**Summary of Inaugural Meeting -- Public Session**

**U.S. Department of Homeland Security**

**Homeland Security Advisory Council**

**The Mayflower Hotel**

**Washington, D.C.**

**June 30, 2003**

**Meeting Summary:**

This summary describes the discussions and actions of the first meeting
of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Homeland Security Advisory
Council (HSAC). The meeting was held on Monday, June 30, 2003 at the
Mayflower Hotel in Washington D.C. The desired outcomes of the meeting
were to administer the oath of office to the HSAC's incoming membership,
for the Secretary to provide the members with his vision for the
upcoming year, and to hear from the Chair, Joseph Grano and Vice Chair,
Judge William Webster along with each member in attendance. The
Executive Director of the HSAC, Chris Furlow introduced the HSAC staff.
The Under Secretary for Emergency Preparedness and Response, Michael
Brown, and the Assistant Director of the Office for Domestic
Preparedness, Corey Gruber, provided a briefing on TOPOFF-2, a five-day,
full-scale exercise and simulation of how the Nation would respond in
the event of a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) attack, conducted by
the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Department of State,
in cooperation with Federal, State, local, and Canadian partners.

**Participants:**

Council Members in Attendance:

Joseph J. Grano, Jr., Chair Dr. Lydia Thomas

William H. Webster, Vice Chair Sidney Taurel

Kathleen M. Bader Mayor Anthony Williams

Dr. Jared Cohon Lee Herbert Hamilton

James T. Moore

Ex-Officio Committee Members in Attendance:

Norman R. Augustine, representing the Panel on Science and Technology of
Combating Terrorism, on the President's Council of Advisors on Science
and Technology.

**U.S. Department of Homeland Security Representatives:**

Asa Hutchinson, Under Secretary for Border and Transportation Security

Michael Brown, Under Secretary for Emergency Preparedness and Response

Frank Libutti, Under Secretary for Information Analysis and
Infrastructure Protection

Charles McQueary, Under Secretary for Science and Technology

Vice Admiral Thad Allen, Coast Guard Chief of Staff

Christopher J. Furlow, Homeland Security Advisory Council, Executive
Director

Jeff Gaynor, Homeland Security Advisory Council Staff

Mike Miron, Homeland Security Advisory Council Staff

Katye Balls, Homeland Security Advisory Council Staff

Joe Whitley, Legal Consultant

Erica Bomsey, Office of General Counsel

Al Martinez-Fonts, Special Assistant to the Secretary for the Private
Sector

Rear Admiral Jay Carmichael, Coast Guard Liaison

Susan Neely, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs

Rachael Sunbarger, Assistant Press Secretary

Corey Gruber, Assistant Director, Office for Domestic Preparedness

Ted Macklin, Assistant Director, Office for Domestic Preparedness

Matt Bettenhausen, State and Local Coordination

Bob Coyle, Designated Agency Ethics Official

Rick Coffin, Chairman, National Response Plan Working Group

Mike Wermuth, National Response Plan Working Group Member

Jack Johnson, Chief Security Officer

Betty Guhman, Chief of Staff, Border and Transportation Security

Brian Cairns, Personal Assistant to the Secretary

Vic Tambone, Chief of Staff, Science and Technology

**Public Attendance:**

Approximately 40 members of the public attended the meeting.

**HSAC Meeting Called to Order:**

The HSAC Chair, Joseph J. Grano, Jr. welcomed the HSAC members and
extended his appreciation to each member for their participation and
dedication to their country. Chairman Grano then introduced Secretary of
Homeland Security Tom Ridge to administer the Oath of Office to the
Members and to provide remarks.

**Secretary Ridge Administers Oath of Office to HSAC Members --**

**Opening Remarks of Secretary Ridge:**

Mr. Chairman, Judge Webster, ladies and gentlemen, I have the
opportunity to share with you a few remarks this morning. The first
really is pride to be working with you. It is an enormous source of
satisfaction for the management team of this new Department to be
associated with such an extraordinarily talented group of men and women,
who will serve as the Department's advisory committee and with whom we
look forward to continuing the relationship and the work that many of us
began together well over a year ago. I thank you for your willingness to
participate. We are grateful, as is the President, for the support you
have given the Department, for your ideas and energy and, frankly, as we
set up the new Department there will be a great deal of work for us to
do in the future as well.

As we take a look at the group of men and women who serve on the
Advisory Committee, we see those who have had extraordinary careers in
the public sector and the private sector, who have dealt with
international and domestic businesses, who have been involved with
science and technology -- frankly it is a mini-microcosm of what the
Department of Homeland Security is all about, and that is engaging in a
national effort to secure the homelands. So we are grateful to be
working with you and grateful that you have accepted this
responsibility.

What I would like to do is just share with you briefly some of the
progress to date that we have made since March 1. As you know, I took
over towards the end of January, but the consolidation began on March 1,
and I think it is very important to highlight some of the things we have
done, and then my colleagues on the management team are going to give
you more specific briefings in a few moments.

First of all, we have begun to establish the Department of Homeland
Security as the focal point to coordinate all state and local efforts.
It is really rather remarkable to see how reflexively state and local
governments, from time to time, give us a call to let us know what is
going on in their respective states and their respective communities. It
is a huge plus for us and for the President. As I said before, he asked
us to design not a federal strategy, but a national strategy. He
realized that the partnerships that we needed to create were at the
state and local and private sectors, an in a very short time -- and
again we will continue to improve it -- but this relationship I think is
on pretty solid and firm ground, and we need, with your help, and within
the Department, to continue to make it even stronger and better.

To that end, we are far better prepared today and far more secure today
than we were on September 12, 2001. That is because the federal
government has expended billions of dollars, state and local governments
and the private sector have expended billions of dollars, and clearly
there is a shared fiscal responsibility and clearly we are going to
spend, at the federal level and all other levels of government and in
the private sector, billions and billions of dollars in the years ahead.
But the fact of the matter remains that, with dollars and the ingenuity
and the innovation and leadership, not just at the federal level, but
across this country, we are safe and more secure. That does not mean
that we still don't have a great deal of work to do and that does not
mean that our internal and external goal of rising to a new level of
readiness and security every single day will ever be met. We constantly
want to get better. We don't guarantee the development of a fail-safe
system, but we certainly guarantee that every single day we will be
strong and more secure, and I believe that in the very short time that
we have been at this we have accomplished that goal.

For those who take a look at the broad portfolio of responsibilities
within the Department, we have begun to establish national performance
standards, mutual aid systems, credentialing protocols to help us
measure outcomes -- not just inputs -- but to determine are we getting
security for every security dollar we have invested. It is fashionable,
very appropriately, in the political world to assess how well you are
doing by how much you spent. That is one barometer. It is equally
appropriate I think to make sure and assess how well you are doing by
how well those dollars are spent and to what end. And to that end, now
that the Department is up and running, by the time we begin the process
of distributing dollars from the President's 2004 budget, to the state
and locals for example, the governors and mayors have all been advised
that dollars will only be distributed according to a statewide plan that
is locally developed. Because we need to build a national
infrastructure, a national response capability, a national prevention
capability.

So again, we have made a lot of progress, beginning with this 2004
budget, which is our first budget for the Department, those dollars are
not going to be spent indiscriminately. As well meaning as the
expenditures have been in the past, with most going to necessary items,
we want each state to develop a plan that is locally driven, and the
dollars will be distributed according to those plans. We will use
performance standards that we have developed, and frankly you have
helped developed. Remember the Statewide Template Initiative? They have
been distributed to the governors, the homeland security advisors,
mayors of big cities, all the regular associations, and they can develop
their plans around the document you spent a great deal of time
preparing. We will use the performance standards that you have
identified to help test and measure our capabilities with our state and
local partners.

Recently we finished TOPOFF-2, which tested a weapon of mass destruction
attack on two large cities, Seattle and Chicago. We are in the process
of reviewing, with a critical and constructive eye, the results of those
two exercises. To show you the depth of the exercises, there were over
120 federal, state and local agencies that participated in those two
exercises. A lot of lessons learned, to be applied as individual states
do their exercises later on in the year, obviously to be applied in the
next TOPOFF exercise as well.

There was a horrible tragedy yesterday in Chicago, where part of a
building collapsed and twelve people lost their lives. It was not a
terrorism incident, but as FEMA and the local emergency management
agency become the all-hazard response teams, responding to whatever the
emergency is, it was interesting to note that one of the observers said
yesterday that the response was quicker, the coordination and
communication better at every level, some felt that we were able to
reduce the loss of life. Having said that, there is no good news
associated with that story because twelve people died. But if you are
trying to take some comfort, it is that kind of collaboration and
communication that we need to develop across the country.

