Sept. 11 Panel Leaders Seek Stronger Congressional Hand in Guiding Homeland Security Activity

By Joe Fiorill
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The leaders of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States continued their tour of congressional committees yesterday, telling representatives called back from a summer break that the legislative and executive branches of government must improve their performance on central antiterrorism tasks (see GSN, Aug. 17).

At a testy morning hearing of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, commission Chairman Thomas Kean and Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton took Congress to task for failing to effectively oversee government antiterrorism activities and repeated their call for basing Homeland Security Department spending on the assessed terrorism risk in different parts of the country, not on political or population considerations (see GSN, July 23).

“I think it’s important,” Hamilton said, “for the Congress to get itself into shape, so that it can perform one of its constitutional duties, which is oversight.”

The Sept. 11 commission said in its report on the 2001 attacks on the United States that the massive, young Homeland Security Department, cobbled together from a host of existing agencies, reports to 88 congressional committees and subcommittees. “That doesn’t mean oversight at all,” Kean said yesterday, since Homeland Security officials spend time testifying before Congress instead of protecting the country.

“Eighty-eight subcommittees: That really is absurd, and it simply is not fair. It is not fair to the executive branch,” Hamilton said.

The commission recommended legislative oversight be both consolidated and strengthened, goals Congress could try to achieve by creating a joint committee with Homeland Security jurisdiction or making the temporary select House panel a permanent committee.

Existing committees have appeared loath to cede power, however. Democratic committee member Loretta Sanchez (Calif.) yesterday decried the absence at the well-attended session of several members — David Dreier (R-Calif.), James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), Bill Young (R-Fla.) and Don Young (R-Alaska) — who head other committees with Homeland Security jurisdiction, suggesting the “empty chairs” were the product of opposition to a permanent panel.

Republican Christopher Shays (Conn.) echoed Sanchez’s complaint, calling the absences “outrageous.”

“We simply have got to put this aside and do this right and have a permanent committee,” Shays said.

Hamilton, a former lawmaker, blamed a generally poor atmosphere in Congress for the impasse. “One of the things that really bother me about the Congress today,” he said, “is … how difficult it is for you to deliberate. … In much of the activity on the floor of the House, you’re just kind of reading speeches and making speeches past each other.”

Kean and Hamilton said Homeland Security grants to emergency responders around the country should be based solely on assessed threats and vulnerabilities, rather than on the current formula, which combines per-state minimum payments with population and other factors.

The commission concluded that cities such as Washington and New York are for now the most obvious priorities for the money. Homeland Security has not yet produced a national threat and vulnerability assessment that is required under the department’s initial mandate and would serve as a central guide to spending.

“Priorities is always the toughest question in government: Where do you put limited resources?” Hamilton said. “Intelligence chatter,” he said, now indicates large cities are especially threatened, suggesting they deserve more funds.

“It’s people and it’s symbols,” Kean said, “and I think we’ve got to direct our resources at those places where the large [numbers of] people congregate and where those symbols exist.”

Private companies could improve their security efforts to take up some of the slack created by shifting government funds to high-risk cities, Hamilton suggested. Witnesses repeatedly told the Sept. 11 panel that “the private sector remains largely unprepared for a terrorist attack,” he said, voicing his endorsement of American National Standards Institute benchmarks for private-sector emergency preparedness.

“Private-sector preparedness is not a luxury. It is a cost of doing business in the post-9/11 world,” Hamilton said.

Top committee Democrat Jim Turner (Texas) said the commission’s conclusions on federal first-responder funding are embodied in a bill that the committee approved in March. Turner and committee Chairman Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) tried unsuccessfully over the past few months to put the measure before the full House of Representatives (see GSN, May 11).

“The 9/11 commission report is a wake-up call for our government. We need to regain the sense of urgency that we had following Sept. 11,” Turner said.

The commission leaders said the United States needs better information sharing among government agencies dealing with terrorism.

Kean said the “Cold War assumption” that the risks of disclosing information are greater than the benefits of sharing is deeply ingrained but no longer appropriate. The chairman called for more incentives to share information and a presidential push to bring “the information revolution” to national-security agencies, including by enabling each to search the others’ terrorism databases.

Hamilton criticized agencies for frustrating the flow of information by assigning “need-to-know” status to too much of their data. “You have to elevate the need to share up to the need to know,” he said, “and maybe the balance even has to tip a little bit toward the need to share.”

Recognition of the intelligence flaws underlying the September 2001 attacks has already spurred the creation of a range of new agencies, including Homeland Security and its Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate, the CIA-led Terrorist Threat Integration Center and the FBI-led Terrorism Screening Center.

A second hearing of the committee yesterday saw top officials from the Homeland Security and State departments, the FBI and the Terrorist Threat Integration Center testify about their efforts to better share intelligence.

Faced with concerns that the new agencies could simply constitute more bureaucracy to impede effective counterterrorism, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Information Analysis Patrick Hughes stressed the benefits of current informal cooperation between his directorate and the other agencies involved in the effort.

“While existing relationships are gaining momentum every day,” Hughes said, “we must assure that we will formalize a process which will improve information-sharing and collaboration. The [Homeland Security] Department is charged with this responsibility by law and by executive order.”

With the Sept. 11 commission recommending a new national counterterrorism center, Cox asked Hamilton at the morning hearing whether further consolidating terrorism-intelligence activity could diminish beneficial competition among agencies. Hamilton suggested the new center could improve the existing situation by bringing competing analyses to the attention of a single overseer, rather than allowing minority views to go unheard by selective decision-makers.

“We do not believe,” he said, “that combining the intelligence agencies under one office undermines competitive analysis. … I do not believe that the current system fosters competitive analysis.”

A national counterterrorism center, Hamilton said, would coordinate the work of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center and other clearinghouses. “TTIC is one among several fusion centers, maybe even one of many” throughout the government, he said, whose work would be brought together.

The committee found itself in the unusual position of having most of its members present to question the heads of the commission, whose report has become a popular cause among lawmakers of both major parties since it was released last month. With so many representatives present, time did not permit questioning from all committee members.

Time constraints combined with high stakes — the commission’s call for better congressional oversight of Homeland Security could weigh heavily on the committee’s future — led to frequent heated exchanges. Members criticized colleagues for taking too much time in posing questions and for pursuing lines of questioning the critics deemed irrelevant.

Representative Barney Frank (D-Mass.) successfully pleaded early on for members to forgo making opening statements, saying he had not returned from a vacation in his home state to listen to politicians’ speeches. As the hearing progressed, Frank paced around the dais and repeatedly threw up his hands when the proceedings slowed.

After Representative Lamar Smith (R-Texas) pressed Hamilton, a Democrat, on the extent of Democratic ex-President Bill Clinton’s responsibility for the Sept. 11 attacks, Representative Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) loudly complained that the remarks were inappropriate, continuing to make the point even as Cox sternly sought to cut off his remarks.

Minutes later, Cox himself drew the ire of Representative Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) when the committee chairman sought to clarify Sanchez’s complaints about absences by noting the presence of several leaders of other committees. Mindful of the short time remaining in the hearing, DeFazio interrupted Cox’s remarks, calling them “extraneous.”

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