Former Homeland Security team resisted raising alert levels

Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said Tuesday that his leadership team was opposed "more often than not" to raising the level of the color-coded threat advisory system because of the impact it had across the country, but he stopped short of saying the system should be scrapped.

Ridge said his leadership team and the White House's Homeland Security Advisory Council often held "vigorous discussions" on whether to raise alert levels. The five-color alert system has been criticized for being vague, confusing, costly and, at times, politically motivated. It was last raised for key financial sites in New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., last August.

"You'll never know the number of discussions we had internally when some people wanted to raise it and others didn't want to raise it," Ridge said. "There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it."

He added: "There's a general impression that Homeland Security just wants to raise the threat level. I just wanted to debunk that myth publicly right now."

Once a decision was made to raise the alert, however, Ridge had to follow suit and was the primary face and voice communicating the message to the American public. Ridge added that people should understand that new DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff "is merely the spokesperson for a process" when it comes to the alert system.

Ridge spoke to reporters following his participation in a panel discussion of former DHS senior leaders sponsored by IBM and the Institute for the Study of Public Policy Implementation at American University.

Ridge said the DHS leadership team under his command, which helped with the merger and organization of the department, understood the impact of raising alert levels.

"Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. Sometimes we thought, even if the intelligence was good, you don't necessarily put the whole country on notice," he said. "We understand the impact of going up. There's no other agency that deals on a day-to-day basis with the governors and the mayors and the police chiefs and the security professionals."

Ridge said, however, that any decision about scrapping or modifying the alert system should be left to Congress and the new DHS leadership team. Ridge added that his team favored sharing information over raising alert levels.

"I think people focus too much on the colors," he said. "It could be colors, it could be numbers, it could be animals. I don't care what you use to designate the trigger. But it's 'what kind of information do you share when you raise the threat level' that I think is more important to the public than ... what the day-to-day assessment is."

He added that efforts should be made to declassify information in order to provide it to states and local first responders.

"A lot of information today is classified according to an old system: Top Secret, Secret, law enforcement-sensitive. I think one of the challenges against this enemy ... is to see whether or not the traditional classification system and the threshold to push things to Secret and Top Secret is the same," he said.

"The public can deal with bad information. The public can deal with difficult issues," he added. "I just think that if we ultimately want to take advantage of 700,000 men and women on the streets ... we got to look at that and try to share even more information."