We are protecting our borders, seaports and airports through "SMART
border" agreements with Canada and Mexico. We have business incentives,
such as the Customs Trade Partnership Against Terrorism and the
Container Security Initiative with major international ports. We are
also strengthening enforcement of our immigration laws, most notably
with the new biometric-based US VISIT System. The Congress and the
President have endorsed the notion that, in the post-9/11 world, when
people come into this country, we want to identify who they are, and we
want to make sure that once their visa has expired that they have left
the country. Congress initially called in an entry-exit system. We
prefer to rename it US VISIT System, because we are still an open and
welcoming country. We want people to visit. We want people to get
schooled here. We want people to get medical treatment here. We want
people to recreate here. But when they have visas, we have to do a
better job of monitoring when they come in and when they leave. So to
that end America requires greater scrutiny of those who enter and
certainly more vigorous enforcement of those who overstay their welcome.
So with greater vigilance and new approaches towards dealing with this
kind of issue, again, every single day will be more secure as a country.

This week, I might add, the Department has emphasized the citizenship
and the openness of this country. We are going to swear in about 10,000
new Americans this week of July Fourth. I was with Eduardo Aguirre about
six weeks ago in Los Angeles, and if you really wanted to put in a
microcosm of what we are trying to protect and why we are trying to
protect it, you ought to go to the naturalization service, because
people come to this country because of the opportunities we have, the
freedoms we have and the way of life we have. That is at the heart of
what we are trying to protect. There were 4,200 people in Los Angles
from 135 different countries. That says it all. And we want to retain
that quality about us, but at the same time, in the post-9/11
environment we have to be a lot more vigilant about who comes in and a
lot more concerned about those who overstay. But it is going to be a
great week for the Department in that regard.

As I have said many, many times before, it is a national strategy, not a
federal one. And you have heard me say this and I will repeat it over
and over, it is a mantra we have within the Department, that the
homeland is secure when the home town is secure. That is why working
with the states and the mayors is so critically important. That is why
working with the private sector is so critically important.

Now there are a couple of things I am going to ask all of you. This is
more of a reminder because you bring this kind of mindset to homeland
security since the day we first started working together, but we ask you
to be inquisitive, provocative. There is nothing here that can't stand a
second or third challenge, a second or third look. You do that day to
day in your companies, you universities, wherever you work, whatever you
do. So we ask you to be inquisitive. We know you are innovative. We
think your ideas will help us preserve our ideals in this country and we
also will be looking to you to help us integrate the new units that we
pull in. We have 22 units that we have pulled in, we have 180 terrific
people who go to work every day trying to do their best to secure the
homeland. But we have integration of people and resources and technology
and as we go about reorganizing and integrating these people and
resources, many of you have done that and we will be looking to you for
some guidance there.

We also think it would be very helpful if the advisory group, just as
you did with the Statewide Template Initiative, we really developed a
common language, a common vocabulary, and homeland security lexicon, as
it were. What do we mean when we are talking about risk management? What
do we mean when we are talking about critical infrastructure? What do we
mean when we talk about first responders? There is a long list.
Interoperability is not just communications and equipment.
Interoperability is making sure that everybody understands concepts and
definitions up and down the line. And I think it would be a very
productive effort on the part of the Advisory Committee, again working
with the state and locals and the private sector, so we are basically
all singing off the same song sheet when it comes to what we do and how
we do it and how we set up priorities.

We are also going to need your help to integrate the work of the
Department with the private sector. This is a huge undertaking because
85% of the critical infrastructure is owned by the private sector. We
reach out to the private sector on a day-to-day basis in many different
ways. We have an office that is really an outreach office to deal with
the private sector. We have a science and technology sector, and here
the genius and the creativity and the innovation will be captured and we
will take that science and technology and apply it to critical missions
and prioritizes. There is infrastructure protection -- actually it is
the Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Unit -- where we
take a look at the threat, determine its credibility, and then map it
against and match it against the infrastructure and make sure we have
done everything we can to harden that particular target or that venue.

So again, as we reach out in these various forms to the private sector
and coordinate those efforts, your ability and your willingness to
assist and integrate the private sector into what we do, I think is
critically important. Chuck McQueary just sent out a broad agency
agreement. Basically there were several million dollars available to the
private sector as we are looking right now for some off-the-shelf
technology we may use in a variety of different venues, and I think we
have 3,300 responses. Again, those of us who get a chance to see what is
out there and see what we might be able to tap into feel pretty
comfortable that, in addition to being more resolute and more
persevering and determined and more committed than our enemies -- we are
a heck of a lot smarter. The creative genius of this country is really
going to help us secure us over the long term.

I would like you to help us establish a Department of Homeland Security
award, similar to the Department of Commerce's Malcolm Baldridge Award.
I think it is very important for us to recognize the quality and
ingenuity in the private sector, as well as best practices of state and
local government. So again, how we go about developing that award,
establishing criteria, setting up a review process so we can recognize
exceptional effort in the area of homeland security.

Finally, you should know that there will be other assignments as well,
and someone will be discussing with you, I am sure, later on today and
in the months and years ahead. Actually I am going to ask your
indulgence for one other change. I would like to take some of the
meetings outside of Washington, DC. I think it would be very, very
helpful if the Advisory Council had a chance to visit some of the sites
around the country. Literally, let's go down to the borders and take a
look at that challenge, with regard to immigration or with regard to
commercial integration between Canada and Mexico. The President has said
many times we need to provide greater security at the borders. If we do
it right, we might be able to facilitate commerce. There are a lot of
venues we need to visit and we will let you and the chairman and the
vice-chairman decide where they should be.

We have made a lot of progress in the first hundred-plus days. We
certainly have a great deal more work to do, but I want to thank you for
your considerable input and effort to this point. And I have the
pleasure of saying that, as of Thursday night, when General Libutti was
sworn in, we have all the principal Undersecretaries nominated and
confirmed and sworn in and we have the nucleus of our management team
here. I would like each one of them to just spend a few moments, if that
is all right with you, Mr. Chairman, just highlighting some of their
priorities and some of the work that they have done.

**Secretary's Leadership Team Provides Brief Remarks:**

**Asa Hutchinson, Under Secretary for Border and Transportation
Security:**

Thank you, Secretary Ridge. And again, I want to join in thanking each
of you for your participation in this. In my neck of the woods, as we
say in Arkansas, we\'re working on the organization of the 110,000
people in border and transportation security, from customs and border
protection, to immigration, custom enforcement, to the Transportation
and Security Administration.

I get many times, well, how difficult is it to change the culture of the
22 different agencies that come into Homeland Security. And the ones in
my arena, I can tell you that they get the message, and they are trying
to change things. I\'ll give you a couple of illustrations.

In Miami, prior to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security,
the three helicopters that might be deployed from Border Patrol, from
Coast Guard, and from Customs did not have communication systems that
could talk to each other going after the same target. Working among
themselves locally, they solved that problem. The Department of Homeland
Security is a cultural change.

The Chief of Naval Intelligence came to see me, and just said, thank
you, because prior to the creation of the Department of Homeland
Security, the naval intelligence had to go on the commercial market to
get the same information that they tried to get from US Customs, and
couldn\'t get. But there was a cultural change, and now we are sharing
that information that is helpful for our national security.

Down at the Arizona border, the Tohono O'odham Reservation, the chief of
police there, right there on the border, had no way to communicate with
the Border Patrol through communication systems. They were on different
systems. That was fixed through the Department. So, I think that\'s an
illustration of both at the top and at the ground level that they are
getting the message of the Secretary that we are to communicate, we are
to exchange intelligence. We are all on the same team.

I think the reorganization is going well. We are concentrating, as the
Secretary mentioned, on the US VISIT System. The SPIN plan has been
approved by OMB. It is at Congress, which will allow us to make the
first investment, and hopefully make the objectives that Congress gave
us for this year.

The Container Security Initiative has been announced for phase 2. The
Secretary and Commissioner Bonner announced that, which is a very
important part of our strategy to enhance our border protections beyond
simply the mega-ports. And this will give us greater capability in some
very difficult regions of the world, including the Middle East.

And so, these are some of the initiatives that we are working on in this
arena. I think our folks are doing a good job in reorganizing, and
bringing these initiatives hopefully to a point of accomplishment in the
near future.

**Charles McQueary, Under Secretary for Science and Technology**

Thank you, Mr. Secretary. I\'m thankful the name was changed. It has
been an interesting time in the few short months that we have had a
science and technology organization. For those of you who don\'t know,
when the Science and Technology Unit was formed, we had one lab that
transferred in, that\'s the Environmental Measurements Lab in New York,
plus six people. So, while Asa has 110,000, I started out with
essentially six, so I\'ve got a way to go to catch up with him, but
we\'ll never get there.

