Remarks by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff at the Christian Science Monitor Breakfast

Release Date: June 20, 2007

Washington, D.C.

Mr. Cook: Thank you all for coming. I'm Dave Cook from the Monitor. Our guest today is Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. His last visit with us was in August of 2005. We appreciate his coming back.

He once told Time Magazine that his parents taught him to do the difficult and unpleasant things first, which may explain why he is starting the day with us.

The Secretary gave up a lifetime appointment as a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to become the second Secretary of Homeland Security. He graduated with honors from Harvard College and from Harvard Law School and then clerked for Supreme Court Justice William Brennan. I'll skip the rest of the biography in the interests of getting as many questions at him as we can.

A couple of logistical details. As always, we are on the record here. There is no embargo after the session. Blog to your hearts' content.

The Homeland Security Department is making an official transcript of this session, but Russ tells me that it will not be released to those who were not here until this evening. As some of you know, the Secretary is having a press conference later this morning.

We will start off by offering our guest the opportunity to make some brief opening comments, then we will move to questions from around the table. Those of you who have been here before know our goal is to make these gatherings as much like a civilized conversation and as little like a hit-and-run press conference as is possible. Your help with that would be greatly appreciated. And to that end, if you'd like to ask a question, please send me a subtle, non-threatening gesture, and I will do my best to call on everyone.

And with that, sir, the floor is yours.

Secretary Chertoff: Great. Well, let me just talk briefly about a couple of issues which are on the front burner. The first is immigration.

We are anticipating that the bill is going to be called back up within the next week and they've got a list of amendments they're going to put together and then it will ultimately be presented for a vote. And I'm optimistic about the fact that we will get a bill.

I understand that it is not a bill, at least in its current form, that pleases everybody. In fact, there's probably unanimity that everybody has found some element they don't like. But that is the essence of compromise. The essence of compromise is a recognition that the way to achieve something good for most people is for everybody to recognize that they cannot insist on a 100 percent win. It's going to have to be a win for everybody. And I think that's what this bill is; it's a win for everybody, although it's not everybody's perfect dream of what the outcome is going to be.

I think the basic elements of the bill, if you step back, make a lot of sense. You do have to have enforcement. But using brute force alone, just putting people at the border, is not going to solve the problem. It's not going to solve the problem of the overstays, it's not going to solve the problem of people who are willing to risk their lives to come in to find jobs so they can earn money for their families. Those people are going to continue to be a very, very strong pressure against the border. So how do you deal with that pressure?

You know, experience with any large-scale challenge involving millions of people suggests you have to use a combination of carrots and sticks. It does mean tough border enforcement. It also means interior enforcement. If you—if you have a system that allows employers to readily hire and maintain illegal employees, that is going to be a very powerful magnet that's going to work against our border enforcement. This bill does have tough interior enforcement.

But you also have to give employers an opportunity to fill jobs that they can't seem to fill using American workers. Because if you tell people that they're going to have to go out of business if they follow the law, you are putting them in a dilemma which is going to cause a lot of them to break the law. That's the reality. So that's why a temporary worker program is important, so that the lettuce does get there, so that the fruit does get harvested.

Fourth, you have to recognize the reality of the 12 million people who are here. The issue of the undocumented workers probably has generated the most visible hostility to the bill, although I think behind the scenes actually there are powerful forces that don't like other elements of the bill. Like people who don't like the enforcement part of it because it's too tough, or people who, you know, are concerned about moving out of a family based to a merit based system. But in terms of public discussion, I think the treatment of the undocumented workers has gotten the most attention.

And I've watched carefully as people have made the argument against it to hear what they would do. And initially there was discussion about, well, we just ought to deport them. Then that really kind of dropped off the radar screen. I think people realize you're not going to do that. And lately what I've heard is, well, just let them be. Let them stay. It will be what George Will called benign neglect. And some of the radio hosts say, well, so they'll just stay, they'll just continue as they are now.

