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Gilmore Commission - Minutes
Panel to Assess the Capabilities for Domestic Response
to Terrorist Acts Involving Weapons of Mass Destruction
March 21, 2003
Arlington, VA
Present
Mike Wermuth
Jennifer Brower
Paul Maniscalco
Bill Reno
Scott McMahon
Hillary Peck
Ken Shine
On Phone
George Foresman
John Hathaway
Ellen Gordon
Pat Ralston
Suzanne Spaulding
Jim Gilmore
Jerry Bremer
A.D. Vickery
Jim Greenleaf
Patty Quinlisk
Jack Marsh
Hubert Williams
Dallas Jones
Kathleen O’Brien
Lois Davis
Wermuth: Welcome everyone. We circulated a draft outline earlier. We intend to go through that outline this morning. Chairman, would you like to give the panel your idea about things as related to the outline?
Gilmore: We had a meeting on the 10th of March with the RAND staff and myself in order to think about what we think the 5th report should look like, philosophically. My idea was to continue to try to stay ahead of the discussion, if we can just add a voice to the ongoing debate, that might be the best thing we can do at this point. But I think we can stay ahead of the discussion. My thinking was on the several topics that are already on this outline. My concern is to address the issue of where the country is really headed and more specifically what the country is really going to look like on the other end of this. I think we are in a strange environment right now, especially with the war and with all the warnings; red, yellow, orange…the duct tape issue. My thought was instead we should be reaching for a decision on what needs to be done in homeland security, and then do it and once it is done, move on. I am talking about a return to normalcy. The question is, what is normal? I resist the thought that we will never return to normal. What we can do is implement a real security program, tell the people what it is and then stop dwelling on it and go on with the business of our lives. The second question is, what is the core implementation of that? What do we have to do to make a decision about what the state and locals actually need to have? How much it will cost and how do we get the money to the places it needs to go? The rest of the agenda goes back to the things we have been working on all along. I am specifically worried about civil liberties.
Shine: I like the notion of looking forward. I was going to suggest a slightly different theme which is along the line of finding the right balance. We need to find the balance between the responsibilities for the long term, the civil rights issue, and dealing with terrorism and the public so as to avoid the argument of whether we are ever normal. But instead, we would be saying we need a balance between being safe and being normal. I would say it’s the same thing the Chairman is saying but just said in a different way.
Quinlisk: I think we went into the process knowing that prepared is on multiple levels and I am worried that we are forgetting that and looking at just one thing.
Marsh: I like your comment Chairman about civil liberties. I believe we ought to give ourselves a chance to critique the situation in Iraq that might impact what we have suggested.
Bremer: I think the outline is good, I think it’s important to get the focus on the strategy and structure, especially the intelligence. I think we need to look at how the Northern Command (NORTHCOM) is working now that it is stood up. I also think we need to look at research and development (R&D). I’ve been disappointed that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) hasn’t gotten their arms around this. We should ask ourselves about whether the federal government has done an adequate job of coordinating R&D capabilities at the federal and state level.
Wermuth: You are right, we should go back and look at R&D, especially long-term. This is a big issue up on the Hill right now.
Brower: The first responder area has a hard time articulating what it is they need.
Gordon: For the most part I like the draft, I am thinking that we may not need to get so in depth on the health and medical and if we do, we should get back into agriculture again. I think we need to stop using the words like multi-hazard and all-hazard.
Wermuth: What we are trying to articulate is the National Incident Management System (NIMS)….the National Response Plan will be the way to implement NIMS. We should look at these and how they are working at the local and state level.
Gordon: It is very aggressive, the concept of the response plan is not as strong. I agree on Jerry’s comments on R&D.
Wermuth: The NIMS is the responsibility of the new department.
Foresman: The only thing that we need to talk about is the all-hazards approach, for example, look at the next 5 years and look at all the little things that are going on. We need to look at the universe out there and I think we need to be articulate and say, ‘look if we don’t have a clear idea of where we are going, the danger is that we may not be where we want to be in 5 years.’ We need to look at the political and organizational levels.
Greenleaf: I generally agree with everything that has been said so far. I am concerned with the use of military, it seems that the Department of Defense (DoD) is still searching for processes. I agree with Jerry about the NORTHCOM. I am worried about the DoD being a moving target for us. The role of the National Guard is still an issue.
Wermuth: We hoped for this meeting to have the new assistant secretary, Paul McHale to come before the commission. Whenever we reschedule the next meeting, he wants to come. He is reading reports like ours in detail.
Chairman: I think everyone is right so far with NORTHCOM, overseas they are fine, but domestically they are not. With NORTHCOM, it doesn’t seem that they know what they do. I think that there is no answer to the question of what NORTHCOM would do if there was an explosion etc…we need to decide who is in charge. And it does deserve some attention.