SECRETARY RIDGE: Don\'t feel advised to go too fast.

UNDERSECRETARY MCQUEARY: So, the major role that we have had in the
short time that we have been in existence is to add people to the
organization. We have about 50 new people that have been added at this
point, and we are striving to get to about 200 total when we reach peak
strength in fiscal year 2004.

So, that\'s where our major emphasis has been, because we are
essentially picking each person a talent base at a time, and so it\'s
very important that we get as good of people as we can, because we need
two kinds of characteristics in the people we get. First, they must be
highly qualified scientific people that can render judgments about
programs. And secondly, they must have the skills and program
management, because our roles will largely be in running programs
external to the Department of Homeland Security.

And that is coming along reasonably well. I would like to see it go
faster, but it\'s more important that we get quality people.

Just a quick run down on things that have happened in the three short
months we have been in existence. The Biowatch Program was deployed to
31 cities, to warn urban areas of aerosol biological attacks. As
Secretary Ridge mentioned, we had over 3,300 responses to our broad
agency announcement that was issued, and we are in the process of
evaluating those.

In addition to those 3,300, I have at least 500 e-mails that have come
in to our e-mail address outlining various kinds of unsolicited
proposals that people have. We have had a major roll out of radiation
detection standards for four different types of devices. And we have
also awarded a contract for a hand-held anthrax standard test kit.

One of the things that has been really enjoyable to me is we decided
early on to award scholarships on behalf of homeland security. I\'m
happy to report today that we had over 2,400 applicants for those
scholarships, and we are going through the process of making selections,
so that the very first scholarships will be issued in September of this
year.

And I think with that, I\'ll turn it back to you, Mr. Secretary.

**Frank Libutti, Under Secretary for Information Analysis and
Infrastructure**

Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Good morning ladies and gentlemen.

I\'ll start by telling you that I have been officially on board since
Thursday night, but have fire in the belly. Number two, I\'m proud and
humbled and privileged to be in this position, and will do my very best,
as my colleagues, the other undersecretaries, have already stated.

I\'ll tell you, the laser focus for me is about communications, sharing
of information as a full partner in TTIC, both as a contributor, and
also one who would provide requirements, so that we can be part of the
analytical process within TTIC, conduct our own separate analytical work
in concert with other members of this great team, look towards how we
share that information with the private sector, and both state and local
authorities, and expedite the information, so that appropriate law
enforcement and other city and state agencies can take action.

Not a footnote, but as a complement to what I shared with you, and a
great piece of my responsibility is to connect as well with the private
sector. And the key word for all of this is partnership.

With that, sir, I\'ll stop and say we\'re ready to charge ahead. My
focus is to fully stand up the office, and connect with my colleagues on
this great team.

**Michael Brown, Under Secretary for Emergency Preparedness and
Response**

Thank you, Mr. Secretary. I think the Secretary put it quite well. The
way I have kind of described it when I have been out speaking in public
is that the FEMA is really now FEMA on steroids. That\'s the best way to
describe us.

When the Congress developed legislation, they did quite a few smart
things. One, they took the Nuclear Incident Response Teams, they took
the Strategic National Stockpile, the took the Domestic Emergency
Support Team, and the National Disaster Medical Teams, and folded all
those into FEMA into the Emergency Preparedness and Response
Directorate.

And so, my job is to really take all of the good things that FEMA did
since 1979, developing the Federal Response Plan, understanding the
All-Hazards approach, and incorporating and integrating all of those new
assets into this new directorate to make sure that when we do respond,
we respond appropriately on an All-Hazards basis.

Now, I want to describe to you for a second why I think the All-Hazards
approach is so critical to the success of the Department. There is an
anecdotal story about someone in the World Trade Center Towers, I forget
the name of the company, but it was a gentleman who had spent an
inordinate amount of time training his employees on how to evacuate the
buildings, how to take care of themselves, where to go, how to
communicate. Every single thing that this Department currently does in
its Ready Campaign, this gentleman was doing.

When the planes went into the tower, not to be crass, but to FEMA at the
time, it didn\'t make any difference to FEMA whether those went into the
tower because of a failure of the air traffic control system, or whether
the towers came down because of a catastrophic earthquake in lower
Manhattan. The response under the Federal Response Plan would have been
the same.

That gentleman\'s response in terms of preparing his employees saved the
lives of every individual employee in that building. They knew how to
evacuate, when to evacuate. And it\'s that kind of mind-set that we have
to bring to this All-Hazards approach to the Department.

At the time that we were going through the TOPOFF exercise \-- let me
back up even before that. I\'ll never forget the first day the
Department was stood up. I\'m watching television at home, and
unfortunately I\'m watching the Columbia Space Shuttle. And I
immediately determined, just based what I\'m seeing on television, that
there is something wrong.

So, I get dressed and head into the office. And as I\'m driving into the
office, the Secretary calls me and says, Mike, I assume that you\'re on
top of this. Well, we were. Our emergency support team was already in
action. It had already been stood up. We had already deployed people to
the scene, and were implementing the Federal Response Plan at that very
minute. Which shows that seamlessly, before March 1, we knew exactly
what to do, and the Secretary knew exactly how things were to operate.

Post-March 1, we are going through the TOPOFF exercise. And during the
TOPOFF exercise we have a record number of tornados, 492 tornados that
hit the Midwest within a two week period. FEMA and EPR were responding
at the same time we were doing the TOPOFF exercise, with no deviation
whatsoever in our capabilities or our ability to respond.

So, I think it\'s that All-Hazards approach that we must take when we do
the National Response Plan, that we must incorporate incident
managements, command and control systems, all of those things that make
the NRP work, we must incorporate into that All-Hazards approach.

So, that is my goal as we integrate into the Department, is to teach
Chuck, and explain to Chuck why All-Hazards is important, continue to
talk to Asa. I know the Secretary is sick and tired of me preaching
about All-Hazards, but I know that is the way we are going to be
successful.

I absolutely believe that the President is going to win the war on
terrorism. But we are not going to win the war against Mother Nature.
So, we might as well just figure out now how we are going to deal with
Mother Nature, and that is through that All-Hazards approach.

**Vice Admiral Thad Allen, Coast Guard Chief of Staff**

Thank you, Mr. Secretary, Mr. Chairman. I bring you the greetings of our
Commandant, Admiral Tom Collins, who this morning is in Kodiak, and I\'m
here as the chief of staff of the Coast Guard to provide a couple of
comments.

First of all, we do pass on our regards, and we thank you for your
public service and getting involved with the Council here. It\'s very
important work.

I would like to hit a couple of key things that the Coast Guard is
involved in right now that may be of interest to you, but first, I would
like to just add a couple of comments to Asa Hutchinson\'s notes about
collaboration down South.

The partnering and collaboration, what we would call the deck plate in
the Coast Guard with our DHS partners, federal, state, and local
partners that we deal with has never been greater, and we continue to
enjoy even a greater sense of partnering and collaboration out there. I
thank him for the comments. We will continue to do that.

As Undersecretary Libutti noted, the requirement to partner and
collaborate as far as the passing of intelligence and information, and
we certainly support that, and are looking forward to working with our
partners in the Department of Homeland Security.

Three issues I think are germane this morning to your work at hand.
First of all, I\'d like to talk about the Maritime Transportation and
Security Act. This was a landmark piece of legislation that was passed
and signed the same day as the Department of Homeland Security Act. It
requires standardization of security measures for our domestic security
team.

When the Secretary talks about a national plan, this is truly a national
plan for our ports. It involves federal entities, state and local, as
well as the private sector to establish a framework of measures that
will increase security in our ports. It also provides a framework for
response and recovery.

It is the domestic counterpart to an international initiative that has
been hammered out at the International Maritime Organization. It\'s
called the International Ship and Port Facilities Security Code. And our
goal is through the issuance of regulations and standards, working in
concert with our partners in the Department of Homeland Security, to
bring into force, a security protocol about a year from now that will
align with international measures.

It\'s the first multilateral ship and port security initiative ever
created. We are very excited about this. It\'s a significant
responsibility that will go a long way towards increasing the security
of our ports.

The second issue I would like to bring to your attention is the general
status of Coast Guard capability and capacity. I have often said we have
never been more relevant or visible since the events of 9/11. And we are
currently in the process of undertaking two of the largest acquisitions
in the history of the Coast Guard.

