Monday, July 31, 2006
Monday PM: The drumbeat on immigration and preparedness
With attention fixed, one way or another, on the Middle East, the administration's press events on immigration reform, border security and hurricane preparedness had something of a by-the-numbers feel to them today.
The president continued to tout the virtues of a comprehensive immigration reform package; Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced that two dozen more federal prosecutors would be deployed to the south western border to ramp up efforts against illegal immigration; and David Paulison said he wanted to make the country proud of FEMA again.
Paulison is well-respected among the nation's tight-knit emergency management community, and it's easy to see why.
"You can't hurt my feelings, you can't embarrass me, I'm way beyond that. So you can ask whatever you think you need to ask," he told reporters, adding that he would try to find time to watch the highly critical Spike Lee documentary about Katrina. "I'm taking this very seriously and I'm not taking it personally," he concluded about criticism of the agency.
FEMA have taken the bold step of arranging to "embed" journalists during any disaster response. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out if there is another "big one" this year.
On the immigration reform front, the Denver Post has joined the chorus saying that Congress (for which read House Republicans) "is effectively killing any chance to rewrite immigration laws this year."
True, the legislative calendar is crowded and there seems little prospect of a deal, but I remember all too clearly that I privately (and there is a blessing I'm unlikely to receive again now that I have this blog) came to the same conclusion several times about the intelligence reform bill -- and I was wrong.
Elsewhere, the Department of Homeland Security announced the appointment of Kathleen Kraninger to direct the Office of Screening Coordination (Quick trumpet toot: UPI reported this appointment Friday). Watch-listing and screening are tricky issues and -- the bureaucrats worst nightmare -- are apt to attract a lot of media attention. With the introduction of the new no-fly list (dubbed "Secure Flight") seemingly irretrievably mired and big decisions about the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative looming, Kraninger has her work cut out for her. Your humble correspondent will be following her progress with interest.
Finally, the National Security Whisleblowers' Coalition says that Russ Tice's grand jury appearance --originally scheduled for Wednesday -- has been postponed to an unspecified future date after his lawyer wrote to the Justice Department asking for more time to prepare.
There's still very little indication of the size or shape of this inquiry. Nor should we necessarily expect any soon. Having already exhausted my rather thin roster of Justice Department sources and come up empty, I have resorted to checking Murray Waas' blog several times a day, but even the man who beat news out of Patrick Fitzgerald's seemingly leak-proof investigation has been silent on this one so far.
Also on the Tice front, the Government Accountability Project says the whole investigation "may violate a congressional spending ban commonly known as the 'anti-gag statute,'" and place Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in jeopardy of the feared anti-deficiency laws. Hmmmm. Nice try, guys.
The president continued to tout the virtues of a comprehensive immigration reform package; Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced that two dozen more federal prosecutors would be deployed to the south western border to ramp up efforts against illegal immigration; and David Paulison said he wanted to make the country proud of FEMA again.
Paulison is well-respected among the nation's tight-knit emergency management community, and it's easy to see why.
"You can't hurt my feelings, you can't embarrass me, I'm way beyond that. So you can ask whatever you think you need to ask," he told reporters, adding that he would try to find time to watch the highly critical Spike Lee documentary about Katrina. "I'm taking this very seriously and I'm not taking it personally," he concluded about criticism of the agency.
FEMA have taken the bold step of arranging to "embed" journalists during any disaster response. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out if there is another "big one" this year.
On the immigration reform front, the Denver Post has joined the chorus saying that Congress (for which read House Republicans) "is effectively killing any chance to rewrite immigration laws this year."
True, the legislative calendar is crowded and there seems little prospect of a deal, but I remember all too clearly that I privately (and there is a blessing I'm unlikely to receive again now that I have this blog) came to the same conclusion several times about the intelligence reform bill -- and I was wrong.
Elsewhere, the Department of Homeland Security announced the appointment of Kathleen Kraninger to direct the Office of Screening Coordination (Quick trumpet toot: UPI reported this appointment Friday). Watch-listing and screening are tricky issues and -- the bureaucrats worst nightmare -- are apt to attract a lot of media attention. With the introduction of the new no-fly list (dubbed "Secure Flight") seemingly irretrievably mired and big decisions about the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative looming, Kraninger has her work cut out for her. Your humble correspondent will be following her progress with interest.
