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American Morning

President Proposes Creating Cabinet-Level Department of Homeland Security

Aired June 07, 2002 - 09:35   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Back here in D.C., the president says we need to focus the fight on terror. In his message last night to the nation and Congress, he proposed creating a cabinet-level department of Homeland Security.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I asked the Congress to join me in creating a single permanent department with overriding and urgent mission: securing the homeland of America and protecting the American people. Right now, as many as 100 different government agencies have some responsibilities for homeland security, and no one has final accountability.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAHN: If Congress approves, the president hopes to have it up and running by January 1st. Joining us now with his reaction is House minority leader Dick Gephardt.

Thanks for trekking up here in person.

REP. RICHARD GEPHARDT (D-MO), HOUSE MINORITY LEADER: Good morning.

ZAHN: Good morning. Your colleague Trent Lott says he thinks it will be a real push, but it's possible that by the 1st of the year the department may be up and running. What do you think?

GEPHARDT: I think we've got to do it, and we've got to do it quickly. I'm happy the president did this. I've been wanting him to do this for months. I think Congress has to move with greater speed than we usually do. We have got to have presidential leadership to help us get it through. But we've got to get this done. This is -- I use the old Apollo 13 phrase, failure is not an option; on homeland security, failure is not an option. We cannot say that attacks are inevitable. We have to stop them before they start.

ZAHN: This senator who you so warmly greeted before you sat on this chair also talked about this, perhaps not being a budget neutral plan. We know that some $37 billion are designated for homeland security. He said it would not surprise him if these cost were to increase. Is that all but inevitable? GEPHARDT: It probably is. There are things we need to do to make targets less vulnerable that are going to cost money. They are going to take personnel, training of local police, coordination of local police and fire departments. We have a lot of the do.

The new front in the war is right out here. It's America, and we have to organize our soldiers, which usually are local police and fire people into a fighting army to prevent acts of terrorism and to deal with them if they unfortunately happen. So we have got a big job, and it will cost money and take time and take effective action on the part of everybody.

ZAHN: We had earlier this morning a counterterrorism expert on who said he thinks that one of the deficiencies of this plan is that this new department will not have access to raw data. It will access to distilled data. And his concern is on September 11th, the folks, and these are his words, analyzing the data missed the signals, and that was raw data. How compromised is this department to get the distilled data?

GEPHARDT: Paula, we will have to look at that. Obviously, Congress is not going to rubber stamp whatever the president sends, and we'll look at that feature. Off the top of my head, I can see a reason to have an intelligence-gathering agency mechanism, and then interpreting all that data with the best intelligence, mind you, and then getting it to kind of front line, which I see this agency as, carrying out the intelligence, getting it down to the local level, and then reacting to it in a proper way, and being more coordinated in the doing of that.

ZAHN: We just got back from the Blair House where we interviewed President Mubarak. And we asked him, based on the Egyptian intelligence that has been shared with the U.S., how likely he thinks it is that the U.S. will be attacked again, and he said these warning go around and around, and he said, obviously, that's a possibility. How likely is it that we would see an attack the scale of what we witnessed on September 11th?

GEPHARDT: We worry about that. And we get intelligence every day. And we try to interpret it to the best of our ability. I think the Rowley-Mueller hearing yesterday gave you an indication that even before 9/11, we were picking up even the beginnings of intelligence that we should have paid more attention to. Hopefully now we are doing that. We are coordinating all the raw data that's coming in from CIA, from FBI, from other sources, and then the reason for this move last night I think was to better take that down to the local level, where the real fighting, and action and prevention will have to go on. That we have not scratched the surface on.

ZAHN: Your reaction a little bit of what we heard yesterday about what the FBI is against -- up against. We heard senators basically saying that grade-schoolers have more access to information in computers than the FBI does, that you can only access one word at a time, "aviation," but not "aviation school." So as we shuffle all these seats in this new department, isn't that just as big of a problem? GEPHARDT: I've heard reports from big computer and software companies in America who have gone to the FBI and to INS and offered their work free, to update their electronic systems, to make sure the databases could be fully shared, and they were rebuffed. I don't though if those are true or not. But I think the fact that they're not electronically proficient is true. And we have to solve that, yesterday. That cannot be. It is absolutely ridiculous that the FBI, which is our main security agency, is not electronically proficient in this day and age.

ZAHN: Before we let you go, what are your plans for 2004? Running for anything.

GEPHARDT: I'm trying to win the House back in 2002.

ZAHN: And that's it? You're not going to seek higher office than that.

GEPHARDT: I don't think beyond that.

ZAHN: You don't think.

GEPHARDT: I don't think.

ZAHN: But you're not sure.

GEPHARDT: I will decide after 2002.

ZAHN: So you haven't ruled out running for president.

GEPHARDT: I don't rule anything out. I'm trying to win the House back.

ZAHN: Thanks very much for joining us.

GEPHARDT: Thank you.

ZAHN: Dick Gephardt.

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