For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
June 10, 2002
Remarks by Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge to the National Association of Broadcasters Education Foundation 2002 Service to America Summit
Ronald Reagan Building
Washington, D.C.
GOVERNOR RIDGE: Thank you, Eddie. And good morning, ladies and
gentlemen. I want to thank you for this invitation to spend some time
with you this morning. I must applaud Eddie and the foundation for
extending the invitation several weeks ago. Your timing was
impeccable. (Laughter.) So I might consider to borrow your crystal
ball in the future.
But it is good to have the opportunity within a few short days
after the President announced his vision and his plan to create a
Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security to spend some time with
this organization. So I very much appreciate the opportunity to speak
to your group at such an important time for our country.
The nine months since the terrorist attacks have been a great time
to be an American, in spite of the horror and the tragedy associated
with the attacks. We have learned so much about what this country and
its people are all about. And most of what we have learned, we have
learned through you.
Through your unblinking eyes and ears, the entire human drama was
brought into our living rooms -- the heartbreaking losses, the heroic
responses, the heartfelt prayers and words of comfort from a concerned
nation. Many of your stations offered 24-hour coverage in the days
following the attacks. And in doing so, you accepted the reality of
lost ad revenues at a time when advertising was already scarce. No
matter the cost, you continued to get the news out.
At the same time, through your efforts, broadcasters helped this
country raise in excess of $1 billion for the victims of 9/11 and
related causes -- an extraordinary contribution in and of itself. And
you still found time to record and air PSAs answering the questions all
Americans had: How can we help?
You've even won over some old critics. Apparently, an FCC chairman
about four decades ago in a speech to your group -- a fellow by the
name of Newton Minow -- was very, very critical of the media. But
recently he was reported to have said, and I quote, "Television
deserves a round of gratitude from the American people for the way they
have handled this crisis. They deserve the highest praise."
But most importantly, as Americans understand it, you did your job,
keeping all of us informed and aware.
Now I think broadcasters have a new challenge, reporting on
homeland security. In many ways -- many, many ways -- this is a much
more difficult story to report. It doesn't have very good sound or
visuals. It's complicated. There are a lot of gray areas. There
aren't too many photo opportunities. It can be under-reported,
breeding false confidence, or over-reported, stoking unnecessary
fears.
But it is one of the most important, if not the most important,
story of our lifetimes. It's the story of how we protect American
lives and the American way of life, the most important job of
government.
Last week, President Bush announced a major change in how we will
do that job. The President has proposed a new Department of Homeland
Security. The new department will be commissioned and tasked to
protect our borders and airports and seaports and to monitor visitors
to this country; to overseas preparedness and to help train and equip
first-responders; address the threat from weapons of mass destruction,
and turn policies into action through regional drills; to map our
nation's critical infrastructure so we can learn where the great
vulnerabilities lie and take action to reduce them; to synthesize and
analyze homeland security intelligence from multiple sources, so we can
separate fact from fiction and identify trends that help us deter and
catch terrorists; and finally, to communicate threats and actions to
those who need to know -- governors, mayors, law enforcement officials,
business owners and the public.
Today, no single agency calls homeland security its sole or even
its primary mission. Instead, responsibility is scattered among more
than 100 separate government organizations. Currently -- excuse me.
Consequently, despite the best efforts of the best public servants, our
response is often ad hoc. We don't always have the kind of alignment
of authority and responsibility with accountability that gets things
done. This creates situations that would be comical if the threat were
not so serious.
Are you the captain of a foreign flag ship that entered U.S.
waters? You could meet agents from Customs, INS, Coast Guard, or the
Agricultural Department, each of whom might have jurisdiction over some
portion of your ship. And even though the Coast Guard has the
authority to act as an agent for the other three, they often defer to
their federal colleagues.
The same thing happens if you're taking a car or truck across a
border -- you can see the INS or Customs, or perhaps the Border Patrol
or Agriculture or somebody else there. One opens the hood, one looks
for people, one checks the baggage, one opens the trunk. Again, we
need to do a better job of targeting those resources, perhaps in
cross-training, to deploy these men and women and the technology that
they have at their disposal in a more effective, much more effective
way.
