Please find below an example of UPI's continuing coverage of homeland
and national security. I hope you find it interesting. You may link to
it on the web here:
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20050712-023300-1568r
Subscribers to UPI's Security and Terrorism service receive this column
every Monday morning, first thing.
If you have any comments or questions about this piece, need any more
information about UPI products and services, or want to stop receiving
these alerts, please get in touch.
Thank you,
Shaun Waterman
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Tel: 202 898 8081
Security & Terror: The week ahead
By Shaun Waterman
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor
WASHINGTON, July 25 (UPI) -- Fall out from the back-to-back attacks in
London and Egypt last week is likely to play big in the national
security headlines this week, but with no foreign visitors to the White
House scheduled and the president's program dominated by domestic
concerns. Congress' final week is also likely to make it onto the news
agenda.
On the homeland security front, lawmakers will likely continue their
efforts to highlight the need for federal support to city governments on
the question of mass transit security in the wake of the London
bombings.
Last week, a series of failed amendments to the Senate's Homeland
Security Appropriations Bill attempted to boost funding to mass transit
security, but senators balked at moving the cash out of first responder
grant programs.
With the money question off the table until the House-Senate conference
on the appropriation bill after the recess, and the legislative calendar
already overcrowded, oversight and the bully pulpit are all that is left
to lawmakers on this issue.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee
announced Friday it was launching an investigation into the
vulnerability of America's mass transit and the role the federal
government should play.
But Congressional Quarterly's Justin Rood reports that no hearings are
expected until after the August recess.
On the House side Tuesday, a hearing planned as a response to the July 7
attacks on London's bus and subway systems has taken on added
significance with the second round of bombing attempts there last week.
The Emergency Preparedness, Science and Technology Subcommittee of the
House Homeland Security Committee, chaired by Rep. Pete King, R-N.Y.,
will examine the training of first responders for a mass transit attack.
Officials from the Department of Homeland Security and the
Transportation Department's Federal Transit Authority will testify
alongside security officials from mass transit systems across the
country.
King is one of those thought to be jostling for the chairmanship of the
full committee, once Rep. Chris Cox, R-Calif., moves on to the
Securities and Exchange Commission.
It will be interesting to see whether lawmakers ask Tim Beres, of
Homeland Security's Office of Domestic Preparedness how his office will
be divided up in Secretary Michael Chertoff's planned reorganization.
According to congressional documents obtained by United Press
International, the Office of Domestic Preparedness, now part of the
ungainly titled Office of State and Local Government Coordination and
Preparedness, will be divided up between the new Directorate for
Preparedness, and an expanded Office of Legislative and
Intergovernmental Affairs.
In a letter to congressional leaders outlining the proposed changes,
Chertoff says that "elements" of the coordination and preparedness
office "responsible for grants, training and exercises," will be shifted
to the new preparedness directorate. But the office's "intergovernmental
coordination resources ... which serves as the department's
point-of-contact for state, local and tribal elected officials" would go
the Office of Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs.
But when UPI questioned Beres' boss, deputy director of the office, Josh
Filler, last week about which elements would go where it was clear that
many details remained to be worked out.
Underlying all this is the concern from many preparedness veterans that
the new structure will decouple preparedness from response -- which will
be the responsibility of a newly independent Federal Emergency
Management Agency.
By splitting the two, some emergency management professionals argue, the
department risks unlearning the lessons that led precisely to the
creation of FEMA as an agency that handled both preparedness and
response.
Moreover, the split is also fuelling concern that it may undermine the
department's commitment to an "All Hazards" approach to preparedness.
Deputy Secretary Michael Jackson insisted at a briefing for reporters
after the roll-out of the reorganization earlier this month that the
department remained committed to an "All Hazards" approach.
But Chertoff's letter to congressional leaders tells a slightly
different story.
"While operational response and recovery programs have an 'All Hazards'
approach," he wrote, "federal preparedness efforts need to be targeted
towards addressing gaps in our terrorism (sic) and homeland security
capabilities."
The "All Hazards" issue might also come up before a Senate panel
Wednesday, when the Disaster Prevention and Prediction Subcommittee of
Commerce, Science and Transportation, chaired by GOP freshman Jim DeMint
of South Carolina, will hold a hearing on the need for a national
all-hazards alert and public warning system.
Reynold Hoover, the national security coordinator for FEMA will be
giving evidence.
And the reorganization, known in department jargon as the Second Stage
Review, will also come under the microscope on the House side Wednesday.
The government reform subcommittee chaired by Rep. Todd Platts, R-Pa.,
plans a hearing on the department's financial management problems.
Platts asked Chertoff himself to appear before his Management, Finance,
and Accountability Subcommittee to explain why his reorganization didn't
fix what many observers believe is a fundamental flaw in the
department's organizational architecture -- the lack of authority of its
chief financial officer -- a flaw, moreover, that puts it out of
conformity with Platts-authored legislation mandating empowered CFOs in
every government department.
Chertoff declined to appear ("He doesn't do subcommittees," one
department official told UPI) and Platts will have to make do with
Undersecretary for Management Janet Hale and un-empowered Chief
Financial Officer Andrew Maner.
It will be interesting to see if lawmakers hold officials' feet to the
fire on the question of the department's inability to get a clean audit.
