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Bush Signs Homeland
Department, Names Ridge

By Adam Entous
11-25-2

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.
 







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