Next president must outline homeland security aims (AP)

2008.10.16 - Terrorism - Source: - Comments [0]

WASHINGTON - Advice to the next president from George W. Bush's former homeland security adviser: Tell the public quickly and clearly how you plan to protect the country from a terrorist attack.

"God help them if something happens before they've done that," Frances Fragos Townsend said Wednesday during a discussion at George Washington University on homeland security and the presidential transition.

Either Republican John McCain or Democrat Barack Obama will inherit the responsibility of preventing another attack on U.S. soil and managing the Homeland Security bureaucracy.

The department was formed in 2003, after the Sept. 11 strikes, in the largest government reorganization since World War II. The department is in charge of everything from immigration enforcement to securing borders, airways, waterways and protecting the president and vice president. It already has gone through several reorganizations and there is not always consensus among experts on how best to run it.

For instance, two advisers to Democrat Obama do not agree on what to do with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. P.J. Crowley, who is with Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank, says FEMA should remain under Homeland Security for now. But James Lee Witt, a former FEMA director, long has advocated making FEMA an independent, Cabinet-level agency.

Intelligence officials view the 77 days between the Nov. 4 election and the Jan. 20 inauguration as a time when terrorists might try to attack the U.S. or American interests abroad.

Bush last week signed a directive that eases the transition to his successor. The Homeland Security Department has filled some of its top jobs — once held by political appointees — with career government officials who will stay in place as the administration changes. In addition, each campaign has been invited to submit a list of appointees to the FBI so that they can be checked and cleared and can hit the ground running if their candidate wins.

"I do not feel confident that the campaigns are taking this seriously," Townsend said.

While she said there is no intelligence pointing to a strike during the transition period, the next administration cannot ignore that attacks did take place early in the first terms of the Clinton and Bush administrations — the World Trade Center bombing on Feb. 26, 1993, and the hijackings on Sept. 11, 2001 — and the attack at the airport in Glasgow, Scotland, on June 30, 2007, days after Gordon Brown took office as prime minister.

"The American people have a right to expect we will not make the same mistakes twice," Townsend said.

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