8 May 2001
To: cypherpunks@lne.com
Subject: US creates task force on "homeland defense" against terrorist
attacks
Date: Tue, 08 May 2001 15:33:09 -0400 (EDT)
From: Faustine <a3495@cotse.com>
Wednesday May 9, 1:09 AM
WASHINGTON, May 8 (AFP) -
Vice President Dick Cheney announced Tuesday he will head a task force on "homeland defense" to assess changing threats to the United States and how to prepare for potential terrorist attacks on US soil.
"The concern here is that one of our biggest threats as a nation is no longer a conventional military attack," Cheney said in an interview on CNN.
"It could be domestic terrorism, but it may also be a terrorist organization overseas or even another state using weapons of mass destruction against the US, a hand-carried nuclear weapon or a biological or chemical agent."
The Federal Emergency Management Agency will devise plans and strategies "to figure out how we best respond to that kind of disaster of major proportions that would effectively be man-made, or man-caused," Cheney said.
The task force will submit results of its work to President George W. Bush and the National Security Council, Cheney said, without setting a time frame.
As the vice president spoke, the US Senate opened a three-day hearing to question other key members of Bush's cabinet on the country's state of readiness against such attacks.
Secretary of State Colin Powell joined Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta to explain their efforts to protect US citizens at home and abroad against terrorist attacks.
"Terrorism is a part of the dark side of globalization," Powell told the hearing.
But he rejected the idea of becoming "helmeted giants huddling in our bunkers awaiting the enemy," and instead insisted on the importance of crafting the appropriate counterterrorism efforts and accompanying public diplomacy to deal with the threat.
"We will continue to strenghten our cooperation with those fighting terrorism domestically," he said.
Senators focussed their questions on the importance of the multiple national agencies involved in US security being able to coordinate to stave off, or deal with the consequences of terrorism.
The unprecendented hearings comes a week before the execution of Timothy McVeigh, convicted for the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, the deadliest terrorist attack on US soil which killed 168 people.
He is scheduled to die by lethal injection at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, on May 16.
The New York Times, May 8, 2001
PUBLIC INTERESTS
By GAIL COLLINS
S ecretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appeared on "Meet the Press" last weekend and explained how the Bush administration was going to go about building a hitherto unbuildable missile shield to protect the United States from nuclear assaults by rogue nations.
"Some of the things will work, some won't and what we'll do is stop the things that won't and move forward on the things that will," he said.
This sounds suspiciously like a plan to finance one's future retirement by buying only lottery tickets that are going to win. But with that kind of can- do attitude, I don't see why we're settling for a lousy missile shield. Why not decide to outfit our surveillance planes with Romulan cloaking devices, so they could hover invisibly over the rogue nation's launch sites? If Saddam Hussein tried to pull a fast one, we could simply zap him with a photon torpedo.
If the missile shield program actually gets through Congress, it will not be because people actually believe it can work, but because nobody ever lost an election by voting for defense appropriations. Weapons systems, like highway construction, are on the win-win side of government. If something fails, you put out yet another contract, and all the people who were happy before get even happier.
Contrast this to the problem of domestic terrorism — the thing that happens if somebody decides to skip the rocket launcher and simply tote a nuclear bomb into the country on a cargo ship or the back of a truck. The issue here is not really money or technology but bureaucratic infighting, a problem that creates many losers and no defense contracts.
Right now, 46 federal agencies are working on homeland defense. If a nuclear bomb were to be unleashed somewhere inside the United States tomorrow, it's far from clear who would be in control of the response. (Except, of course, in the case of New York City, where Mayor Rudolph Giuliani would be in complete and total charge, even if he had already been incinerated.)
This week the U.S. Senate is going to have an unusual joint committee hearing with the laudable intention of trying to figure out who should be calling the shots. But in order to estimate the senators' chances of eliminating overlapping authority, consider the fact that there are seven committees and eight subcommittees with jurisdiction.
"That's just in the Senate. Lord knows how many if you include the House," said Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, the chairman of one of my favorite subcommittees, "Emerging Threats and Capabilities."
Mr. Roberts held a hearing last week on just one tiny particle of the homeland defense picture, the Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Teams. The WMD-CST's are part of the National Guard, and among their many problems is the fact that they have one of the worst acronyms in the history of civil defense.
"We used to call them RAID teams," Senator Roberts said nostalgically.
The National Guard teams were supposed to offer a Defense Department presence at the site of a terrorist attack. There were originally scheduled to be 10 teams, but your basic Congressional conviction that more is better, particularly when it is located within one's own personal district, led to upping the ante to 32. In the end, it didn't much matter, since none of them have actually ever gotten trained.
"Do you believe it would be prudent to have a civil support team in West Virginia?" Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia asked a military witness.
"Yes sir, if you want," the general replied.
Meanwhile, Senator Roberts worried out loud about who was going to coordinate the 46 federal agencies, not to mention governors, mayors, police chiefs and all the other officeholders who would want a say in responding to a possible biological or chemical or nuclear disaster in their state. Many experts, he offered, favored giving the job to the vice president.
This makes a lot of sense, since "terrorist attack" fits under Dick Cheney's current portfolio of Everything Except Education.
All I know is that Mr. Rumsfeld should be taken out of the running for homeland defense czar, if only because his department changed the RAID teams' name to WMD-CST. Also, when it comes time to decide how to move the civil defense workers to a crisis site, we should definitely be looking at transporter beams.