I consider that a silent amnesty. I consider that a way of saying, we're really going to let them stay but we're not going to be candid about it. We're not going to tell the American public that we are essentially giving them a de facto amnesty. We're going to preserve the fiction that they're in violation of the law and that we're going to do something about it, but we're not actually going to expect that that thing is going to be done.

I don't believe you're going to have attrition with 12 million people. I don't believe that simply ramping up enforcement is going to result in the deportation of 12 million people. And I don't think most people think that's going to happen, either.

So you either leave them as they are and we, you know, we pick up as many as we can, but we recognize it's only a small fraction. Or we use the carrots and the sticks. We give people who are here as economic migrants an opportunity to step up, accept responsibility for the fact that they've broken the law, pay a fine and get on probation and follow the law going forward, and then the remainder, the criminals and the people who are ineligible we can focus on. We either do that or we let the existing system continue, in which case the really worst people like the criminals and the drug dealers, hide among the economic migrants and therefore distract us from our ability to hunt down and deport those people that I think every American believes ought to be at the top of the list.

The last thing I would say on this issue is, I have the perhaps enviable, perhaps unenviable opportunity to sit in the center of this firestorm and watch all the different attacks come in. And what I've noticed, as I've reflected over the last few weeks is how people are talking past each other and there's a tremendous contradiction that's emerging.

For example, I hear from one set of people, build a fence, build a fence. You know, build it right away; it's more important than anything else. And then I hear from a bunch of mayors in Texas who are actually representing cities where the fence is going to go, we don't want a fence, we want high technology. A fence is going to make it hard for our farmers to bring their cattle down to the river. These two groups are talking past each other.

I hear groups say, let's keep deploying the high tech and enforcement stuff. And then I hear other groups say, the cameras are spoiling our view. The cameras are making it difficult for the spotted, you know, woodchuck to move around in the environment.

And what's happened is everybody is pursuing their own agenda. These agendas are contradictory. We have people who encourage us, who are complaining we're not doing enough enforcement. And then when we do an enforcement action, we have a mayor who complains, why are we picking on separating families in his town.

And all of these contradictions under the current system are balanced on the back of my agents. My agents are caught in the crossfire between more enforcement, but you're being inhumane. Arrest all those illegal immigrants but when you do, we're going to sue you and take you into court because you're not being, you know, nice to people who have little children.

We've got to resolve the contradictions. And I frankly think that, if nothing else, support for the ICE agents and the Border Patrol agents makes it incumbent to come up with a solution that doesn't balance the contradiction on the back of the agents, that finally, once and for all, resolves where the country wants to be.

I think the President has made it clear and, you know, I've certainly made it clear we think the answer is a comprehensive solution that does bring the 12 million into a regulated system. But the one thing that can't be acceptable is the continuation of the status quo where everybody criticizes everybody else, but the people who have to produce and who get criticized as being somehow inept are the agents who put their lives on the line every day and do the actual hard work. And that's who I'm sticking up for, first and foremost, is the agents, the guys and the women that I go down and see on the border, or see when they are doing operations in the field.

Second topic real quick. Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative. We're going to announce the next—the final rule that's going to come out on this initiative. Let me explain why it's important and what we're going to do to strike a balance between the desire to drive forward on a very important initiative and the recognition that we want to do it in a way that is as convenient as possible.

It's important for this reason. Right now, we have 8,000 forms of identification that are presented at our land borders. This is a very, very difficult challenge in terms of determining what is real and what is fake. Every once in a while, GAO or the IG runs a test and they prove elegantly once again that you can't expect people to be able to sort through 8,000 kinds of ID and determine what's phoney and what's real. The only way you can do it is to reduce the number of ID to a manageable number that are tamper proof and reliable. That's what the GAO was telling us, that's what the 9/11 Commission told us we have to do to protect this country.

Again, contradiction. It's going to be a little inconvenient, where people are going to have to over time acquire this kind of identification and we're going to have to phase it in. And that's going to cause a certain amount of dislocation. But either we care about the security of the country and we're prepared to take a little bit of inconvenience to put it in place, or we really don't care. And what's most important is convenience, and then we're prepared to live with the consequences.