Former officials have told UPI that part of the reason why some of
Homeland Security's budget woes -- the huge hole in the finances of
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, for instance -- took so long to fix
is that Maner didn't have the authority he needed over the finance
chiefs of the department's 22 legacy agencies.
And, they add, Hale didn't back him up.
Another official who might expect to finish Wednesday with rather
scorched soles is FBI Director Robert Mueller, who testifies before a
full Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
There are no end of issues for critics to hash out with him -- starting
with the bureau's astounding waste of hundreds of millions of dollars of
public funds in the fiasco over the Virtual Case File computer system.
But whether Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and the other committee
members will have their eye on the FBI ball, with the Supreme Court
nomination dominating national political news, we shall have to wait and
see.
They will have pretty impressive support from other witnesses: the
Department of Justice's Inspector General Glenn Fine; Lee Hamilton of
the Sept 11. Commission; and the only man ever to have run both the FBI
and the CIA, Judge William Webster.
Interestingly, this will also be the first congressional outing for John
Russack, the program manager for the administration's much-touted
Information Sharing Environment.
Russack's role -- he is based in the office of the new Director of
National Intelligence John Negroponte -- is central to the overhaul of
the nation's sprawling and fractious collection of intelligence agencies
envisaged in last year's intelligence reform legislation.
His office, supported by Negroponte's general counsel, is responsible
for resolving the complex knot of legal, policy and technical issues
that threaten to thwart the vision of a "wired," inter-connected
intelligence community.
In doing so, Negroponte and his staff plan to re-write the rules on
"U.S. persons," the guidelines that bar U.S. agencies from spying on
American citizens and corporations, and on foreigners living here
legally.
But before they get into the FBI, members of the Judiciary Committee
will tackle the much sexier, more controversial issue of immigration
reform.
The panel is slated to hear Tuesday from four senior senators who have
proposed legislation on the topic. The bill authored by Sens. Edward
Kennedy, D-Mass., and John McCain, R-Ariz., would offer limited guest
worker visas to foreigners who wanted to come and work in the United
States.
By contrast, the bill promoted by Sens. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., and John
Cornyn, R-Texas would focus on tighter enforcement of borders,
authorizing -- according to Congressional Quarterly -- 10,000 new Border
Patrol agents, 1,000 new immigration inspectors and 10,000 new detention
spaces over the next five years.
Chertoff made immigration and border reform the second plank of his
Second Stage roll out earlier this month. He will doubtless tell the
panel that getting control of the border requires not just more
enforcement, but policy changes to increase the number of would-be
workers allowed to enter legally, thus reducing the pressure on the
border.
The sticking point in policy terms will come over what happens to the
undocumented workers already here. A significant bloc of conservative
immigration hawks in the House has promised to lie down in the road
before any bill that even smells like an amnesty.
But senior officials at the department fret that any measure which
doesn't involve a way to bring the undocumented -- in the president's
words -- "out of the shadows" of illegality, risks missing a key goal:
re-establishing some sort of integrity to an immigration process
currently honored far more in the breach than in the observance.
Border integrity and interior enforcement will also be on the agenda
Wednesday in the House, at a hearing of the Management, Integration, and
Oversight Subcommittee of the House Homeland Security Committee.
Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., will lead a probe of the current law
and policy governing the role of state and local law enforcement in
interior immigration enforcement.
Many municipalities and other local governments have so-called sanctuary
laws which bar local law enforcement from involvement with immigration
rules. Advocates argue that policing immigration is a federal, not a
local responsibility, and that cops cannot effectively police
communities with significant numbers of undocumented workers if no one
trusts them because they are seen as immigration enforcers.
But for the majority of jurisdictions, the issues involved in their
ability to assist the federal government are far more prosaic: training,
resources, personnel. Under the so-called 287(g) program, homeland
security can give free training and support to state and local partners
to help them assist federal agencies in identifying criminal and
terrorist aliens.
Young's panel will hear from officials in Immigration and Customs
Enforcement at the department and from state officials from Florida and
Alabama.
But it risks being overshadowed by the Senate Homeland Security and
Governmental Affairs Committee's latest hearing on security at chemical
plants -- probing what kind of regulation the federal government should
employ.
The House itself is likely to be dominated from Wednesday on by vigorous
debate over the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Area,
which will also likely elbow into the margins any debate on Wednesday's
mark up of the four year authorization bill for the Department of
Justice, fiscal years 2006-2009.
Another panel event rather at risk of getting lost in the woodwork is
Thursday's hearing of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Economic
Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Cybersecurity.
The hearing, on the management of the aviation screening workforce, will
confront the Transportation Security Administration's acting
second-in-command Thomas Blank with complaints from airport managers
across the country.
Copyright (c) 2001-2005 United Press International
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
--------------------------
Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL
PROTECTED]
--------------------------
Brooks Isoldi, editor
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.intellnet.org
Post message: osint@yahoogroups.com
Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
*** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has
not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. OSINT, as a part of
The Intelligence Network, is making it available without profit to OSINT
YahooGroups members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of
intelligence and law enforcement organizations, their activities, methods,
techniques, human rights, civil liberties, social justice and other
intelligence related issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes
only. We believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material
as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use
this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,'
you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
