- WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Bowing
to pressure from Congress, President Bush proposed creating a new Cabinet
agency on Thursday to protect the United States after the government's
failure to stop the Sept. 11 attacks.
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- The White House said Bush will propose an overarching
homeland security department to focus on four areas: transport and border
security; emergency preparedness and response; preventing chemical, biological
and radiological attacks; and intelligence analysis and infrastructure
protection.
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- "This is ... the biggest restructuring of the federal
government since 1947," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters,
saying the overhaul under former President Harry Truman was to confront
the Cold War while the current effort was to fight terrorism.
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- Fleischer said the new department, which will require
congressional approval and have Cabinet status, will draw from eight existing
government agencies, which he did not name, an idea that raises the possibility
of a fierce turf battle among entrenched federal bureaucracies in Washington.
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- The spokesman denied the timing of Bush's announcement,
due to be made at 8 p.m.(0000 GMT on Friday), was intended to divert attention
from congressional hearings that began this week into intelligence failures
before the Sept. 11 attacks, saying protecting the country is "a priority
any time."
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- "The president views this as a way to help people
who are doing their job and doing it well now, so they can do it even better,
by bringing them into one domestic agency that has responsibility as the
one lead department, with Cabinet-level status, for protecting the homeland,"
Fleischer said.
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- In creating a Cabinet rank department, Bush is bowing
to the demands of many in Congress who had argued for an agency that would
be subject to congressional oversight, unlike the White House Office of
Homeland Security created soon after the Sept. 11 attacks in which about
3,000 people died.
-
- In a sign that Bush's proposal may win broad support
on Capitol Hill, House Democratic leader Richard Gephardt of Missouri backed
the plan immediately. "That's precisely what I think should be done,"
he said.
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- RIDGE EXPECTED NEW DIRECTOR
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- Fleischer said Bush will ask Congress during his prime-time
address to approve legislation creating the new Cabinet agency this year.
The new agency's director is widely expected to be Tom Ridge, the former
Pennsylvania governor whom Bush picked to lead his much smaller White House
homeland security office.
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- The Bush administration has taken growing criticism since
Sept. 11 for the failure of major U.S. agencies, including the CIA and
the FBI, to properly share information within the government before the
attacks on Washington and New York.
-
- A government official said one element of Bush's proposal
would include properly sharing information among a wide range of agencies,
including the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Immigration and Naturalization
Service as well as state and local law enforcement.
-
- Bush will make his announcement as a joint committee
formed by the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives intelligence committees
this week began a wide-ranging investigation into how the government failed
to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.
-
- In those attacks, 19 men of Middle Eastern descent hijacked
for airplanes and crashed them into the World Trade Center in New York
and the Pentagon near Washington, killing about 3,000 people. The United
States blames the attacks on Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden and his
al Qaeda network.
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- In recent months, there have been a series of disclosures
suggesting the government may have missed clues that might have led them
to the hijackers before the attack.
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- U.S. officials from Bush down have insisted that they
have seen no evidence suggesting that they could have prevented the attacks
and they have warned the public that another attack is a virtual inevitability.
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