So what we're going to do is we're going to announce that we will begin the process of issuing WHTI compliant alternative cards, including a pilot program with the drivers license in Washington and a pass card, kind of a scaled down passport in card form. We're going to start issuing those come next January. But we're not actually going to implement and require that WHTI compliant documents be presented until sometime later during the course of the summer, depending on the degree of market penetration. So we will give people an opportunity to acquire these WHTI documentations and phase it in over time.

We will, however, even during the phasing period, start to shrink the different kinds of ID that are currently being used, so that at least we can begin to manage the situation and get better control over who comes across the border. The goal by the time this President leaves office is to have fixed one of the number one problems identified by the 9/11 Commission, which is phoney identification.

Mr. Cook: I am going to do two quick ones and then we'll move around the table and we will start with Mark Shields.

There was a wire story this morning, which I am sure you are aware of, that your department and the lead agency were fighting cyber threats suffered more than 800 hacker attacks, break-ins, virus outbreaks and other computer security problems. The AP quotes a forthcoming report as saying the problems threaten the confidentiality, integrity and availability of key DHS information and information systems. It's part of sort of a litany of factoids that lead some people to say the department that you are running is too big actually to be managed in any kind of consistent and effective way.

Can you sort of speak to both the computer security and sort of the larger question of, is it just too much?

Secretary Chertoff: There are hundreds of thousands of intrusions and attacks on every computerized system, public and private, in this country every month. Most of them are never visible to the public. They happen all the time. That's why we build in firewalls and do things both unclassified and classified to deal with those. Most of them turn out to be things that are repelled or easily fixed. We have actually a team called a SIR team which actually works with the private sector to determine when there is a serious threat and to work to mitigate it and send out information on it.

So I think this is part of a more general issue. We actually have a very aggressive program working both on a—what I call the high side and the more secret side in building up not only for ourselves but for the government in general defenses. That includes, by the way, some low tech stuff. Like, when you write your password down and you put it on a piece of paper and you leave it on your desk, that defeats the most sophisticated firewall in the world. I mean, a lot of what you have to do is techniques.

Second, I just think it's incorrect to first of all, the idea that the solution to every problem is it's always reorganize everything, is completely bone-headed. There comes to a point where you have to recognize you don't grow a plant by tearing it up at the roots every year. You have to let it grow. In this case, we have actually, I think, convincingly demonstrated the value of integration.

We now have at our border, for example, in our maritime domain, integrated defense with the Coast Guard, Customs and Border Protection, and our other components including science and technology, that allow us to leverage a unified approach, for example, to protecting our ports that we wouldn't be able to do if these were stovepiped agencies. We now have, with respect to FEMA, for example, a capability to support them with communications equipment and with airlift capability that comes from the fact that the Department owns helicopters and planes as part of the Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection and ICE. Again, if all these agencies were separate, you would either have to build a whole separate, new air unit for FEMA, or you would have to go to other agencies, cap in hand, to request this kind of capability.

So I don't think this department is too big to manage. I think like any other department that's new, we're still in the first five years, we are integrating, we are reducing the number of different systems, we are integrating our IT. But it's not going to happen overnight, because nothing happens overnight. It doesn't happen overnight in the private sector; it doesn't happen overnight in the public sector.

Mr. Cook: I am going to hold my second question and we'll go to Mark.

Question: Mr. Secretary, you were intimately involved in the production of this immigration bill and had a peak into the legislative process that very few of us have. At the conclusion of that, you have made yourself second only to Hillary Clinton as the most unpopular person in conservative blogs, by saying that Ted Kennedy was awesome and saying he was one of the critical leaders in putting together this deal.

Any second thoughts on the awesome tribute to Senator Kennedy?

Secretary Chertoff: No. Because I have to say, I—it's kind of—I'm not a guy from Washington. So I'm always kind of fascinated by the weird culture of people in Washington politics. I can disagree with someone but still respect their capabilities. And I can like them personally.

