- WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President
Bush established a vast Department of Homeland Security on Monday to prevent
terrorist attacks on the United States, setting in motion the biggest government
overhaul in half a century; completion is expected to take at least 10
months.
-
- "We can neither predict nor prevent every conceivable
attack," Bush acknowledged at a White House signing ceremony. But
he said the "continuing threat of terrorism, the threat of mass murder
on our own soil will be met by a unified, effective response."
-
- A chief aim of the new department will be to avoid breakdowns
in communication between the FBI, CIA and other federal agencies exposed
by the 2001 hijacked airliner attacks on the World Trade Center in New
York and the Pentagon near Washington. About 3,000 people were killed in
those attacks and a crash in a field in Pennsylvania.
-
- While neither the FBI nor the CIA will be part of the
new department, it will include a division that would analyze intelligence
in hopes of thwarting future attacks.
-
- Bush nominated White House adviser Tom Ridge to head
the new agency. Ridge takes on what many believe is an impossible job,
screening out would-be attackers without slowing down some 500 million
people, more than 11 million trucks, 51,000 foreign ships and 2.2 million
rail cars that enter the country each year. Ridge is expected to win easy
confirmation in the U.S. Senate.
-
- AN IMMENSE TASK
-
- Bush nominated Navy Secretary Gordon England to serve
as Ridge's deputy at the Cabinet-level agency, which will consolidate all
or parts of 22 federal agencies, including the Coast Guard, Secret Service
and Border Patrol.
-
- The president acknowledged it would be an "immense
task" setting up the new agency. "Adjustments will be needed
along the way. Yet this is pressing business and the hard work of building
a new department begins today," he said.
-
- The General Accounting Office, Congress's investigative
arm, and others estimated that it would take several years to fully integrate
the various agencies and their different traditions, cultures and ways
of doing business.
-
- But the White House set the ambitious goal of bringing
the agencies into the new department by Sept. 30, 2003, administration
officials said.
-
- The first agencies would join by March 1, including the
Secret Service, Coast Guard, Customs Service, Immigration and Naturalization
Service, Transportation Safety Administration and the General Service Administration's
federal protective services.
-
- The FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center would
move to the new department on April 1, followed by the Pentagon's national
communication system on May 1. The Agriculture Department's Plum Island
Animal Disease Center would shift to the new agency on June 1.
-
- "While the nation is continuing to be protected
today, there's no question the new agency will go through growing pains.
Wrinkles are going to have to be ironed out," White House spokesman
Ari Fleischer said.
-
- The new department was initially proposed by Democrats
and opposed by the White House. Bush later offered a similar plan and made
it a central theme in the Nov. 5 election, in which his Republican Party
gained control of the U.S. Congress.
-
- WARNING ABOUT DELAY
-
- Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat who first
proposed a Department of Homeland Security a month after the Sept. 11,
2001, attacks, warned against foot-dragging.
-
- "While we have been debating the creation of this
department, our terrorist enemies have been plotting and planning to exploit
our vulnerabilities. We must close the gaps in our domestic defenses as
quickly as humanly possible," Lieberman said.
-
- Ridge, a former Pennsylvania governor, is currently director
of the White House Office of Homeland Security. He is a former congressman
and a decorated Vietnam veteran.
-
- Bush said Asa Hutchinson, the administrator of the Drug
Enforcement Administration, would be nominated to serve as undersecretary
for Border and Transportation Security.
-
- Formation of the department comes at a time of growing
concern that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, blamed for the attacks
on America, will strike again. Intelligence agencies in recent weeks have
reported an increase in communications among militants.
-
- The president will have broad authority to hire, fire
and transfer workers at the department in the name of national security.
That flexibility, opposed by most Democrats and their allies in organized
labor, was the biggest hurdle to passage.
|