The first one is our Integrated Deep Water Project, which is our attempt
to recapitalize our offshore sensors, cutters, and aircraft. It
basically is going to replace World War II vintage and Vietnam era
assets. It\'s going to allow us to provide a layer of security from the
port to the coastal inlet area, out to the limits of our exclusive
economic zone and beyond. And it is going to provide a tremendous
increase in network-centric operations and effectiveness for our forces
out there.

The transformation or recapitalization that we are going through is
Rescue 21, and that is the upgrade to our coastal rescue communications
network. If you will, our maritime 911 system. This is our nation\'s
only maritime emergency communications system. And this is going to
dramatically increase our ability to assist boaters, whether there is a
problem with search and rescue, or there is a problem with security. It
will increase our ability to interact with our federal partners.

The third point I\'d like to make to you as we move through this
collective challenge is the requirement, at least the way we see it in
the Coast Guard, to sustain operational excellence. We know we have had
to increase our homeland security activity since 9/11, and we will
continue to do that. But we do a lot of other things that are very
important to this country, and remain important in a post-9/11
environment, specifically, illegal migration, drug interdiction, and
fisheries enforcement. It is our endeavor to make sure that those
missions receive the same amount of attention that they did before 9/11.

The challenge we have is the capability and capacity in bringing that
online. And with the unprecedented support from the administration and
the Congress, we have had significant capabilities added to the Coast
Guard. And we will continue to try and achieve that mission and balance,
and do all the things the country expects of us to do, including search
and rescue, icebreaking, maintenance of ace and navigation, and
everything that allows our maritime transportation system to move.

We look forward to working with you, and it\'s been an honor to be able
to talk to you this morning. Thank you.

**Agenda Item - HSAC Membership Remarks:**

**Chair, Joseph Grano**

Well, first of all, on behalf of the advisory council, we would like to
welcome all the members of the public who are in attendance today.

As you know, our meeting notices are posted on The Federal Register, and
they will continue to be done that way in the future. At the end of
today\'s open session we will provide information on how the public may
provide commentary to the Homeland Security Advisory Council, and we
will give you those instructions at the end of the day.

Mr. Secretary, I would like to remind you and obviously the new
undersecretaries who have been sworn in, really what our council is all
about, gentlemen. It is ideally best described as a group of
multi-disciplined and skill-oriented people. We represent the private
sector, local and state government in the form of Mayor Williams for
instance and Governor Leavitt.

And we are really here to provide advice and counsel to the Secretary,
to the Department, and to all of you. As the Secretary pointed out, he
is asking us to challenge, to question, and I can assure you that this
group is not shy. And we will gladly help you in any efforts that we
can.

We, for instance, are privileged by the fact that we did start out as
the President\'s Homeland Security Advisory Council. With the formation
of the Department, all of us have so-called opted in, and then requested
to continue, although there are three members that will not be with us
prospectively.

First and foremost, we regret the passing of our brother, Steve Young,
who was the president of the Fraternal Order of Police in our nation. We
regret that John Chambers, our ex-officio member, has decided not to
continue because of time constraints. And most importantly, we are proud
of the promotion, so to speak, of Jerry Bremer, who has become the
administrator of Iraq, and we wish him very well. It\'s obviously a very
complex and difficult position to fulfill. So, Mr. Secretary, we will
anxiously work with you to replace those three members prospectively.

In terms of my commentary, I want to thank you and the Department for
allowing us to comment, first of all, to the national strategies itself
within the council. We are very pleased at the reception to the
commentary, and the changes we asked for.

I believe that you are also very pleased with the response from the
states, and the statewide template that came from our SAC. And that
seems to be going very well. And I can assure you personally, as a
member of the financial services community, that the private sector
within financial services have responded quite well to much of the
direction coming from the Department. The New York Stock Exchange, DTC,
NSCC have in fact improved upon their physical security.

And my knowledge of every single member of the industry that I deal
with, I would suggest to you that every corporation has improved, and
made more secure, their disaster recovery plans, as well as their
business continuity plans. And I think that is a direct result not only
of the post-9/11 trauma, but literally some of the direction we have
gotten from the Department.

I think what is needed, and you pointed it out quite well, is that now
we have to take the silos that many of us are operating within the
private sector, and begin an integration, if not a coalescing of the
many efforts we are embarking upon individually.

And I think if we take an industry-by-industry approach, we have a good
opportunity to integrate not only with the Department, but the state and
local initiatives, and we believe, as you do, a national reaction and
plan is what is required here, not simply a federal one. And I can
assure you, on behalf of the financial services industry, we are here to
play.

At this point, I would like to introduce our vice chairman, Judge
William Webster. He really needs no introduction, given the amazing
service that he has given our country, not only as director of the
Central Intelligence Agency, but director of the FBI as well, and
service as a federal circuit and appeals court judge.

**Vice Chair, Judge William Webster**

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Secretary, undersecretaries, everyone. This
is a unique opportunity for the members of this commission to recommit
themselves for additional service to our country, and this time more
specifically to the Department of Homeland Security, which we watched in
the process of its formation, and hope we can contribute as it continues
to grow.

As the chairman pointed out, each of us brings a wide range of
experiences that we think and hope will be useful to him and to the
Department. Calculating, without going into it, that I have spent
roughly half my adult life in public service, starting with my five
years as a naval officer in World War II and in the Korean war, I like
to think that that gives me the perspective of a private man in public
life, and that some of my opinions, along with other members, will be
useful to the commission in seeing the pitfalls, and the opportunities
\-- especially, the opportunities.

In thinking about our role, it seems to me it is important for us to
remind ourselves that this council is not operational. It is not our
role to run the Department. It is our role to step back from that
responsibility and to make suggestions, and to respond to tasking. To
give a new and perhaps different insight to those who are day in and day
out, carrying out this very important mission.

But I think it is an opportunity for us, when asked, to review the
policies, the plans, and the actions of the Homeland Security
Department, and to provide objective, experienced advice on specific
problem areas. If we do that, we will have done our job well.

I think we should respond to what the Chairman has said, and what the
Secretary has said about thinking creatively about new and better ways
for homeland security to be more effective for the people of this
country.

One of the most significant \-- and all of us will have an opportunity
to participate in this discussion, so I will be brief \-- one of the
most significant areas relates I believe, to the interface with
non-federal agencies and first responders. We have never in our country,
in our federal system, really addressed that issue, and now we must.
Now, we must find ways to make the work of the state and local
authorities and the municipal authorities work well with the federal
government, and to provide them with the greatest possible and most
effective assistance.

Part of that is through the establishment of standards. The template
process was a great beginning, and we will see more of that as it goes
along, and money is distributed to make the work at the hands-on level,
at the place where the action first occurs, more effective and
immediate.

And I might add that there is an important relationship where I hope
many of us can contribute. Representative Hamilton, for example, who
served so well as chairman of the Intelligence Committee. The FBI and
the CIA form two of the legs of the intelligence triangle, bringing
information for further analysis to homeland security. And I hope our
own experiences in those great organizations can be useful in making
this work well for Homeland Security.

And finally, on one tender subject, considering how we make our views
best known. I believe it is our responsibility on this Council to
realize that our first responsibility is to the Secretary of the
Department, and the Under Secretaries of the Department. Those are to be
the first place we bring our problems and our solutions.

We had a great time as being part of the President\'s Advisory Council,
but we now work, and I hope effectively, for the Secretary of this
Department and his key members. And that means to me, not going around
them. It means not taking our case to the White House or to the
Congress. And to avoid making advance statements to the press, rather
than taking our case \-- and there may be a case to be taken \-- to the
Governor and to his leaders in the Department.

I think we can do that. I think we will do that. And Mr. Secretary, that
will be my pledge, and I believe the pledge of all of us to do it in
that way. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

**Chair, Joseph Grano**

Thank you, Mr. Vice Chairman and Judge. Let me just simply add that we
perhaps had the ability not to subject our findings and our meetings to
Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), but the Secretary asked us to
continue that tradition from the very first council, and we all agreed.
And I would add the public as one of our clients as well, Judge, as we
go forward.

**Mayor Anthony Willliams**

I\'m Tony Williams, Mayor of Washington, DC. I want to certainly, as
mayor of our city, welcome the Council here to meet in our city. Welcome
all of you in the press corps here to witness this very important event.
I hope that all of you will stay in our hotels, get plenty of parking
tickets while you\'re here.

I have had an opportunity to work with the Department and work with the
Secretary from the very beginning when he came over to meet with me, and
to try to personally address and understand not only the needs of
Washington, DC as our capital city, but just understand more immediately
the needs of city, state and local government in general.