Shine: I would make a few points. I would like to see a specific discussion of maintenance of effort and what we think needs to happen over time. Second, we ought to have a specific section on how we know if we are prepared including what have we learned about this over the last year and how do we think about this in the future. Third, I would like to see a section on personal protection. The public is told all sorts of things from the different levels and it seems that there should be attention to the notion of how we communicate what you need to do as a citizen. Fourth, I agree entirely on the R&D issue, my concerns are the interface between the private sector and government, in addition the coordination of research in agencies, and also the role of technology at the local level. There are disconnects between technology and research. And finally, I still think we have not figured out how to symmetrically help people deal with these threats. We have to pay attention to the notion that if it is an integrated system, then it has to be articulated throughout communities instead of through a stovepipe approach. I am also very concerned about the balance we have seen in the public health arena. There is no balance between the time and money spent on vaccinating people versus the capacity to deal with something if it does happen. We need to push the concept of striking the right balance.
Maniscalco: I think we need to seize the moment as we are ending our legislative life. With all the funding and energy we have spent on this, we should look at what it has bought us. Look at the threat, as well as contrasting readiness. What is local readiness? Using the survey, and research, we should provide a report card of readiness. That will also mean for us to define readiness. Lets come up with a definition of readiness. We could even go beyond that and create a matrix of readiness. If the feds aren’t going to do it, someone has to and we are in a good position to do that. We still have fragmentation in this processes that we addressed in year one. The last thing is the citizens corps…we are dumping a lot of money into there. We probably want to look and see where the money is going. I am not so concerned about the all-hazards approach as everyone else on the panel. There are unique characteristics of this threat and we need to be careful about dumping all money into one pot.
Marsh: If you have a major international event like this war, you don’t ignore that type of thing in a report like this, especially if some of the issues we address are the reason for this war. We are getting a test of a lot of what we are researching, especially the National Guard issues. I think we should assess the impact of the war. I share the views of the Governor about civil liberties. I think the R&D thing is right on.
Wermuth: We will of course, continue our cross cutting themes, and of course civil liberties will remain.
Jones: The funding streams are still fabricated for health and they don’t seem very well coordinated. So when you have an operation area, you are constantly saying, what money is available in this pot and what about this other pot and it is causing a food war. The other thing is this coordination issue- there is disorder within the agencies. No one knows what the chains of command are. This is two problems, one is internal and one is external. I think we should make the comment that this should be a two-way system and that there should be a single point of contact.
O’Brien: I would just say I agree that we should use the fifth report to emphasize the long-run…what we want our nation to look like in the future. I also appreciate the civil liberties issue being a part of this. I am thinking about the impact of the economy and the shortfall of state and local budgets and how this is impacting our readiness. This week more than 50 firefighters were laid off from the Minneapolis fire department. Our basic infrastructure of first responders is at risk because of budget deficits. I understand what Paul is saying about how the system works but one of the things I find is that it is important to be able to speak logically to the public about what research is building. I agree that we need to go back to that issue of how we define readiness. It’s hard to measure our success if we don’t know what we are trying to arrive at. I think it would be good to have a sub panel group to go look at this specifically. Finally, I agree with Ken’s point about paying attention to human detail and trying to come up with a good description of how to educate the public. A big focus on our part of the country is food production safety and I do think this should be included.
Davis: I have been working on this and I think a sub panel is a good idea. The Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT) and RAND have done a survey on agro-terrorism. We specifically surveyed the state departments of agriculture. We are analyzing the results right now. That finding will be able to be presented to you soon.
Quinlisk: I think the civil liberties issue is very important and a piece of that is that a lot of states are putting into their laws quarantine issues, which is contrary to civil liberties. I think five years from now there will be concern from the public about justifying what was spent, especially during times of budget crisis. I think we should definitely think about addressing this. I like the R&D idea. I see that there is a lot of basic research being done but we are not thinking about how it will be used in the world. We need to make sure we have research and development all the way down to the implementation level.
Ralston: The clearance issue is something that we have still been wrestling with. Clearances are not always accepted from one federal agency to the other. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) doesn’t accept Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) clearances etc… The R&D portion of this IS very important. Referring to what the governor said, we are not even on high orange alert now and I think that if we are ever to go to red, there will be mass chaos. There is a problem getting information out.
Chairman: I am asked all the time about the color code by the media. I am trying to offer a rational explanation of the codes but I don’t even think the government knows that. When the color code goes to Orange, they ask me and I have nothing to say to them.
Maniscalco: I think you are right. We need to get them to draw a line in the sand and not worry about the touchy feely stuff.
Brower: I just want to echo defining readiness…but to go beyond that and say what some example actions for both public and private sectors as the terror alert goes up are. Because like you said, it is different in every state.
Reno: I am intrigued with the Governor’s statement about normalcy. If we want to shape the debate around what return to normalcy is and the vision, then maybe we should write the entire paper around the commission’s visions of what normalcy will be. If we define the vision of the end state of normalcy and state what we need to do in all sectors and all levels then we will have defined it. At the end of the paper, say ‘if you agree with what normalcy will be then you must do the following things…’ and then list our recommendations. Then you would have a document that would focus on what the nation wants it to be. We don’t recommend, we tell what it would be.