Finally, the National Security Whisleblowers' Coalition says that Russ Tice's grand jury appearance --originally scheduled for Wednesday -- has been postponed to an unspecified future date after his lawyer wrote to the Justice Department asking for more time to prepare.
There's still very little indication of the size or shape of this inquiry. Nor should we necessarily expect any soon. Having already exhausted my rather thin roster of Justice Department sources and come up empty, I have resorted to checking Murray Waas' blog several times a day, but even the man who beat news out of Patrick Fitzgerald's seemingly leak-proof investigation has been silent on this one so far.
Also on the Tice front, the Government Accountability Project says the whole investigation "may violate a congressional spending ban commonly known as the 'anti-gag statute,'" and place Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in jeopardy of the feared anti-deficiency laws. Hmmmm. Nice try, guys.
Sunday, July 30, 2006
The week ahead in homeland and national security
(Every Sunday night/Monday morning I'll be posting a preview of the events, issues and people likely to be dominating homeland and national security news throughout the week. Each weeknight, I'll post a quick word or two on the following day's diary.)
This week, the Israeli military action in Lebanon -- and the diplomatic efforts to stop it -- will likely dominate the news in the wake of the bombing in Qana.
(And yes, that does sound familiar.)
Partly as a result, it looks like being a quiet week on the Department of Homeland Security beat. The Nebraska Ave. press office didn't bother with its scheduled week-ahead tele-briefing on Friday, and ATOW they hadn't put out their usual weekly e-mail schedule either.
House Field Hearings
Instead, the week's homeland security news, such as it is, is likely to be dominated by the stalled and fruitless row over immigration reform and border security legislation.
Thursday the House GOP leadership announced two weeks of field hearings by nine House panels on the issue.
House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said the 21 hearings in 13 states would enable members to "to listen to the American people, to find what the real issues are, what we need to do" before returning to negotiations with the Senate after the August recess.
(In a glorious act of political chutzpah, BTW, the hearing notice calls the Senate bill the "Reid-Kennedy" bill -- for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Liberal icon Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. -- blithely ignoring the fact that it was sponsored by Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Penn., without whose efforts it would not have made it onto the Senate floor, and supported by 22 other Republicans.)
Few observers seem to think these events will get anyone any closer to an agreement, however. "They have advertised the parade of hearings as a method of exposing provisions in the Senate-passed bill they consider too lenient on illegal immigrants," wrote CQ's Michael Sandler of the GOP House leadership last week.
Sandler also points out that several of the hearings will be in places such asHamilton , Mont. , Concord , N.H. , and Dubuque , Iowa
Administration events
For its part, the White House is clearly trying to keep up a steady drip, drip on its message about the need for a comprehensive reform package, and beltway types will doubtless be watching the continuing point-counter-point between the administration on the one hand and the House GOP on the other.
Getting the ball rolling Monday is Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who will hold a press conference on the issue in Albuquerque, N.M., after a morning meeting with Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson, and a speech to the National District Attorneys Association.
(Monday's NYT story about the crackdown against firms that employ illegal immigrants will give him something nice to riff on, should the need arise.)
For this part, President Bush will be in Miami Monday. He will tour the National Hurricane Center and the Port of Miami. His remarks -- slated to be about the U.S. economy, but unlikely not to touch on immigration -- will be made at the Coast Guard HQ there.
Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez addresses the libertarian Cato Institute Tuesday on “Comprehensive Immigration Reform for a Growing Economy;” and Assistant Homeland Security Secretary for Policy Stewart Baker is at Heritage Wednesday, doubtless banging a similar gong.
(Thanks to the encyclopedic Christian Beckner for making this a lot easier.)
But these are just warm-up guys for the administration's main event on the topic this week, which is the President's speech in Mission, Texas Thursday following a tour of the Rio Grande Border Patrol sector.
For anyone who has been on Mars or under a rock for the past year, the problem is that the two chambers of Congress have adopted very different approaches to the issue. The House has passed an enforcement-only bill, which some critics have labeled draconian. The Senate-passed version adds a guest worker program and a "path to earned citizenship" (amnesty to its critics and plain-speaking folks everywhere) for those already here illegally to its security enhancements.
(Full disclosure: I am a foreigner present in the United States on a non-immigrant work visa, who is seeking legal permanent resident status.)
