Homeland Security on the Hustings

NYT Editorial



Voters in the 2008 elections need to hear in detail how the presidential candidates intend to wrestle the sprawling homeland security apparatus into sync with the true state of the terrorist threat. That critical connection has become befogged in years of hyperbolic alarms, official ineptitude, enormous spending and political sleight of hand.

So far, terrorism and homeland security have been treated as a melodramatic premise for campaign commercials about atrocities past rather than a way for contenders to plainly say what they’ve learned since 9/11 — and what needs to be changed.

While intelligence specialists dispute where the next likely threats might originate, the government is awash in tens of billions of dollars being spent annually on programs that still fail to deal adequately with such obvious shortcomings as port and chemical plant security. On the stump, the candidates so far offer short shrift. There’s no hint, for example, of what sorts of talent they have mind for the next administration to replace the serial blunderers and patronage hacks that riddle the vast homeland security bureaucracy. Such basic questions are lost in the diversionary din of outsize warnings from Republican candidates about the threat that illegal immigrants supposedly present to domestic security.

There’s no dearth of amorphous position papers on the Republican candidates’ Web sites, but they barely hint at what’s needed. Mike Huckabee’s “Secure America Plan” invests chapter and verse on immigration control and only a subliminal reference to President Bush’s record. He promises “renewed diplomacy and inclusion” — i.e., an end to the administration’s brushing off the views of the rest of the world.

Mitt Romney talks of “stronger international alliances,” but dwells on intelligence gathering as the essential domestic bulwark when voters need to hear more about the state of port, rail and airline defenses. Rudy Giuliani, is campaigning as America’s ultimate post-9/11 authority (while not incidentally making money in the private security business). He proposes greater regional and local security powers, but of course makes no mention of the man he pushed for the first homeland security czar, Bernard Kerik, New York’s ex-police commissioner who is now under indictment.

The Democrats offer more detail in promising stronger infrastructure defenses. The Hillary Clinton Web site lists concern about the pork-barrel shortchanging of antiterrorist funds for the most obvious and populous targets — a complaint not likely to be heard on the provincial hustings. John Edwards’s Web site is encyclopedic, from first responder improvements to cyberterrorism. The Barack Obama Web site lists various proposals he put in the Capitol hopper, including requiring chemical plants to beef up security.

But a real-life debate of the terrorism issue is lacking — one that should focus on the messy reality of the Department of Homeland Security, the behemoth created in 2003 by consolidating 22 separate agencies and 220,000 employees to guard against attack and deal with the aftermath. The department’s shortcomings were excruciating to witness after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Since then, Congressional investigators found the department failing to meet even half its own performance expectations. Critical shortcomings exist in emergency communications, computer integration, border defense and information sharing.

The department disputes these findings, and no fair American envies the huge challenge befalling the homeland mega-agency. But voters need to hear the candidates on domestic risks as much as on the Iraq surge. How hard would they work to enact Congress’s mandate to screen all seaborne containers heading for ports in the United States and the air cargo on all passenger planes within the next five years? How would the candidates repair the years of slippage reported in the long-promised program to effectively screen passengers against terrorist watch lists — a core weakness enabling the 9/11 suicide attacks? And which candidates promise a strong fight against the wasting of antiterrorist grants on political feather-bedding of low-risk localities?

Beyond these specifics lie bedrock constitutional issues posed by the Bush administration’s eavesdropping on citizens and eroding habeas corpus standards in its treatment of interned terrorist suspects.

Six years after the 9/11 attacks, the Council on Foreign Relations finds the very notion of the global “war on terror” proclaimed by President Bush slipping from the political lexicon. So far, the major Republican candidates, desperate for the party’s base support in the primaries, embrace the simplistic “global” definition. Democratic candidates, while wary of being demagogued, are more openly doubtful.

John Edwards has called the so-called global war Mr. Bush’s “bumper sticker” attempt to justify all manner of abuses — spying on Americans; the Abu Ghraib abuses; the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, internment dungeon; the resort to torture; and the Iraq war itself. Mrs. Clinton momentarily stumbled on the issue when she estimated Americans are “safer than we were” since 9/11. She quickly amended that to say that we’re not as safe as we should be, while the Obama campaign noted State Department findings that terrorism was an accelerating threat.

There is no way to separate the homeland security issue from terrorism abroad, much as candidates might prefer. One crucial dynamic is the extent to which the war in Iraq breeds new terrorists and siphons away resources from the original Al Qaeda threat based in Afghanistan. The vital give-and-take voters deserve on shifting security risks has gone begging under umbrella slogans about change. It’s time for details.

The need to revive creative diplomacy is obvious, but Republican candidates have been pathetically wary of openly criticizing Mr. Bush’s Iraq war and swaggering defiance of internationalism. John McCain warns terrorists “will follow us home” if the nation dares to quit Iraq. Mr. Huckabee says Democrats “delusionally deny” that the war is the main battlefront against terrorism.

Voters should demand clearer judgments and firmer prescriptions from the politicians vying to take responsibility for securing the homeland.