planned.
However, at the same time, the sole supplier of anthrax
vaccine to the United States military cannot now produce the
vaccine because it has repeatedly failed basic Food and Drug
Administration inspections.
We need a Department of Defense facility to produce these
vaccines on an emergency basis.
At the same time, we must dramatically improve our
ability to protect our civilian populations over the immediate
term, meaning months, not years.
We also need to swiftly and substantially increase our ability
to respond to a chemical, biological or nuclear attack.
While a range of factors work in our favor, limiting
terrorist access to and in some cases the efficacy of these WMD
weapons, we must prepare for the worst.
We need to train and equip our federal, state and local
political leaders, medical establishment, civilian law
enforcement authorities and National Guard units to help them
prevent and mitigate WMD attacks.
We must also invest in research to develop new technologies to
assist us in more quickly and better identifying a WMD threat
before widespread harm can be done.
E.
IMPROVING INTELLIGENCE AND INTELLIGENCE SHARING
Our intelligence services are simply not adequate to the task of
providing our policy-makers and operational agencies with timely
and accurate estimates of terrorists’ capabilities and
intentions. The courage and dedication of our intelligence
community is superb, and our technology is impressive.
However, we have emasculated both our overseas
intelligence-collection capability as well as that of our
domestic law enforcement agencies with unbalanced restrictions
on their freedom of action to penetrate and disrupt terrorist
cells before they carry our their murderous plans.
This problem is likely to get worse before it gets better.
For example, recent studies of the federal workforce have
found that the ranks of field FBI agents will suffer great
losses of experienced personnel in the coming years. With the number of these counter-intelligence and
counter-terrorism trained agents already shrinking, and with
demand for them from the private sector growing, we must find
ways to better recruit and retain the best and the brightest.
The dedicated and courageous agents of the FBI are also
struggling with woefully inadequate and outdated information
technologies. The
FBI’s computers cannot in real time track the enormous amounts
of information that is being mined.
The American people would be astounded to learn that they
have more flexible, capable and faster performance from their
home computers than most agents can get from a computer
workstation in an FBI field office.
The FBI’s recently announced Trilogy program, which
will expand the Bureau’s information processing capabilities,
is, by all accounts, inadequate.
These upgrades, limited by budgetary constraints, will
still not be capable of processing the explosive growth of
information that the agency must manage in routine
investigations, let alone ones of this magnitude.
And, this information technology problem is not limited to the
FBI. In January of
2000, the entire information infrastructure of the National
Security Agency, the nation’s premier high-tech spying
capability, went dead when its computer systems crashed.
For three and a half days our nation’s intelligence
community was largely blind and deaf. NSA Director Lt. General Hayden should be commended for his
$2 billion Project Groundbreaker, which will in short order
bring that agency’s information technologies up to speed.
The FBI and other agencies would do well to follow the
ambitious lead of the NSA.
We have reaped what we have sown by terrorizing the leaders of
our own FBI, CIA, and NSA agencies for political
self-protection. For example, FBI agents were aware of suspicious actions on
the part of Zacarias Moussaoui, as early as August of this
year—when he sought lessons for flying but not landing or
taking off a jumbo jet. However,
because of the legal impediments of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act and the Attorney General’s Guidelines, the
FBI agents were prevented from searching his computer and
launching a full-scale investigation—this despite warnings
from French intelligence. In
the wake of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, agents
were finally authorized to look more carefully at Mr. Moussaoui;
investigators allegedly found information on crop dusting and
wind patterns. He
is now being detained as a “material witness.”
In sum, we lack a body of policy that enables our domestic and
foreign intelligence services to aggressively discover and track
criminal conspiracies and disrupt or preempt their actions.
And, we lack the human and other resources needed to
pursue such a policy.
Better intelligence produced and analyzed in a vacuum, however,
is of no use. We
also need to develop more effective ways of ensuring that the
information that is developed reaches the field where it can be
used to prevent future terrorism and bring criminals to justice.
In the counter-drug law enforcement world, ONDCP over the
last five years has lead efforts to create mechanisms to ensure
that federal intelligence was securely pushed down even to the
street law enforcement. Such
mechanisms also need to be developed in the area of Homeland
Security. Here, we
will need to go even further—at times, we may find it
necessary to provide certain limited forms of intelligence
information with the private sector, such as owner/operators of
critical infrastructure, in order to prevent harm.
F.
ENHANCING FEDERAL, STATE AND LOCAL COORDINATION
One of the most striking parallels between the fight against
terrorism and the fight against drugs is the degree to which
success in both of these struggles is dependent upon efforts at
the state and local level.
The first line of response to a chemical or biological
attack is the local doctor, hospital and health authorities.
As both the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks
demonstrated, the first responders to a bomb or other terrorist
assault are the state and local law enforcement.
However, on a nation-wide basis, coordination between the
various levels of government is lacking.
For example, we have no integrated means for various
federal state and local first-responders to jointly exercise to
prepare for terrorist attacks.
Nor do we have adequate mechanisms for securely sharing
federal intelligence and coordinating operations with state and
local authorities.
Over the last five years, in the area of counter-drug policy we
developed a range of mechanisms in both the prevention and law
enforcement arenas to strengthen state and local anti-drug
efforts and to better coordinate these efforts with federal
programs.
We need similar mechanisms for homeland security. The federal government must assist states and localities in
strengthening homeland security programs ranging from law
enforcement and fire and rescue to logistics and healthcare.
These strengthened state and local programs then need to
be seamlessly integrated with our federal programs.
G.