The only approach that at the moment appears to yield hope of a deal is some kind of a legislative trigger. This would could give political cover to worried members of Congress by requiring the President or Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to sign off on some kind of raised border security metric before any immigration reform (for which read, basically, guest worker program and/or legalization process) can kick in.
Politically, this may be a good trade-off, but in policy terms, it risks looking in the wrong direction. The problem with a guest worker program is not that it might be implemented before the border is secure, it's that it might it might be implemented before the machinery is in place to properly process applicants -- weeding out frauds and other malefactors.
As I can personally attest, the wheels of the U.S. immigration process turn damnable slow, and shoveling millions more applications into a system which is already overloaded doesn’t seem like an awfully good idea to your humble correspondent.
Also on the Hill
Indefatigable Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, holds a hearing on fake IDs and border security on Wednesday.
In the Senate, both the Judiciary and Armed Services Committee have hearings on the judicial process for detainees at Guantanamo.
And on Thursday, armed services hears reports on "Iraq, Afghanistan and the global war on terrorism" from Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Peter Pace and Central Command's Gen. John Abizaid.
Also tentatively scheduled for Thursday is a judiciary business meeting where Specter may try to get a bill on warrantless electronic surveillance and FISA modernization out onto the floor.
Bubbling under
The subpoena served on Russell Tice in connection with unauthorized disclosure of information about the National Security Agency is likely to prove the tip of a very large iceberg indeed, in the opinion of your humble correspondent.
When the president goes on national TV to say the people who leaked the NSA program are going to be caught and punished… Well, let's just say it would be naïve to assume that the public silence about the subject since then is indicative of a lack of activity.
CQ is following the ABC TV News story about Federal Air Marshals being subject to a quota for their so-called Surveillance Detection Reports, or SDRs.
SDRs are designed to leverage the fact that Federal Air Marshals are based at every major airport in the United States -- and should be on the look out for suspicious behavior that might be surveillance or other terrorist planning or operational activity.
Marshals in Las Vegas alleged they were required to make at least one SDR a month -- and that this meant innocent passengers getting written up for innocuous behavior like taking photographs.
To be honest, I was a little skeptical of this story at first, especially because the original report appeared to acknowledge that the July 2004 memo imposing the quota was withdrawn a month later.
But, as ever, a little more reporting has raised a lot more questions, and the CQ story seems to suggest that there was at least some ambiguity about the policy.
One thing that is not true is that an innocent tourist could get put on the U.S. government's terrorist watch list solely as a result of one of these SDRs. The Federal Air Marshal Service is not a nominating agency to the list.
One thing seems clear: there were -- and perhaps still are -- some serious management issues in the service. I'm going to keep digging on this one.
This week, the Israeli military action in Lebanon -- and the diplomatic efforts to stop it -- will likely dominate the news in the wake of the bombing in Qana.
(And yes, that does sound familiar.)
Partly as a result, it looks like being a quiet week on the Department of Homeland Security beat. The Nebraska Ave. press office didn't bother with its scheduled week-ahead tele-briefing on Friday, and ATOW they hadn't put out their usual weekly e-mail schedule either.
House Field Hearings
Instead, the week's homeland security news, such as it is, is likely to be dominated by the stalled and fruitless row over immigration reform and border security legislation.
Thursday the House GOP leadership announced two weeks of field hearings by nine House panels on the issue.
House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said the 21 hearings in 13 states would enable members to "to listen to the American people, to find what the real issues are, what we need to do" before returning to negotiations with the Senate after the August recess.
(In a glorious act of political chutzpah, BTW, the hearing notice calls the Senate bill the "Reid-Kennedy" bill -- for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Liberal icon Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. -- blithely ignoring the fact that it was sponsored by Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Penn., without whose efforts it would not have made it onto the Senate floor, and supported by 22 other Republicans.)
Few observers seem to think these events will get anyone any closer to an agreement, however. "They have advertised the parade of hearings as a method of exposing provisions in the Senate-passed bill they consider too lenient on illegal immigrants," wrote CQ's Michael Sandler of the GOP House leadership last week.
Sandler also points out that several of the hearings will be in places such as
Administration events
For its part, the White House is clearly trying to keep up a steady drip, drip on its message about the need for a comprehensive reform package, and beltway types will doubtless be watching the continuing point-counter-point between the administration on the one hand and the House GOP on the other.
