Homeland Security head Tom Ridge speaks before Congress on making the office a cabinet-level department

WASHINGTON , June 22 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – U.S. legislators on Thursday, June 19, grilled Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge on Capitol Hill, warning him that President George W. Bush's proposed Department of Homeland Security will not likely improve communication problems between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). 

Ridge went to hearings in the Senate and the House of Representatives to explain Bush's proposed new department, stating that "unprecedented times call for extraordinary measures," and urged Congress to swiftly approve the White House's proposal. Though warmly received, he was also closely questioned about likely drawbacks from lawmakers. 

Although Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, said, "I haven't heard anything today that tells me we won't or can't get this done," he told Ridge that there were "unsettled questions" about integrating the military into the new department, while at the same time coordinating hundreds of thousands of local police, firefighters, health workers and other emergency personnel. 

Lieberman, who rose to fame in 2000 as Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore's running mate, has been at the forefront criticizing the Bush administration on homeland security issues. 

Lieberman said that Congress must help "redress the awful lack of coordination and information sharing among key agencies of our government, including the FBI and the CIA." 

Republican Senator Fred Thompson told Ridge that the proposed department "does not address what I consider to be the most immediate and troubling deficiencies in our country's intelligence and counterintelligence, counter terrorist capabilities." 

Democratic Senator Carl Levin was unimpressed with plans for the new department to distill information provided by the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies, but not collect it. 

"There's no accountability here," Levin said. "If the FBI doesn't share the information with you, you don't know about it. If the CIA doesn't share the information with the FBI, the FBI doesn't know about it. Where is all the relevant information . . . about terrorist threats going to be coordinated?" 

Ridge countered that Bush wants the new department to have access to all the information needed to produce its own "competitive analysis," and be able "to connect the dots" the same way the FBI or CIA does, or "potentially connect the dots in a different way." 

The FBI, CIA and other agencies would be required to pass along intelligence reports and analysis, although the new department would not routinely have access to raw materials, such as the full contents of interviews with sources, tape recordings and intercepted conversations, reports the Washington Post. 

Ridge said the CIA and FBI should not be entirely within the proposed department, but would continue to conduct independent analyses of threats. In conjunction with information sent from the agencies, the new department would be doing its own work, as well. 

Ridge was again queried about poor cooperation between the FBI and the CIA when he went to the House of Representatives. 

"If the FBI and CIA were loathe to communicate before September 11 and are now casting blame at one another as we investigate 9-11, what makes anyone think that they would communicate with a new, untested agency?" asked Democratic Representative John Tierney. 

According to the Post, Bush's plan calls for merging all or parts of 22 federal agencies into a single department, especially focusing on the proposed structure's ability to obtain terror-related intelligence from the FBI, the CIA and other agencies. 

The Bush reorganization plan would create a 170,000-person department with a $37.4 billion budget that would include the Customs Service, the Coast Guard, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Transportation Security Administration and many other agencies, reports the paper.

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