Let me give you another example. Say you live near a nuclear power
facility, and you want to obtain potassium iodine in an emergency --
and some states are actually in the process of distributing some. If
you live within a ten-mile radius of the plant, the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission regulates the distribution of this very important drug. If
you live outside the circle, the Federal Emergency Management Agency
regulates the distribution. But of course, if you live within ten
miles of a nuclear weapons facility, it's the Department of Energy that
distributes the drug. And oh, by the way, to add one more layer, if
there isn't enough potassium iodine to go around, then the Department
of Health and Human Services is in charge of the national
pharmaceutical stockpile.
These men and women go to work every day. They're patriots all,
and they work very hard to comply with the law and do what they're told
to do, according to the law and the regulations and the direction of
their agency. But clearly a situation like that shouldn't be so
cumbersome, shouldn't be so complex. It is confusing, to say the
least. We need to eliminate as much of the confusion as possible.
The Department of Homeland Security will have a single mission. As
the President reminds all of us, it is his most important job, and the
most important job of the federal government: protect the American
people and our way of life from terrorism. And it will have a single,
clear line of authority to get the job done. It will bring together
everyone under the same roof, working toward the same goal and pushing
in the same direction.
Let me give you another example. Right now, many, many
governmental organizations collect intelligence for a variety of
purposes. The most prominent are the CIA and the FBI, but obviously
you have several in the Department of Defense, the NSA. You've got the
Drug Enforcement Agency. INS collects intelligence, Customs collects
intelligence, Coast Guard collects intelligence. You have multiple
agencies out there that gather information and intelligence. No single
agency conducts a comprehensive analysis of that entire universe of
data. No single agency is charged with that task.
That would change. Not only will the Department have access to the
data, but that department will be able to fuse it, analyze it for
threats, and then map those threats against vulnerabilities, which the
Department will also be responsible to assess. We can then put out the
threat advisories or call for increased security measures to meet the
threat. Basically, the Department will be able to put together all of
the pieces of the puzzle and, depending on what the picture shows, take
the requisite action.
Since day one, the primary mission of the Office of Homeland
Security has been to develop a comprehensive national strategy to
secure the United States from terrorist attacks and threats. This
proposal is the centerpiece of that national strategy. It gives us the
structure that we need in order to implement the national strategy.
Now, I know conflict usually makes for far better news than
consensus. And any reform this far-reaching will certainly have its
share of both conflict and criticism. The conflicts are particularly
sensitive in a town as turf-conscious as Washington, D.C. But as I
said on day one, the only turf we should be worried about protecting is
the turf we stand on. And by and large, the people who serve this
President have taken that message to heart.
And I'm confident, by the way, based on conversations, numerous
conversations I've had with Republicans and Democrats on the Hill, that
they share this President's commitment to getting this done sooner
rather than later. We were very encouraged by a conversation we had
with many of the members who have been out talking about some form of
reorganization for quite some time last Friday morning, when the topic
of the conversation, during the course of the President's discussion,
was how they can work together to accelerate the consideration, the
legislative consideration of this proposal on the Hill. And the
President was very gratified by that, very gratified by Congressman
Gephardt's remarks the following day, suggesting that maybe we could
get it done by September 11th.
Now, having been on -- having served as a member of Congress for 12
years, the notion we could get something this dramatic, historic, done
between now and September 11th would be a grand and historic gesture in
and of itself. But -- and we're going to do everything we can to work
with Congressman Gephardt and everybody else. But if we can work
together, presidential leadership with legislative leadership, and get
it done by the end of the year, as the President has suggested and
hoped, I think it would be an extraordinary accomplishment.
[FEMA Director] Joe Allbaugh said at a Cabinet meeting where the
President announced his plans the following: "Mr. President, you came
to Washington as a change agent and we're change agents, too --
otherwise, why are we here?" It's a huge change, a sea change, nothing
like it since Harry Truman. And I believe the executive and
legislative branch together will get it done.
Now, we all know that change can be fairly uncomfortable. It's
been said that it is always easier to create new government than it is
to reorganize old government. The President's reform touches nearly
every Cabinet department, and will affect nearly 170,000 federal
employees. But we need to seek a better fit between the job at hand
and the agencies with the matching core competencies in the field. And
I want to assure them that they will have the satisfaction of going to
work every day knowing they're protecting the American people and our
way of life.
