House Democrats, Republicans Clash Over Bush Homeland Record

By Joe Fiorill
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — Democratic lawmakers Friday called on the Bush administration for greater urgency in efforts to protect the United States against WMD and terrorist attacks.

The Democrats’ criticisms, which came on the final working day before Bush’s annual State of the Union address this evening, prompted an immediate, pointed rebuttal from Republican legislators, as well as a White House defense of Bush’s “war on terrorism” strategy.

In preliminary findings of a comprehensive homeland security report slated for release next month, House Homeland Security Committee minority members criticized the administration for falling short in efforts to improve nuclear and chemical plant security; bioterrorism and general emergency response preparedness; assessment and use of intelligence; aviation, border and port security; and critical infrastructure protection.

“There’s no question we are safer. But the issue should be … are we safe enough? Are we as safe as we need to be?” senior committee Democrat Jim Turner (Texas) said in a conference call with reporters Friday.

“The bottom line is that America is not as safe as it needs to be in light of the threats we face. Democrats believe we must move faster and take stronger measures to make sure another 9/11 does not occur,” Turner added in a statement accompanying the report.

The Democrats said the administration has failed to adequately staff the Homeland Security Department and to produce a national terrorism threat assessment; to prevent dangerous items from being loaded onto airplanes; to adequately protect borders and screen foreigners; to create a comprehensive system for screening cargo containers for radiological and nuclear materials; to regulate chemical plant security; to secure Russian biological weapon sites and U.S. laboratories that use “weaponizable pathogens”; and to fund first responders at a sufficient level.

Within hours of the report’s release, committee Chairman Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) accused the Democrats of “substituting rhetoric for responsible oversight,” adding, “Homeland security is too important to politicize.”

“Backsliding from responsible oversight into one-page summaries of major initiatives and a laundry list of homeland security ‘gaps’ is unacceptable amateurism. … The minority owes a duty to every American to recognize that the administration has a comprehensive and coherent strategy that addresses each of the homeland security areas mentioned in their memo,” Cox said.

Bush spokesman Scott McClellan said the United States “is much safer today than it was on Sept. 11.” He pointed to U.S. military action abroad — taking “the fight to the enemy by waging the war on terrorism” — as evidence of the claim.

“The best way to prevent an attack from happening in the first place,” said McClellan, “is to bring those who seek to do us harm to justice before they can carry out an attack here in our homeland.”

Turner told reporters the committee could produce this year both a chemical security bill and an omnibus homeland security authorization bill, which he said could address many of the concerns aired in Friday’s report. The committee’s Emergency Preparedness and Response Subcommittee has already produced a bill on funding for responders, which the full committee is expected to take up within weeks (see GSN, Dec. 19, 2003).

“For this new department to really work in the most effective way, I think [we need] to have a meaningful authorization process where the Congress and the administration can come together … a bill [that] we then authorize [to say] that this is what we’re going to do,” Turner said.

He lingered over the question of bioterrorism defense. “Dealing with bioterrorism,” Turner said, “is a much broader challenge than what you see in the Bioshield legislation,” referring to an administration effort to promote vaccine research and development (see GSN, July 1, 2003). He said congressional reservations about the project stemmed from unwillingness to give the administration a “blank check” for vaccines.

Turner stressed the need for a capability to identify biological agents and an ability to quickly develop vaccines in the event of an attack. He said that only two states are capable of emergency vaccine distribution.

“We’ve got serious security gaps in the area of bioterrorism, and it is in my judgment a very troubling threat because of the catastrophic nature of that threat,” Turner said.

The Democrats criticized the administration for its “failure to close the gap” on security of nuclear material stockpiles. Citing al-Qaeda’s “end goal” of obtaining and using a nuclear weapon, poor security at ex-Soviet nuclear sites and International Atomic Energy Agency reports of uranium and plutonium theft, the lawmakers appeared to call for a consolidation of nonproliferation activities now carried out in various government agencies.

“No single senior official within the U.S. government is responsible, and therefore could be held accountable for, the coordination and ultimate success of multiple American programs designed to prevent nuclear materials from falling into the hands of terrorists,” the report reads.

The idea of naming “some sort of coordinator for all nonproliferation programs in the U.S. government” is not a new one, according to Carnegie Endowment for International Peace nonproliferation expert Jon Wolfsthal, who said creating such a post could help streamline efforts and is possible despite the complexity of the task.

“We have a drug czar; we have an AIDS czar; so it’s clearly something we could do,” said Wolfsthal.

Implicit in the Democrats’ criticism, added Wolfsthal, is the idea that U.S. threat reduction programs have evolved over the past decade and are in need of review.

“The U.S. government needs to have an honest appraisal of all its [nonproliferation] programs and consider which ones need to be consolidated, which ones need to be strengthened and which ones need to be phased out,” Wolfsthal said.

“We have been moving at a staggeringly slow pace of trying to get nuclear materials out of these backwaters. We’re accelerating; we’re doing more over the past couple years; [but] no matter how you slice the numbers, we’re moving too slowly,” he added.

In general, Turner told reporters, “We need to be much more aggressive about getting control of that nuclear material.” It is unclear, though, how much responsibility for nonproliferation the fledgling committee could legitimately take on.

Turner said specific recommendations are being developed within the committee, but one committee source added that, because of competing priorities and still-evolving committee responsibilities, nonproliferation activities are unlikely to turn up in the omnibus homeland security authorization bill that Turner mentioned.

“It’s a very critical area,” said Turner of nonproliferation, “and of course, it involves several other committees in the Congress as well.”

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