I spent a lot of years in courtrooms fighting very hard-fought cases, prosecuting cases against very tough lawyers who in the courtroom were as difficult as could possibly be. And yet at the end of it, I could go out and have dinner with them and have made friendships out of it. Because I don't believe that disagreement has to lead to warfare, and that people that have different political philosophies are your enemy.

Now, maybe that does put me out of touch with Washington culture. Maybe Washington culture now is you have to hate the person that disagrees with you and they're the enemy. I know who the enemy is. The enemy is sitting in a cave over there in Pakistan.

And I want to tell you, I had a great, life-transforming event on September 11th, and it put for me in very vivid focus the importance of remembering the difference between disagreeing among Americans, all of whom or virtually all of whom have the same fundamental values, and recognizing that we have true enemies who actually don't share our fundamental values.

So I don't apologize for expressing my respect for Democrats, expressing my respect for Republicans. It doesn't mean in the course of negotiations we didn't have some very strong disagreements. But the idea that only hatred and personal animosity is an adequate demonstration of principle, I just don't agree with.

Mr. Cook: We're going to go next to Doug Turner, James Meek, David Lightman and Mimi Hall.

Doug.

Question:    A couple questions on the Canadian border. Congressman Reynolds of upstate New York has criticized what he called the brawling among agencies and vendors over the creation of the pass card. Has a pass card been selected and is it—has the technology been agreed on?

Secretary Chertoff: I don't think there's brawling. There's a procurement in place. The standards are set. The technology to run a pass card is basically what you see in E‑ZPass. It's not a very complicated, novel technology. Because it's a procurement, you know, it's a sin against procurement law to start to talk too much about it.

But, you know, I think this is proceeding apace. And whichever vendor winds up with the lowest cost, effective system will be the vendor that is selected. That's how it usually works in government.

Question:    The second question is about shared border management. This is a proposal on the Canadian border where inspection agencies between the U.S. and Canada would switch sides in Buffalo and at Alexandria Bay. Ontario chamber of commerce was down here two weeks ago begging that these negotiations be reopened. Is there any hope that these negotiations be reopened?

Secretary Chertoff: Sure. Let me be very clear about this. I was asked by the community in Buffalo in the spring to let them know honestly where we thought this was going to go, and they needed to know by May so they could make some decisions. And I respected that request, not to simply blow smoke and keep kicking the can down the road. And I said, as of May, it did not look like we could come to an agreement for the reason I will explain in a moment.

Then I heard people say, well, you just arbitrarily cut off the negotiations. We're happy to talk. I thought I owed an honest answer to a request for a candid assessment of where we stood, as opposed to a kind of a political smoke-blowing exercise, designed to fool everybody into believing everything is on track.

What's the problem here? First of all, Canadians are great partners. They are very cooperative with us. But it became evident that because of certain legal requirements under the Canadian charter, their version of the Constitution, if we were to conduct our activities, our border activities in Canada, we would be subject to Canadian law and the Canadian constitution. And the Canadian constitution, as interpreted by the Canadian courts, puts restrictions on law enforcement that are greater than ours and that would be, frankly, unacceptable to our law enforcement people, including our drug agents and our Customs and Immigration officials.

And we talked about, is there some way to create a consulate relationship such that that would allow us to exercise our authorities? And the lawyers looked at it and the lawyers said, it can't be done.

In the end, I have to make the following judgment. Can I surrender the decision-making authority over who enters the United States and what enters the United States to the Canadian court system? And I don't think I can do that.

So without suggesting that Canadians don't want to be full partners, I think they operate under a legal system that is somewhat different than ours. And I have, first and foremost, the obligation to make sure we are discharging our obligations under our legal system and our responsibilities to control our border.

Mr. Cook:James.

Question:    A couple of unrelated questions. The first one is that you just mentioned you know who the enemy is and he's living in a cave in Pakistan. Does that enemy have the initials U.B.L.? And how do you know he's in Pakistan?

Secretary Chertoff: He does have the name U.B.L. And I guess I should say I assume he's living in a cave in Pakistan. I was speaking metaphorically and not trying to talk—give you classified information.

