Columns:: Worth Repeating

since 12/15/98

Columns::October 15, 2001

Worth repeating

The keynote speech for this year’s Russell Symposium on Oct. 3 was delivered by Gen. John Galvin, former supreme allied commander of NATO. He has served for the past three years on the bipartisan U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century and urged the audience to read the three-volume commission report (on the Web at www.nssg.gov):
“This very disparate group of people came to a conclusion that we never thought we would come to a year earlier. . . . We said--I hate to say this--‘Americans will likely die, on American soil, possibly in large numbers,’ and we were talking about the terrorist threat. . . . We published that in the spring of 1999. . . . We said we felt that events would happen to us within the next few years that would be shocking to our own sensibilities.
After that we published the final volume, which was the implementation recommendations. . . . And the first thing that we said was we need to create an agency, with a head at the Cabinet level, who reports to the president and has control of enough of the assets in the United States to be able to respond to these kinds of events. . . . There is Congressional oversight of intelligence, but there is . . . no committee that covers homeland defense or homeland protection or response.
We recommended that those things be done: the agency be created, an oversight committee be created. . . .
We now have Gov. Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania, and he has an office in the White House. But that’s not an agency--that’s a good first move, but next, he has to have power. He has responsibility now, he has authority now, now he needs resources, he needs structure, he needs to be able to respond. . . .”

--Beth Roberts

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