I have been very, very impressed with that. And I\'m proud to have
worked with the Chair, the Vice Chair, and the Chair of our State and
Local Officials Committee, Governor Leavitt, on the promulgation of the
Template.

One of the things that really concerns me is that there will be endless
discussion \-- and necessarily so, this is going to happen in a city
like ours \-- there will be endless discussion about distribution of
funds to state and local government, and certainly, that is important.

But I think it\'s just as important that we use the standards that the
Secretary has talked about in the Department as a whole, in conjunction
with the Template to see to it that the challenges that we face in
homeland security drive change at a state and local level in meeting
these objectives, in meeting this common agenda.

We need the resources, yes. We need the assistance, yes, but we also
have to change the way we do business. I think just in the way that
Secretary Rumsfeld is driving change in the military to meet new
challenges, at the state and local level we have to think differently,
and think anew about how we meet those challenges. Money is important,
but how we do business is just as important. And I look forward to
working further with the Council, and with the state and local group to
do just that.

Secondly, I hope that we continue our effort to talk about how, as we
think about doing things differently, as we think about this network of
response, think about citizen involvement. I have found as mayor \--
I\'m not sure about you, Tim \-- but as mayor, going out to community
groups, there is an enormous amount of citizen interest and willingness
to get involved in emergency response. I think we have a golden
opportunity now to try to drive that and encourage that, and I hope we
do so.

But I look forward to continuing to serve the Secretary and serve our
country on this group. I think we are up to great things.

**Dr. Lydia Thomas**

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Good morning, Mr. Secretary,
undersecretaries, Admiral. I am extremely pleased to be here. My name is
Lydia Thomas, president and CEO of Mitretek Systems.

I have spent perhaps more years than I like to recall at this point,
particularly in the chemical, biological warfare defense arena. But
perhaps more importantly, and at the 35,000 foot level, I have spent my
entire professional career of putting technology to work in the public
interest. So, I feel quite at home here in this group. I am honored to
be a part of the council. These are all very wonderful people, and very
dedicated.

Mr. Secretary, I am very hopeful that we will indeed be able to bring
some of the challenges we experience in the private sector, and some of
the problems that we perhaps have solved that you are now facing to you,
hopefully with more solutions than additional problems.

We look forward to addressing some of the issues that you brought up
this morning, particularly the lexicon. As a scientist working primarily
with engineers my entire career, I know how important it is to develop a
common language. And I am really looking forward to being able to accept
that challenge, and help you with that particular task. Thank you very
much.

**Sidney Taurel**

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Secretary, undersecretaries, and Admiral Allen.
I am honored by the opportunity to continue to serve you and Mr.
Secretary, and the administration in this advisory capacity. My name is
Sidney Taurel.

I\'m the chairman and CEO of Eli Lily and Company. I have had the chance
to live in five or six countries and four continents, and I would
certainly echo your comments, having had the opportunity to become a
naturalized citizen in 1995, about the profound emotional experience
that the naturalization ceremony represents. It\'s a very important,
proactive choice that we make, and embrace the values of this country.

I believe a primary focus of the council and the administration should
be bolstering our biodefense capabilities. I believe that some progress
has been made, but our vulnerabilities are still serious, and the need
for countermeasures is still great.

Due to the leadership of President Bush, you, Secretary Ridge, and
Secretary Thompson, Congress, and also valuable contributions from the
private sector, the US has now enough stock of smallpox vaccine to cover
the entire population, and many first responders have been vaccinated.
Congress has provided the resources to develop the next generations of
vaccines for smallpox and anthrax.

This is a good beginning, but only a beginning. Significant gaps remain
in our biodefense arsenal against the most virulent and dangerous
pathogens likely to be used in an attack. And also, our public health
infrastructure must be further fortified so that it can meet the
overwhelming demands of a potential large scale attack.

Now, developing new countermeasures will really require a new paradigm
of public and private coordination and cooperation. The Bioshield is, I
believe, a very important initiative, and the first step in recognizing
the need for such partnerships. I would only add that the key side
benefit by the way of these efforts, would be to inject new vigor in the
fight against infectious diseases in general.

And now, the SARS epidemic is an unsettling reminder of what is at stake
in this fight. The human and economic loss in the areas affected by SARS
are staggering. Imagine the extent of the loss with the intentional
release of a much deadlier disease.

So, my top priority here will be to continue to find the ways and means
to forge and implement practical and effective programs linking
government and industry. And I strongly recommend that the HSAC make
this one of our priorities.

I would also like to add one point. And that is that terrorism, as its
name indicates, is designed to really affect the psyche of the citizens.
And as we look at the recovery efforts, we should not neglect a
strengthening of our mental health capabilities, because this is a very,
very important thing, as we have seen after September 11 in New York
City particularly.

**Norm Augustine**

Mr. Chairman, and Mr. Secretary, as a way of introduction, I am trained
as an aeronautical engineer. I\'m a former chairman of Lockheed Martin
Corporation, and long ago was Undersecretary of the Army. I also had the
privilege of serving as chairman of the American Red Cross for nine
years, which of course has for over a century, been involved in disaster
prevention and disaster response, and is a partner of this Department.

It was my privilege, along with several other members of this committee,
to have served on the Hart-Rudman Commission, which I believe was the
first to have recommended the creation of the Department of Homeland
Security. And I\'m struck by the enormity of the task that lies ahead.

I\'m also struck by the enormity of the accomplishment that has taken
place to date. For example, I recently was given the opportunity to
observe part of the TOPOFF-2 exercise. And I was struck by the fact that
such an exercise probably couldn\'t even have been conducted on
September 12, let alone conducted as well as it was.

I, for the past couple of years, have been chairing the President\'s
Council of Advisors on Science and Technology Panel on Counterterrorism.
And in that capacity, I have come to view this management challenge
faced by the Department of Homeland Security as probably the toughest
management challenge I\'ve ever seen.

I say that because it obviously cuts across almost every agency and
every Department of the federal government. But it cuts across state and
local governments. It clearly interacts heavily with the private sector,
with not-for-profits, and it has international connotations. And
furthermore, the consequences are enormous.

I have two points that I guess I would like to raise at this time in
terms of the future of this committee and our activities. Clearly, the
first addresses the fact that clearly, the really major worries in
homeland security continue to be nuclear threats and biological threats,
as they have been for some time.

At the same time, I believe we need to be mindful of the fact that this
is not a static problem, a static threat. For example, as our country
has been relatively successful in decapitating the command and control
systems of many terrorist groups, and of greatly inhibiting their
ability to raise funds, and to move funds around, it is very likely that
those terrorists who still live among us will find totally new means of
carrying out their missions, totally new roles of terrorism, new types
of terrorism, and some of the specific ones I think deserve our special
attention.

The second is that I\'m struck by the fact that there is so much that
citizens of our country can do to help themselves, but they have to be
told what to do. And they can help themselves and their families by
their own actions. And the Department has a good start on that, but
there is so much yet to be done, and that can be done. Clearly, here the
enemy is complacency, and that needs to be addressed I think.

So, let me just close by saying, Mr. Secretary, I\'m honored to be here,
and I hope I can be of help.

**Lee Hamilton**

Good morning to all of you. I\'m Lee Hamilton. I served in the Congress.
I\'m now president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars. It\'s a pleasure to be on the Homeland Security Advisory
Council, to work with my colleagues, to work under the direction of
Secretary Ridge, with whom I worked in the Congress some years ago, and
with his very distinguished group of undersecretaries.

I might say that I\'ve been very pleased too with the leadership of our
chairman, Joe Grano, and Bill Webster, our vice chairman. And it has
been a distinct privilege for me to try to assist.

I will be focusing, I think, on several questions that I\'m concerned
about. One is money. Are we spending enough money to prepare fire and
police, rescue, and medical agencies to handle another catastrophic
attack? I do not believe that we are. I believe we are spending \$27
billion over 5 years at the present time.

That\'s an enormous amount of money. And everything that has been said
here about being sure you spend it effectively and efficiently is
correct. But I think I have been talking to a number of my former
colleagues on the Hill, and I think it\'s a fairly safe bet that that
figure will rise, and perhaps rise dramatically in the years ahead, and
probably should.

Secondly, I\'m concerned about screening out, of course, the potential
terrorists, but I want to do it in such a way that we do not choke off
the flow of people and commerce that is the economic and cultural life
blood of this country. At the Woodrow Wilson Center, we depend very
heavily on a flow of remarkable talented students and scholars, and I
have become very much aware of the difficulties many of them now have in
coming into this country for a variety of purposes.