WORKING WITH THE PRIVATE SECTOR TO COMBAT TERRORISM
The terrorist who carried out the attacks of September 11th
did not rely upon traditional weapons.
Instead, they used commercial airliners as their bombs.
In the wake of these attacks, the FBI has found some of
the terrorists also inquired about using crop dusting planes.
The terrorist weapons of tomorrow can just as easily be
an oil refinery, cruise ship, or skyscraper’s air conditioning
unit as they may be a gun, bomb, or bug.
It is imperative that the new Office of Homeland Security work
with the private sector to harden both the nation’s critical
infrastructure (e.g., stock exchanges, refineries, financial
institutions, and air carriers) and those elements of our
industrial base and infrastructure that can be used by the
terrorists to inflict serious damage (e.g., stadiums).
We have taken steps over the last decade to protect our
nation’s infrastructure from use by terrorists.
However, much remains to be done:
Under federal laws, chemical and refining plants still provide
worst case scenarios to the general public that provide a
detailed blueprint for how to attack these plants.
This month, a single shot from high powered rifle caused 285,600
gallons of crude oil to spill from the Trans-Alaska pipeline and
shut the pipeline down for days—imagine what a terrorist bomb
could do.
The decentralization of the telecommunications industry coupled
with advances in encryption technologies and the legal limits on
federal wiretaps, together provide terrorists and other
criminals with much too secure communications capabilities.
Our international financial networks remain too easily available
to terrorists, drug traffickers, organized crime, and others.
From the structural design of skyscrapers, to inadequate
security at stadiums, to air conditioning units vulnerable to
chemical or biological attack, our buildings were not designed
with terrorism in prevention mind.
The recent report of the Graham Commission found that the
security at our nation’s ports is woefully inadequate.
Even with the President’s plans to upgrade air security, we
still have little or no ability to adequately control our
airspace or deter terrorists with armed marshals and flight
crews, as well as federally supervised passenger and baggage
screening law enforcement personnel.
And, these are just a few of the immediately obvious problems we
face.
We cannot allow the demands of security to fundamentally alter
our way of life or grind our nation and its economy to a halt.
Security in an open democracy is necessarily imperfect.
However, in this grave new world, we all need to better
incorporate security into our day-to-day lives and work.
This must be a priority for the new Homeland Security
Office.
CONCLUSION
Listen carefully in the October air and you can hear the
mournful cries of our nation’s war dead. The 634,140 military
service men and women who gave their lives in the 20th century
to keep the horror of 11 September away from our shores are in
anguish. They died by the thousands in the surf at Tarawa, in
the skies over Schweinfurt, in the muddy hell of the Argonne,
wrapped in the frozen white emptiness of the Yalu, and on the
killing grounds of the Ia Drang. They gave their lives so that
America could live in peace and security, not in the conditions
of despair, injustice, poverty, and physical terror that
characterize the desperate existence of so many across the face
of the globe.
Those Americans in political leadership over the past two
decades have failed the American people. It did not have to be
this way. The failure was not due to shortcomings in our
fighting men and women. We did not lack courage and resolve
among our police officers, firefighters and emergency medical
technicians.
Instead, our shortcomings were a lack of leadership and sensible
policy judgments by our democracy’s political, economic,
media, and military elites over the past 15 years. We were
collectively incompetent in the face of growing mountains of
evidence that our nation was increasingly at risk of
catastrophic losses from terrorist attacks.
In Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, the protagonist takes false
comfort in the witches’ veiled warning that he is safe until
“Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane Hill.”
Not long after, Macbeth is shocked to learn the woods
have in fact moved on his castle—the troops of Malcolm his
enemy have cut the trees and used them as camouflage. The
unthinkable has happened, the once peaceful woods have been
turned into a weapon against Macbeth, just as the witches
prophesized. However,
he was warned all along.
In this same vein, experts have for years told us about the
vulnerability of our nation to terrorist attack.
We studied the situation with wise, perceptive groups of
men and women. We issued calls to action, which were wittily
debated by the American political leadership. We carefully
examined the many reasons why any and all anti-terrorist policy
measures would be ineffective or, worse, result in a
counter-reaction to threaten a value we hold precious. We issued
multiple calls and sent innumerable diplomatic warnings and
demarches. But it
stopped there. We
failed to hold the terrorists and their state sponsors
accountable in the only ways they understand.
A complicated, dangerous world demands American leadership,
economic and military support, and intelligence cooperation.
Each generation seemingly has to learn through bloodshed that
freedom is never free. Sadly,
this time the wake up call came at the expense of over 5,000
innocent lives—people who were simply going about their daily
routines.
Our political leadership has taken the necessary first step in
Afghanistan by holding both the terrorists and those who gave
them refuge and comfort responsible.
Afghanistan will be the "schwerpunkt" of what
is likely to be a six-month campaign.
Then, we will have to confront the threat of terrorism
more broadly—wherever else it arises.
This strategy, combined with the improvements to our domestic
ability to deter and respond to terrorist acts and our
international ability to track and preempt terrorist networks
will be neither short nor simple. Maintaining international
consensus in the coming war against terrorism will demand
skillful diplomacy; maintaining domestic resolve in the face of
American casualties will be equally difficult. Both tasks will
require strong, decisive leadership.
In order to succeed we must better organize ourselves to the
task. There can be
no doubt that Governor Ridge in his new role as director of the
Office of Homeland Security enjoys the support of the President,
the Congress and the American people.
Nor can there be any question that he has the skills,
dedication and determination required to help our nation
prevail. The only
question that remains is: will our political leadership give him
the tools he needs to get the job done?
Thank you once again Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member Thompson
for the opportunity to appear before this Committee.
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