Speaking on whether "Americans were safer since Sept. 11," Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.) told Ridge during a House Select Committee on Homeland Security hearing that her assessment was: "barely."
"I don't think we're that much safer," Sanchez said. "If you went and asked firemen or law enforcement, they would tell you that the whole process has been pretty messed up."
Sanchez cited "civil liberties" concerns over intelligence-gathering operations, no noticeable difference in the movement of people and materials across the borders and ports, and how much money was being spent on the department's creation.
"I know it's hard to put a department together, but time is wasting, and are Americans any safer? Not much," Sanchez said.
In response, Ridge spoke of his department's employees. "There are 180,000 of your fellow citizens who go to work every day who are trying to make this country safer in the federal government," Ridge told Sanchez.
"They work for what used to be the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Customs, they work for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and they work for national labs," Ridge explained.
"I think they would probably respectfully disagree with you that the work they're doing today doesn't make the country any safer than it was Sept. 10."
Committee Chairman Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) convened the hearing to determine how safe Americans are in the 80 days since "the majority of the agencies that make up" Homeland Security, "including Customs, the Border Patrol, the Coast Guard, TSA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)," officially joined the department.
Ridge ticked off a long list of his department's accomplishments since its creation.
These included: improved border relationships with Mexico and Canada; the multi-billion-dollar investment Congress has made in airports; work done by the Coast Guard with the 55 strategic ports to set priorities and identify vulnerabilities; creation of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center; work done by 50 governors who speak with homeland security directors twice a month and more; and "the outreach and technical assistance that information analysis and infrastructure protection is providing.
"So I think that, in respectful disagreement, that we are much safer. We go to a new level of readiness every day," Ridge said. "That is not to say that we still don't have a considerable distance to travel."
Ridge recalled President Bush's strategy in the department's creation: "preventing a terrorist attack, reducing our vulnerability and responding to an attack if it occurs."
Since its creation, Ridge said the department had consolidated the various border enforcement agencies and improved relationships with local authorities in combating illegal immigration and terrorist threats from across the borders.
"Congress understands that our military, our CIA and our FBI are really our first responders in going after the...terrorists themselves. With the success of our military overseas and the work that we've done in this country, coupled with the Threat Integration Center, coupled with the advanced information sharing among the agencies, this is a different very time," Ridge said.
"In the post-9/11 era, there is much more information sharing. In the future, there will be more products that we can rely upon."
According to Ridge, an information and science unit within the department would be using the "considerable resources" given to them by Congress to do two things: assess which detection and protection equipment "we have on the shelves" can be applied immediately and in the long term; and "make FEMA an all-hazard agency" that would "continue working with the state and locals responding to incidents whether they are a force of nature or a force of evil."
Cox also wanted to know what was learned from last week's national disaster drill involving simulated events in Seattle and Chicago. He mentioned reports of hospital capacity problems in Chicago during the exercise, along with legal liability problems stemming from the distribution of antibiotics by volunteer medical personnel.
Ridge said that during the exercise, "we weren't quite at the saturation point" in hospital bed capacity, that the Department of Defense had portable hospitals that could be deployed in the eventuality of capacity levels reaching their limit during a real scenario, and that public health emergency teams could be deployed to spell hospital employees working for extended periods.
He said the liability issue was a state matter and could be resolved by an executive order by the governor to facilitate the distribution of pharmaceuticals by volunteers supervised by a public health nurse during a crisis. Ridge assured Cox that a full assessment report on the exercise to Congress would be forthcoming.
Summing up the phase of readiness reached by his department, Ridge stated: "As Winston Churchill once said when faced with another threat to worldwide peace and liberty, 'This is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning.'"
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