This is a tough problem, how you strike the right balance. But in our
desire to block out the terrorists, we must be exceedingly sensitive to
the importance to this country of a flow of information through people
who come to this country to visit in all sorts of capacities.

Next, I am wondering about the effectiveness of the private sector in
identifying its vulnerabilities, and protecting its critical
infrastructure. As I understand it, today we are operating largely on a
voluntary basis here. That may be sufficient. I\'m not sure that it is.
And I think we have to look at incentives through insurance and other
devices to encourage the private sector to act to protect their critical
infrastructure.

Next, given my background, along with several others here in
intelligence, I have a lot of concern about whether or not we really
have a unified intelligence effort among the several agencies, or
whether there is too much stovepiping, as the expression goes. We\'ve
got a lot of agencies working on intelligence, dozens of them.

We have an enormous intelligence budget in this country. By and large, I
think it works pretty well. But I\'m interested in the role of the
Department of Homeland Security, and how it relates to the DOD, to the
CIA, to the FBI, and to this new organization, the Terrorist Threat
Integration Center. Everybody\'s solution to the problem of terrorism is
prevention. And of course we all know that intelligence is the key to
prevention. So, this is a tremendously important topic.

And finally, I am interested in the question of how we sort out the
responsibility, or to borrow a phrase from another problem, how we
develop a road map for the federal, state, local, philanthropic, media,
private sector for disaster prevention, relief, and recovery. In other
words, the problems of federalism, and the distribution of
responsibilities.

I think this advisory council can make a significant contribution on
these and other questions. I hope I can contribute to that
constructively.

**Tim Moore**

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good morning, Mr. Secretary, and
undersecretaries, and Admiral Allen.

My name is Tim Moore. I\'m the commissioner of the Florida Department of
Law Enforcement. I\'ve had the pleasure of serving in that capacity for
over 15 years. And in that capacity, I also have the pleasure of serving
as Governor Bush\'s homeland security advisor.

I\'m grateful for the opportunity to serve, Mr. Secretary. Perhaps the
best I could do is maybe give you a perspective from on the ground,
because we have to deal with the realities of the things we recommend to
you, and that you put into place every day. And I can tell you I think,
without fear of contradiction, that at least from the perspective of the
state of Florida, that as you said, the relationship that we enjoy with
you and with this new Department is indeed solid. And we are indeed
making progress, I believe, on all fronts.

You have gone about this in a very smart way. We\'ve got a sound
strategy. We\'ve got a solid structure. You are developing systems that
will enable us to make mid-course corrections as we need across the
board, and to gauge and measure our progress as we move forward. That\'s
critically important. So, every day, at least again from my perspective,
our capacities and our capabilities are getting stronger. They are
increasing, and that\'s good for America.

Equally important, you have assembled a very, very strong team of
professionals, men and women with credibility. It is said that there are
three kind of people in the world. There are people who watch things
happen. There are people that make things happen. And then there are
people that after the fact say, what just happened?

And clearly what you have done, is you have assembled a group of
professionals who know how to make things happen, the right things, the
right way, and that is good, because it is producing results, results
that we are all benefiting from.

The collateral value, the synergy of what we are doing first of all, and
then the collateral value beyond combating terrorism and just increasing
public safety generally is strong, and one that we are benefiting from I
believe across the country \-- municipal governments, state governments,
and our country as a whole.

I\'m glad to see the continuing focus on prevention, because I think you
are exactly right, that is our best friend. That is our strongest asset
in preventing future attacks on America. And I\'m especially proud to
see, Mr. Secretary, your continued commitment on a national versus a
federal strategy. That\'s critically important.

As Judge Webster says, we\'ve got some work to do there on role
definition. How it works. But we are well on the way to at least
understanding the questions we need to be asking each other, and the
answers that we need to cobble together to improve our overall effort.

And you are correct again, Mr. Secretary, much remains to be done, but
from my limited perspective, I firmly believe we are on the right track,
if we will continue to use both ends of our pencil as we go ahead, not
be afraid to erase and recorrect when we see things that need
correcting. Then we will continue to make progress on our task ahead.

And measure our progress. The mayor is right, money is important, but
it\'s not all about money. It\'s about how we use that money to raise
our level of capacity and capabilities in our communities. So, I think
it\'s really a misnomer to judge how well a state or a local government
is doing by the amount of dollars that state has received, or has not
received.

Your suggestion as well, Mr. Secretary, to celebrate successes, and to
reward exceptional effort I think is a critical one. A lot of good work
is going on out across America, and to the extent that we can chronicle
that, leverage that, export that, and use it, then we are the better.

I have always been told that the three most important ingredients in any
enterprise you undertake, be it public or private, is number one,
communication, and number two, communication, and number three,
communication. If we can talk about it, we can fix it. And Mr.
Secretary, you have clearly, and I can say this from personal experience
over the last 20 plus months, you have clearly created a culture of
communication and partnership.

Your men and women that work for you, not only at the senior levels, but
where it really matters, at the staff level, they get it, and they
operate the same way. If we can continue that, we can continue to make
good progress on the traction that we have realized so far under your
leadership.

I thank you for what you do, and I look forward to continuing to support
your effort.

**Jared Cohon**

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Secretary, and all of your colleagues. Like
everyone else, I feel honored to be here, and be continuing on as a
member of the new Homeland Security Advisory Council.

I come from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which all should know, and
remember, Tim, is the place of birth of the Secretary of Homeland
Security, and home to Carnegie Mellon University, which I serve as
president.

I, too, have several issues. I\'ll be brief. Mr. Chairman, you must be
very happy that not all the members are here today. I\'m taking up the
time that they yielded to me. No, I will be very brief, and try to
leverage off of what others have said.

I share Lee\'s concern about the private sector. I won\'t call it a
concern yet, because I simply don\'t know. I think there is a real
question that needs to be answered about how the private sector has
responded to the challenges.

One of the things that the Secretary has stressed not only in his role
as Secretary, but in his prior life as governor is partnerships \--
public-private partnerships, government-university-industry
partnerships, now federal-state-local partnerships. I think that
public-private partnership is extremely important in general, but in
particular in terms of getting the buy in and the participation by the
private sector. I look forward to pursuing that issue.

Not surprisingly, given the sector that I represent, science and
technology I think is a very important issue, and I want to say, Mr.
Secretary, that my sector, the research university sector, cheered when
Chuck McQueary was nominated and confirmed. I think it was a great
choice. We are very pleased at the very rapid progress he has been
making. We look forward to working with him.

With regard to the council, we look forward to getting involved, and
getting into science and technology issues. As you observed, Mr.
Secretary, we are the smartest nation. We need to take advantage of
that. And there is a tremendous amount of potential there.

The third area of general interest to me, and that I think that should
be of concern to our council, as I know it is to the Department and its
leadership is how do we measure how effective we are being? That is, we
are putting together a lot of plans, and I want to join Norm\'s comments
about the tremendous achievements that have been made in a very short
period of time.

We are going to be at this for many years. I think it\'s important now
that we start getting in place the criteria and metrics that will be
used to measure how we are doing, so we can adjust as called for, and do
the best job that we can.

Communication, I couldn\'t agree more with Tim, it is absolutely
crucial. Of all the hard jobs you have, Mr. Secretary, this might be the
hardest of all. And it certainly comes after prevention and response,
but it has got to be part of all of that as well.

I was struck by Sidney\'s comment about SARS. You know, even if there is
a bioagent no more deadly than SARS that affected no more people than
the SARS did, but if it were known or suspected that it was intentional
and not \"natural\" in origin, who knows what the impact would have
been? Which raises a real question about communication. What would we
have done with a SARS-like thing if it had been intentional? How would
we have communicated in a way that contained the impact?

Finally, Lee raised the issue of foreign visitors. My university and
universities in general are very concerned about this. I do want to say
though publicly, that the Secretary, the undersecretary response from
this, Asa, have been responsive and very open to this. We know this is a
difficult issue, one in which the Department of Homeland Security and
the Department of State have to work together and weigh a lot of
competing goals.

And we are convinced you are doing the best job you can on that, and we
are very pleased that you have been open and willing to talk about this.
But it does remain a very important issue that we have to work on. Thank
you very much.

**Kathleen Bader**

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Secretary, undersecretaries, Admiral,
fellow HSAC members. My name is Kathleen Bader. I\'m a business group
president for the Dow Chemical Company, and their corporate vice
president for quality and business excellence.

I live in Zurich, Switzerland. I\'m in the US this week. I was
originally coming to the US this week, because every 4th of July for the
last two decades my family gets together to celebrate what it\'s about
to be an American. So, we are all at our centennial farm this week,
dressing in red, white, and blue until you are absolutely sick of red,
white, and blue, including the dog. And there is very little that would
get me off the family farm this week, but obviously the honor of serving
my country, as William Webster said, is more than sufficient. So, thank
you for that opportunity.