Getting the ball rolling Monday is Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who will hold a press conference on the issue in Albuquerque, N.M., after a morning meeting with Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson, and a speech to the National District Attorneys Association.
(Monday's NYT story about the crackdown against firms that employ illegal immigrants will give him something nice to riff on, should the need arise.)
For this part, President Bush will be in Miami Monday. He will tour the National Hurricane Center and the Port of Miami. His remarks -- slated to be about the U.S. economy, but unlikely not to touch on immigration -- will be made at the Coast Guard HQ there.
Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez addresses the libertarian Cato Institute Tuesday on “Comprehensive Immigration Reform for a Growing Economy;” and Assistant Homeland Security Secretary for Policy Stewart Baker is at Heritage Wednesday, doubtless banging a similar gong.
(Thanks to the encyclopedic Christian Beckner for making this a lot easier.)
But these are just warm-up guys for the administration's main event on the topic this week, which is the President's speech in Mission, Texas Thursday following a tour of the Rio Grande Border Patrol sector.
For anyone who has been on Mars or under a rock for the past year, the problem is that the two chambers of Congress have adopted very different approaches to the issue. The House has passed an enforcement-only bill, which some critics have labeled draconian. The Senate-passed version adds a guest worker program and a "path to earned citizenship" (amnesty to its critics and plain-speaking folks everywhere) for those already here illegally to its security enhancements.
(Full disclosure: I am a foreigner present in the United States on a non-immigrant work visa, who is seeking legal permanent resident status.)
The only approach that at the moment appears to yield hope of a deal is some kind of a legislative trigger. This would could give political cover to worried members of Congress by requiring the President or Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to sign off on some kind of raised border security metric before any immigration reform (for which read, basically, guest worker program and/or legalization process) can kick in.
Politically, this may be a good trade-off, but in policy terms, it risks looking in the wrong direction. The problem with a guest worker program is not that it might be implemented before the border is secure, it's that it might it might be implemented before the machinery is in place to properly process applicants -- weeding out frauds and other malefactors.
As I can personally attest, the wheels of the U.S. immigration process turn damnable slow, and shoveling millions more applications into a system which is already overloaded doesn’t seem like an awfully good idea to your humble correspondent.
Also on the Hill
Indefatigable Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, holds a hearing on fake IDs and border security on Wednesday.
In the Senate, both the Judiciary and Armed Services Committee have hearings on the judicial process for detainees at Guantanamo.
And on Thursday, armed services hears reports on "Iraq, Afghanistan and the global war on terrorism" from Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Peter Pace and Central Command's Gen. John Abizaid.
Also tentatively scheduled for Thursday is a judiciary business meeting where Specter may try to get a bill on warrantless electronic surveillance and FISA modernization out onto the floor.
Bubbling under
The subpoena served on Russell Tice in connection with unauthorized disclosure of information about the National Security Agency is likely to prove the tip of a very large iceberg indeed, in the opinion of your humble correspondent.
When the president goes on national TV to say the people who leaked the NSA program are going to be caught and punished… Well, let's just say it would be naïve to assume that the public silence about the subject since then is indicative of a lack of activity.
CQ is following the ABC TV News story about Federal Air Marshals being subject to a quota for their so-called Surveillance Detection Reports, or SDRs.
SDRs are designed to leverage the fact that Federal Air Marshals are based at every major airport in the United States -- and should be on the look out for suspicious behavior that might be surveillance or other terrorist planning or operational activity.
Marshals in Las Vegas alleged they were required to make at least one SDR a month -- and that this meant innocent passengers getting written up for innocuous behavior like taking photographs.
To be honest, I was a little skeptical of this story at first, especially because the original report appeared to acknowledge that the July 2004 memo imposing the quota was withdrawn a month later.
But, as ever, a little more reporting has raised a lot more questions, and the CQ story seems to suggest that there was at least some ambiguity about the policy.
One thing that is not true is that an innocent tourist could get put on the U.S. government's terrorist watch list solely as a result of one of these SDRs. The Federal Air Marshal Service is not a nominating agency to the list.
One thing seems clear: there were -- and perhaps still are -- some serious management issues in the service. I'm going to keep digging on this one.