I also want to reassure taxpayers that we are not creating a new
federal bureaucracy. We're not creating a new government agency in the
sense that there are 170,000 new employees that will be going to work
for the federal government. The President said, we need to make the
existing government work better and to focus on efficiency and
effectiveness if we're to consolidate and streamline our homeland
security responsibilities.
So I would ask my former colleagues in Congress who have been --
many of them have been fully engaged in this debate not only during the
past several months, but for several years even before the tragic
occurrences of 9/11, who have called for similar reforms -- to approve
the President's proposal before they adjourn this year. We're very
encouraged. I believe they will.
The current structure may be favored by some. There are some
people that just like the status quo, think things are just fine --
just give us more money, more people, more this, more that, but let's
just keep things as they are. And I understand there may be some
people on the Hill who have worked very hard to oversee, as
legislators, different components of the new proposed Department of
Homeland Security. But I am hopeful that in the long run they would be
willing to understand that a streamlined, consolidated, reorganized
effort is precisely the way this country needs to go.
The President and I believe the American people need a single
department that can partner with states and localities. It was very
interesting -- in the President's directive creating the position of
Advisor to the President for Homeland Security, one of the tasks given
to our office was to design and implement a national strategy -- not
just a federal strategy. A national strategy, by implication, means we
have to work and do a better job not just within our federal agencies,
but we have to tie ourselves together with state and local government
and the private sector as well.
We need to make this deparment a clearinghouse for many of the best
practices that we believe can be deployed to prevent terrorism. And
certainly we need to do a better job of preparing our country, building
up capacity to respond to one, an attack, if it occurs.
We can never eliminate the threat completely. We can never
eliminate the notion of surprise, of terrorist attack, particularly in
a society that's as open and as free and as diverse and as large as we
are in the United States of America. And I believe we can
significantly, significantly reduce the vulnerability to terrorism and
terrorist attack over time. We can give Americans greater peace of
mind, convenience, and commerce. Done wrong -- it's just business as
usual, things done the old way -- I believe we leave our nation more
vulnerable to attack, and the possibility of slowing our economy down
as well.
Homeland security is not an inside-the-beltway story. It
encompasses the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink,
the energy we use, critical infrastructure everywhere. It affects us
every time we board a plane or visit the office or log onto our
computers. It touches everyone's lives. And broadcasters have an
important role to play in informing and educating the American people.
After 9/11, you just didn't report the news. You helped calm
fears. You answered questions. And I hope and believe you'll give the
same attention to homeland security. As my colleague, Mike Byrne,
who's worked so hard on first-responder initiatives within our homeland
security office -- he's a 20-year veteran of the New York Fire
Department who lost his next-door neighbor, as well as many other
friends with whom he had served in New York City -- he reminds all of
us on a very, very frequent basis: always remember, he says, this is
about saving lives. And there's no more important story than that.
You know, for those of us at a certain age, there were a few
constants in life. One of those was radio and TV. The other was the
Cold War. Half a century ago, President Truman saw a need to
reorganize the military, in spite of the victory in World War II, to
meet the new threat, the Soviet threat. Back then, the Army and Navy
and other military organizations had separate, independent commands.
Truman looked at the lessons learned from Pearl Harbor and from our
prosecution of the war, and he said, and I quote: "In the theaters of
operation, we went further in the direction of unity by establishing
unified commands. But we never had comparable unified direction or
command in Washington." Sounds familiar.
He added: "It is now time to discard obsolete organizational
forms, and to provide for the future the soundest, the most effective,
and the most economical kind of structure for our armed forces."
Truman pushed for the creation of a unified Department of Defense -- he
got it -- a Central Intelligence Agency to learn about the threat, and
a National Security Council to analyze the threat. He got all three.
When told it couldn't be done, he said simply, in typical Truman,
straightforward, plain language, "It has to be done." His efforts
turned the U.S. military into the most powerful force for freedom the
world has ever seen. And though he didn't live to see it, his vision
and his reorganization helped bring down the Berlin Wall and end the
Cold War, a goal many, many people in the '50s and the '60s thought
impossible.
It's time for us to take the lessons learned from 9/11 and from our
war on terrorism and apply them to homeland security. We may not see
victories in our lifetimes either, but if we build the foundation now,
I'm confident America can do the impossible and make history once
again.
Thank you very, very much. (Applause.)
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