Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 8 May
The speech I gave in New Orleans at the Gulf Coast Expo got me mentioned in two local stories.
The first one appeared in The Advocate, and was titled, “Blanco: State vital to defense,” by Joe Gyan, Jr. Blanco refers to the governor of Louisiana who gave the kick-off speech.
Here’s the excerpt about my panel (with no extra quotations added):
The expo featured a panel of military experts Thursday discussing "How do we protect our borders -- and not choke trade?"Another story highlighted the speech by a senior official of the Department of Homeland Security. It was an AP story. When the reporter ran up to me after the panel asking if he could have a copy of my statement, I gave him my website URL and said it was already posted there!
Rear Adm. Robert Duncan, commander of the U.S. Coast Guard's New Orleans-based Eighth District, which oversees 26 states, said the key to providing maritime security without "shutting down" maritime commerce is checking cargo at various points before it reaches U.S. shores.
"We need to have a layered approach," he said.
In the Gulf of Mexico, Duncan said, one of the keys to protecting the 4,000 oil and gas platforms is the eyes and ears of the rig workers.
"We're developing a 'neighborhood watch' among those people," he said.
Brig. Gen. John Yingling, commander of the counterdrug Joint Task Force Six based at Fort Bliss, Texas, said 906,000 people were caught last year trying to enter this country illegally. Three times that many people probably were successful in illegally crossing U.S. borders, he said.
The reasons for illegal border crossings could vary from seeking economic improvement to carrying illegal drugs or perhaps even weapons of mass destruction, Yingling said.
"I am not advocating the militarization of our borders," he said. "But there are assets that the military can bring. There is a roll for DOD (Department of Defense) assets."
Military personnel, for instance, could help train this country's 11,000 border patrol agents how to detect weapons of mass destruction, he said.
Thomas Barnett, a senior strategic researcher and professor at the Center for Naval Warfare Studies' Warfare Analysis and Research Department at the U.S. Naval War College, shook up the discussion by charging that the post-Sept. 11, 2001, creation of the Department of Homeland Security was merely a "feel good measure."
As for the terrorists in the Middle East, he said, "We can't kill them fast enough. They grow them quicker than we can kill them."
Barnett said the United States is in a "race to connect the Middle East to the rest of the world" while the terrorists try to disconnect it.
As for the ongoing war in Iraq, Barnett said he prefers "dealing with the threat at the source" and added that having the fight in Baghdad is "better than having it in Boston."
That story was titled, “Official defends Homeland Security agency's anti-terror efforts.” I found the speech by Broderick to be a little bit disturbing, actually. It was full of “if you only knew’s” where he was constantly assuring us of bad things stopped dead in their tracks, it’s just that he couldn’t describe any of them. I hate that sort of sly fear mongering, as I describe it in my book (see Chapter 7).
Here’s the whole story, because I don’t have any links to it online:
NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Criticism of the federal Department of Homeland Security has come partly because critics don't understand the struggle of creating the government's third-largest department "from scratch, while fighting terrorism simultaneously," the head of the agency's intelligence sharing group said Thursday.What I said about DHS’s creation being a mistake was that I don’t think the bifurcation of U.S. national security should have been made on a geographical basis (Defense Department for “over there” and DHS for “over here,” with the border as the key defense line) because I think, strategically speaking, the only way to defeat global terrorism is to deny them the outcome they seek, which is strictly an “over there” (i.e., Middle Eastern) thing. By emphasizing homeland security, I believe we actually play into al Qaeda’s hands.
Matthew E. Broderick, chief of the agency's Operations Center, acknowledged struggles inside the agency, saying "I don't think I've seen a place where burnout hits people so fast."
"Everything's hard, everything's difficult, but I think we're just starting to come out of that," Broderick, a retired Marine brigadier general, said at a security conference in New Orleans.
Critics, some of them in Congress, have blamed the agency run by former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge for a number of possible security lapses. Some have criticized the agency's color-coded alerts of terrorism threats, others have said the agency has overlooked rail and port security while focusing on airline security. Congressional auditors last year said Ridge's department failed to resolve bureaucratic conflicts over oversight of transportation security as a whole.
Broderick spoke at the Gulf Coast Military Expo, a gathering of military and civilian security and business officials organized by the Marine Corps Association and the U.S. Naval Institute and sponsored by military contractors.
His comments came in response to remarks made by Thomas P.M. Barnett, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, who said in a panel discussion earlier Thursday that creating the agency months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks was a mistake.
One benefit of having the new agency, Broderick said, is that, for the first time, federal law-enforcement agencies are sharing information on illegal immigration, possible terrorists and other suspects. To apprehend possible terrorists, Broderick's Operations Center collects and shares information from more than 21 government agencies, including the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency, immigrations, customs and the state department.
The Operations Center receives information on any known terrorist suspect from agencies around the country, as well as from cooperating foreign governments such as the United Kingdom, Canada and others. Each suspect is tracked and their backgrounds checked, Broderick said.
"Is he really just a visiting professor who's going to do a speech at Johns Hopkins tomorrow? Or is he really a threat to the United States?" Broderick said.
Broderick said his office has daily meetings with the White House, the Department of Defense and other agencies with updates on potential threats.
"Unfortunately for us, business is good. You have no idea of the number of people that are trying to do this country harm," he said.
Broderick said he believed anti-terror efforts have disrupted efforts by al-Qaida and other groups, but added that their members are "smart people, and they're really here to do us harm."
Broderick expressed one concern: That, in apprehending the older, more patient and farsighted terrorists around the world, his agency and others are inadvertently promoting younger, rasher terrorists within those organizations.
"That could be good, because they might get clumsy, but it may be bad because they might get successful," he said.
Other speakers at Thursday's meeting included Joseph L. Galloway, author of "We Were Soldiers Once and Young," and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco.
I prefer bifurcating national security into a Department of War (my Leviathan force) and a Department of Peace (my Sys Admin force). In short, I wouldn’t have created DHS, even as I would have forced all those players involved in border control, etc., to cooperate far more fully with one another. In the end, the integration I seek is better security between U.S. and the rest of an expanding Core, not integration overwhelmingly focused within these United States. America is not the problem, but the solution, remembering that we are the world’s first and most successful economic and political union—50 members strong and someday again to be growing. We are globalization’s source code, so when we go down the pathway of creating DHS, I see backward motion.
I know the temptation with a 9/11 is to pull back, but what we really need to do is reach out.
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