Rockefeller wants new homeland security leadership

Transcript

Today, Senator Jay Rockefeller is helping to wrap-up the third West Virginia Homeland Security summit in Morgantown. It began yesterday with a simulated rescue from a rubble pile, a simulated SWAT team raid, and other demonstrations of homeland security techniques and technologies.

Rockefeller says the Bush Administration and Congress have failed to adequately fund homeland security, and hopes a new president will change things. Scott Finn reports.

Finn: Rockefeller says we don’t have the homeland security apparatus we need to protect us, and President Bush and Congress share the blame.

Rockefeller: They’re tremendously underfunded, but they’re probably the most important agency of all, in that they’re the ones who are meant to be keeping us safe from attack, which is still very much always in the air. A lot of people think nothing’s happened since 9/11 so that’s all fine. They’re wrong.

Finn: Rockefeller is chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, so he has inside knowledge of the threats facing us. He says those threats are not limited to just New York and Washington D.C.

Rockefeller: In our case, we have a lot of power plants and chemical plants on the Ohio River and Kanawha River and they are extremely vulnerable. And secondly, we’ve got to get somebody in there who understand that you don’t just do what you call “risk-based funding”, which is you give it to the biggest cities assuming that whatever malevolent group is out there trying to do damage, they’re going to do it to the biggest cities. That does not necessarily follow at all.

Finn: Rockefeller is hopeful that a new administration will appoint what he called more competent leadership. And he has a suggestion: today’s scheduled speaker at the Morgantown summit, Stanford professor and director of the National Security Council’s Office of Global Issues during the Clinton Administration.

Rockefeller: We’ve got to get a really competent administrator in there, and I think that competent administrator is going to be speaking at our lunch tomorrow. And no matter who is elected, they ought to go after him, because he’s the best in the country.

A lot of that leadership has to come out of Washington, and right now it really isn’t. So we’re living on borrowed time, so far that’s worked out in our favor, but that doesn’t say anything about the coming weeks or months.

Finn: For West Virginia Public Broadcasting, I’m Scott Finn in Charleston.