As I listened to the undersecretaries speak, I started to write down
just a few of the words they used. And if I weren\'t obviously here, I
would think I was back home in Switzerland or in Midland, Michigan,
because all the words I heard are words about running a business. Things
about using science and technology, globability, safety, knowledge
management transparency, communication, management of change, continuous
improvement, merger and acquisition, sustaining the gains.

So, what this really is, is probably the most complex business that
anyone has ever had to take in hand. And while the challenge is huge,
the genius of leadership is in fact taking a huge challenge, and putting
it in sufficiently simple terms for people to be able to understand,
align themselves, get motivated, and then direct their objectives toward
the key strategy.

I have to say, Mr. Secretary, that in what I have seen over the last
year or so that we have been together, is a quickly advancing strategy
in terms of its definitiveness, in terms of its specificity, its
measurability in terms of its goals and objectives, and one that I
believe people can now begin to get behind, broken into the key elements
that they have to deal with.

I do think that we need to learn our lessons from history. And I think
some of those are very relevant to the private sector discussions that
Lydia spoke of when we started. And that is that very clear goals that
are smart, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and trackable,
that are widely shared and transparent result in the public sector and
the private sector working in concert, and if we do that, we can move
mountains.

We have lessons in history to prove that, whether it\'s the Panama
Canal, the highway system, the space race, I think we also have to learn
that federal programs can be implemented via state, local, and private.
Commissioner Moore addressed that, as did others.

The third lesson, that economic benefit enables success, innovation, and
sustainability. Not to suggest that there has to be economic benefit in
everything we do. I think there also has to be the spirit of serving
one\'s country, of giving because that\'s the right thing to do, of
leveraging what you have, because in fact it will benefit this country.

The win-win needs to be there in the final analysis. I believe
cooperative programs achieve more. That much more effort is given when
there is in fact more than just legislative fiat.

And finally, that technology transfer ultimately can fuel economic
growth. And I believe there will be significant technology developed
here, that at the proper time, and in the proper way, can be leveraged
to advance the business of this country, which is in fact business.

**Agenda Item: Remarks by Chris Furlow, Executive Director, HSAC**

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. On behalf of the Homeland Security
Advisory Council staff, I would like to thank you, Secretary Ridge, for
the opportunity to serve and support this Council.

Chairman Grano and Judge Webster, I want to thank you personally for the
working relationship that we have had in planning for this meeting, as
well as upcoming meetings, and we thank you very much.

We have been asked where the Homeland Security Advisory Council, how it
relates in the organizational chart of the Department of Homeland
Security. And I think this is it right here. It\'s that direct
connection, that direct report to Secretary Ridge that makes your
service so valuable.

As the principal advisory body to the Secretary, we want to as a staff,
insure that you have the information and the tools that you need at your
disposal in order to advise the Secretary in the most appropriate
manner.

Even though this is a direct report, we also understand that we can\'t
operate in stovepipes, that there are always other components that are a
part of this grand effort. And that although there are other advisory
boards and commissions that have been inherited by the Department of
Homeland Security, we are not going to operate again, within a
stovepipe.

We intend to operate in a coordinated way, one where we take seriously
the Secretary\'s charge to integrate the nation's unprecedented and
fast-paced homeland security efforts together. We have been reaching out
to other federal partners and other federal advisory commissions to take
advantage of their good work, and how to build a repository of
information again, that will be of service to you as you deliberate the
issues that the Secretary has put before you.

I would like to thank the undersecretaries who are here, and Admiral as
well. This is very important, and it\'s indicative of the strong
relationship that we will develop as we move forward with the Homeland
Security Advisory Council. And our staff truly looks forward to serving
in the liaison role.

If I could, I would like to briefly recognize the members of our staff:
Colonel Jeff Gaynor, who came from the Secretary of Defense\'s office.
He also previously served at the White House Office of Homeland
Security. We also have on the staff Mr. Michael Miron, who has
background at both CIA and the Department of Commerce.

We\'re very proud to have both these gentlemen, and their dedication to
both public service and national security on board - and Ms. Katye
Balls, who will play a key logistical role with our council as we move
forward. She had previously served in the immediate Office of the
Secretary. They are all knowledgeable about the issues with which you
will debate.

Since I came aboard just a few weeks back, we have really been working
at the staff level to stand up both moving into a new office, and all of
the challenges that that brings. But additionally, our staff is working
to develop ways to assist the public with any questions that they may
have.

There will soon be a Homeland Security Advisory Council link on the
Department of Homeland Security Web site that will stand up relatively
soon. We will post Federal Register notice information on that site
regarding our meetings and activities. We\'ll post contact information
for the Homeland Security Advisory Council Office, so that members of
the public may provide comment.

We will post meeting minutes from the public sessions there, and also
the products of this Council, like the Statewide Template Initiative
that many of you have taken part in at the President\'s Council. As you
produce products, we\'ll also post it on that site.

So, with that, Mr. Chairman, I will wrap up. But as a staff, we look
forward to working with you and these outstanding Americans.

**Agenda Item - TOPOFF-2 Briefing by Michael Brown, Under Secretary for
Emergency Preparedness and Response, DHS, and Corey Gruber, Assistant
Director, Office for Domestic Preparedness, DHS**

The presentation this morning will cover first impressions from our
TOPOFF-2 or Top Officials Exercise that was just completed in May of
this year. Before I start, I wanted to note that this exercise was
directed by Congress in fact in fiscal year 1999. We conducted the first
TOPOFF exercise in May 2000, in the Portsmouth, New Hampshire sea coast
region, and in the Denver, Colorado metropolitan area.

With that, we then started the planning process for the second TOPOFF
exercise. That exercise was co-sponsored by our office on behalf of the
Department, and by the Department of State, because in TOPOFF-2 we had
the very robust participation of the government of Canada, who were
great partners over the course of the entire two years of planning.

It is important to note that the planning process for TOPOFF-2 actually
started in June 2001. So, before some of the most dramatic events that
we experienced, and I\'ll talk a little bit about how that shaped the
exercise.

Just a little bit about the scope of this undertaking. This was a two
year endeavor. It involved planners from across all levels of
government. It involved, as you can see the grand total there, 121
Departments and agencies that participated in the exercise, and
unprecedented scope, 76 hospitals between the two venues that
participated. And those were the state of Washington, and the
metropolitan areas of Seattle, and King County, and then the state of
Illinois, and Chicago, and the contiguous counties to the city of
Chicago.

We had 525 objectives for this exercise. That should suggest to you that
this was a very complex, and an exercise of unprecedented scope. And
then if we add together all the exercise activities, and there were
fully 16 over the course of that 2 year period, we had well over 18,000
participants; about 10,000 that participated in the full scale exercise.

And then we were able to use many of the systems that we use day in and
day out for training across the homeland security community, we used
those distance learning conduits to provide this information out to
states, to homeland security professionals across the United States.

And we would be remiss in not citing Mayor Guiliani\'s comment there.
Again, the value of an exercise is it gives us an opportunity to
practice to proficiency to face whatever possibilities our adversaries
may impose on us.

We had a series of goals, and these goals were initially developed,
again, as I mentioned, in June 2001. They were certainly revisited
following the events of September 11 and other events that we
experienced. But we think that they encapsulated what we were trying to
accomplish on a national scale, with a very broad partnership across the
community.

I mentioned the partnership with the government of Canada and the
Department of State. Part of the Smart Border agreement of course was
one mandate to do joint exercises and training. So, this provided a
great opportunity to collaborate with the government of Canada, and get
the international perspective, which we did not have in the first TOPOFF
exercise.

The first TOPOFF exercise was one full scale exercise, one physical
demonstration. We realized after that, and certainly Congress did as
well, that it was more appropriate to take an approach that was cycle of
exercise activity that increased in complexity.

So, what you see here represented here are really seven national level
exercise activities that were complemented by nine exercise activities
in our two venues, and in Canada as well. And as we progressed through
these, starting with a series of seminars, we were informed by the
lessons of all the exercises we had done since TOPOFF 2000, in fact,
196.

We were informed by the lessons of September 11, other events that had
occurred. And we went out to the community, and polled the community
about what were the most critical issues that they wanted to address in
the course of this exercise.

For example, our very first seminar was on emergency public information,
or public information officers, and we had 74 public information
officers and retired professionals from the media community that helped
us to understand over the course of two days, what the issues were
around this scenario.

