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As the fifth year observance of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks approaches, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff on Friday provided a detailed progress report on his agency's efforts to ward off future attacks, while urging Congress to pass bills to give his department greater authority to protect chemical plants and the president broader powers over intelligence collection.

In a one-hour speech to a packed crowd at Georgetown University, Chertoff underscored the ongoing threat of terrorism as the key issue in President Bush's midterm campaigning to retain Republican control of Congress.

Answering congressional complaints that Homeland Security has, at the expense of prime big-city targets, too widely disbursed its anti-terrorism funding to areas that appear unlikely to be attacked, Chertoff reminded critics that al-Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden has vowed to "bankrupt" the United States and its western allies.

He insisted that the U.S. government must not "act hysterically" against all risks, no matter how small, but must balance its response and limited resources to those threats that appear most likely to materialize. Homeland Security's focus, Chertoff said, must remain on fending off the use of weapons of mass destruction, halting the infiltration of this country by international terrorists, and rooting out homegrown terrorists bent on radical and violent acts.

After ticking off a long list of anti-terrorist measures already put in place by Homeland Security and other federal agencies, Chertoff acknowledged that more needs to be done.

He said plans are under way to double the size of the U.S. Border Patrol to 18,000 by the end of next year; create counterfeit-proof driver's licenses and other forms of identification; set up an international system of fingerprinting for visas and passports to help in identifying potential terrorists; install radiation-detection devices at every major U.S. port by the end of next year to screen "one hundred percent" of incoming cargo, and train state and local first-responders in new communications technology to better coordinate with the federal government during natural disasters.

As for the chemical-plant and communications-intelligence bills in Congress, Chertoff said most private plants have cooperated in strengthening their facilities against sabotage but some have dawdled. Homeland Security, he said, must have the clout to pull them into line. And the president, he said, needs broader reach in surveillance of suspected terrorist communications as a way of "stopping attacks before they happen."

COMMENTS

• I feel that I should put my 2 cents in, because I have a lot more time and experience in this field than most, including Mr. Chertoff. First of all, Homeland Security was, is and will always be an unnecessary and overly expensive Cabinet department, which has done little to protect this nation since its creation. What it is good at is wasting billions of taxpayer dollars, destroying morale of its employees, and generally being the laughing stock of law enforcement. The fact remains that DHS has little or no authority in anti-terrorism, which is still the purview of the FBI. In reality, much of what Mr. Chertoff touts as accomplishments of DHS were actually programs that were already initiated by the legacy U.S. Customs Service before it too was sacrificed upon the altar of politics in the knee-jerk reaction to 9/11 (CTPAT, Container Security Initiative, Operation Green Quest - I forgot, Tom Ridge gave that up after the FBI complained, etc.). There was no need to destroy Customs, and merge it with INS and the USDA APHIS to form CBP and ICE, which only further divided these workforces and generally made things worse. The creation of DHS was a purely political decision, with no input from those who were most affected by its creation, namely, its employees. Ironically, they were the only ones who really knew what needed to be done, and how to accomplish that mission! What a disgrace, and what a waste! GovExec.com reader Posted September 9, 2006 6:49 PM