We took a heretical approach to exercise design, because we in fact
allowed the participants in the exercise to be privy to many components
of the exercise scenario. The reason we did that, and the reason we
adopted this kind of stair-step approach is the most important thing we
can do is provide opportunities for learning. We wanted a continuous
learning process.

We wanted to be able after every one of these activities, to bank the
learning to that point, not to wait until after the entire process to
publish a report, but to in fact learn and engineer the corrections as
we went through the course of this process. And we believe we validated
that at the end of this process, but I will talk about that a little in
a moment.

I do want to point out in the middle there, in the February timeframe,
we conducted a seminar in direction and control. We brought in our
Canadian counterparts, our counterparts from our two venues, our federal
partners, and we did an eight hour seminar on direction and control of
these very complex incidents.

And we again used distance learning methodologies. We broadcast that
seminar fully to audiences in 48 states across the country. So, while
face-to-face contact, 18,000 people, we in fact had a very wide audience
that could benefit from the exercise process.

We had an unprecedented level, and I think what really created the
conditions for success in the exercise process, unprecedented level of
play by our top officials, by the Secretary, by his counterparts in the
cabinet and other senior officials from the venues as well. And that
preceded our full scale exercise. I will talk about that in a bit of
detail as we move through the process.

This is a very simplified depiction again, of a great deal of activity
over the course of a week, but simply put, it was an attack with a
radiological dispersal device in the Washington venue, in Seattle
proper. Fully about 21 acres of a site that we used and we prepared that
we mocked up to mimic the aftermath of an event like that. And then the
Illinois venue was a bioterrorism attack, which played out covertly over
the course of several days, as you know, as the agent began to manifest
itself.

You will see again, issues related to direction and control, the
unprecedented total of the number of hospitals that participated
actively. We did have a whole series of prevention activities that
occurred over the course of the exercise at various times that all
contributed to the unfolding scenario.

And then one important note. We did this in the original TOPOFF
exercise, but we created a virtual news network, which for all intent
and purposes, encapsulated the entire exercise process with a mimicked
news network, with an anchor. It happened to be Frank Sesno, who I know
many of you are familiar with, that served as our anchorperson. We had
field crews at studios at both venues.

So, eight hours a day, all the participants in the exercise were getting
information, and were being submersed or immersed in perhaps not a full
replication of what the media environment would be like, but the one
that we could achieve in the course of the exercise. So, that was very
important to driving decisions, and making the conditions feel authentic
for all of the participants.

Again, I mentioned early on, and I want to emphasize this again that
really first impressions of the exercise, because we had an
unprecedented number of hundreds and hundreds of data collectors and
controllers that were out at all the areas of the exercise collecting
data. So, we have a great deal of data to go through.

We just conducted a week ago, our after-action conference with about 220
attendees from all the participating agencies in the exercise. And we
have a voluminous amount of data that we are going through and
analyzing. And you will see our process at the end there.

Quite simply again, even though we have reports from preceding exercise
activities, this final report will be a summation and a compilation of
all the lessons we have learned over the course of this process.

Again, very first impressions, most importantly, with the volume of
participants in an exercise of this scale, with rubble piles in Seattle,
with SWAT team take-downs and things, we were very careful. We were
considerate about safety issues, and we had while you can imagine, very
minor scraps and bruises, we were safe and successful in completing the
exercise without any injuries to anyone.

We believe we validated the process we took, that cycle of activity. I
mentioned earlier before, what made this most authentic for all the
participants down to the police officer and the paramedic at the
incident site was seeing Secretary Ridge, was seeing Mayor Nichols, was
seeing Governor Locke actually participating fully in the exercise. It
couldn\'t feel any more authentic than that.

And very importantly, the operational architecture for the exercise,
when we have our Department, which is relatively new, and our
interagency partners work very hard to shape how we would approach this
operationally. We will talk about this a little bit. Again, citing
General Lowenberg, Adjutant General, State of Washington at the bottom
there, \"We know we design exercises to find seams. We design exercises
to identify the problems, because that is the purpose of practicing.\"
So, that was our charge when we started this process.

We aggregated a tremendous number of observations into three areas, at
least in this first impression process, and that was really the science
picture or portrait or awareness of the action, of the incident, the
information again in terms of public information, and how we share
information, and then operationally how we managed the incident.

I know these have been wordy. I will go through these quite quickly, but
suffice to say we did lessons, some of which were corrections to
previous impressions that we had in the course of the process, one of
which was in terms of the science. We are often striving for one model,
one tool that will give us a complete portrait of the exercise.

And in fact, what we found is really the reverse is true, that the
multiplicity of models that we had in aggregation, and with the right
kind of analysis, were helpful to us in getting us a better picture of
what was occurring scientifically in the incident.

But we also understand that that tool has to be very dynamic, because as
we learn more about the source term, and about what actually happened in
the course of the incident, we have to have the ability to factor in
weather changes and all the variables that affect again our scientific
pitch of what occurred in the incident. And then we have to be able to
very quickly draw all the best expertise that we can across the
community into there to help us again shape our operational decisions
about the event.

And again, it\'s very important that all of that is harmonized and
synchronized, that what we tell our public about the protective action
guidelines or information on decisions is all in lock step again, with
our operational processes and policy decisions. And again, that has to
be communicated.

One of the pressures that we put on the exercise was the virtual news
network. We strove very hard to make the virtual news network try to
outpace, try to get head of the decision cycle, so that those pressures
would be there on the entire decision-making architecture and the
incident, because again, we think that that is reflective of in fact
what often happens. As you will see in the last bullet there, the tempo
of the news reporting sometimes outpaces that process.

Again, as we look in terms of operationally, we went through several
changes in the Homeland Security Advisory System. Again, these were
driven by objectives that were submitted by the venues that were
submitted by all the participants to explore actions that they would
take at those stages.

We understand that there are many implications that we have all heard
about. One important point to note is that one of the preliminary
activities prior to the full scale exercise in December of last year, we
spent three days in, in essence, a war game looking at the longer-term
issues, the economic, sociological, political issues associated with an
event like this.

We can\'t play the full scale exercise over the course of months like
the real incident would unfold. So, we spent three days in a war game
looking at those longer-term remediation and recovery issues. And that
helped to educate us about some of those economic and social
implications.

And we also know that there has to be tremendous flexibility when we are
dealing with the very most extreme and complex of events. We have to
have those in our ability to respond to those. Undersecretary Brown and
his personnel were very helpful in us all learning about that process.

And then again, in an unprecedented manner, we had five sites in the
Illinois venue where we were exercising stockpiles. Those were
stockpiles at the county level, at the state level, as well as a
representation of the Strategic National Stockpile, but never before
done on that scale. And that was a tremendous learning experience for
everyone. It helped to shape the bioterrorism response planning not just
for the communities that participated, but for the entire public health
community.

Just a point I think of great interest was we did conduct an exercise
related to a potential cyber assault. This was done in a table top
setting actually prior to full scale exercise. This has been identified
earlier in the exercise process, in fact back in TOPOFF 2000, as we well
know, and important component potentially of an attack on various
fronts.

This exercise again, with the great assistance of the Department of
Information Services and Washington State was very successful. Again, we
had our international partners playing in there, really a regional
representation from across the northwestern states, and a very
successful undertaking. And again, our participants have encouraged us
that in the future, we want to integrate this into the exercises to
follow.

Again, I know that was a quick burst, but to summarize, again, we
believe that performance equals preparedness. If we can perform, if we
can take those 525 objectives, and measure how well we performed those
tasks under the artificial stress of these conditions, that\'s our
surety for how well we will perform when whatever possibility faces us.

We tried to design a system. We never knew which one of these events
might be our last rehearsal, so we tried to design a system where we
could bank learning through the course of that cycle of activity. We
also we think, again, to an unprecedented degree, and I would again put
this in the laps of the senior leaders that helped that cooperation and
that collaborative process.

I would be remiss if I didn\'t mention there have been many stories
about the amount of money that was spent on the exercise. One important
point to note is that fully \$5 million of the funds for the exercise
were provided in grants, \$2.5 million to each venue to help defray
their costs of participation in the exercise, which again, was critical
to getting that authentic representation and participation in the course
of the exercise.

With that, sir, we\'ll go to the last slide. If we have time, Mr.
Chairman, and Mr. Secretary, I'll take questions.

**Chair, Joseph Grano Closing Remarks**

Chairman Grano invited members of the public to submit public comments
to the Homeland Security Advisory Council Staff at <HSAC@dhs.gov>, or
mail to: Homeland Security Advisory Council, U.S. Department of Homeland
Security, Washington, DC 20528. He then adjourned the public session of
the meeting.