Question:    It's okay. The Counterterrorism Center, or the National Counterterrorism Center actually has a calendar out, and that's where they put him.

But at any rate, the other question is last year the urban area security grants came out. New York City got cut $80 million over the previous year. There were a lot of explanations at the time, a lot of angst obviously directed at you.

We're coming up on that time of the year again. And in the year since, there have been other grants that have come out that have shown increases for New York City. Pete King has suggested that is to make up for that $80 million cut.

What do you anticipate is going to happen in whenever it is, July, when the grants come out? Is New York City going to get, in effect, sort of restored that money, more money, same amount, less? Can you give me any sense of that?

Secretary Chertoff: I can predict one thing. Everyone is going to find something to be unhappy with, because everyone is going to want all the money for themselves. I mean, I am being a little facetious. But the truth is I understand everybody from the standpoint of the community they represent has a very good argument for getting more money. The pie is only so big.

Now, what we have done as we refine this every year is, we've pushed it more and more in the direction of risk-based funding, to the extent the law allows us to do it. And we've identified, for example, a group of half a dozen urban areas that are the top urban areas in terms of risk. And we've—and naturally, we're going to put over half the money in those six areas.

Now, some people might say, we should put all the money in six areas. But I've got to tell you that I can't discount the risk, although it's less, in other cities. Some people say it should be spread evenly among all the states. I don't think that's right, either, because I don't think that reflects the real risk.

So again, I'm in the unhappy and apparently politically unpopular position of taking the middle. Which is putting most of the money where the highest risk is but not all of it. I think that we are trying to—you know, we do recognize that New York has a very high risk profile, as do a couple of other cities. We've introduced for the first time some flexibility in terms of an opportunity to use some of this for dedicated personnel, which I think New York really wanted to do.

But I also have to say that the—if you look at the funding that goes to various cities, it has fluctuated up and down at various times. Sometimes it's reflected on the particular projects people want to fund. And it shouldn't be viewed as the kind of—as an annuity where it always stays level. There will be ups and downs. I do think, though, if you look over time, we have moved more and more in the direction of putting the most money in the highest risk areas.

Let me give you two examples and, in particular, on a more specific basis about things that have happened already. In the area of ports and transit, we have again been moving in the direction of putting more and more money in the highest risk ports and transit agencies. And we did it based on assessments of vulnerability.

For example, with respect to transit, we looked not just at the miles of trackage, which was the original concept, how many miles of track. We said, well, not all track is equal. And the vulnerability of track in a tunnel is greater than the vulnerability of track above ground. And the vulnerability of a system that's under water is greater than if it is underground.

So we have gotten much more precise in analyzing these risks and applying the money in a way that is weighted significantly to risk, although it doesn't—we're not going to put it all in a few buckets.

Mr. Cook: We're about half way there. We're going to go next to Dave Lightman, Mimi Hall, Carl Leubsdorf, Gil Klein, Al Eisele, Paul Bedard, Carol Eisenberg, and Jerry. That will probably take us home.

So, Dave.

Question:    Okay. A couple New Haven-related questions, particularly in light of what you were saying, how agents are criticized if they do and if they don't, and this is a good example.

Two things. First of all, is DHS still pursuing or still looking into the operation of that raid, the June 6 raid?

Secretary Chertoff: We were—someone raised complaints. Whenever anybody raises a complaint, we do take a look at it. So Internal Affairs is examining it.

The mayor asked me the question, well, why didn't we do Hartford? Well, we actually did Hartford in May, so I guess that's the answer to that.

Question:    What's next?

Secretary Chertoff: I'm not going to tell you.

And then we did Portland, Oregon, the next week. And that got complaints from the mayor of Portland, Oregon. Although I think there was actually—the public actually was speaking out in favor of it.

Look, here's the bottom line. I have been involved in law enforcement most of my life. It is always unhappy when you arrest somebody. I have stood in courtrooms when people got sentenced to jail for very, very long periods of time and their children and spouses were crying in the courtroom and the lawyer was saying, how can you send this man away? And the judge says, because he should have thought about that before he did—he broke the law.

It's unhappy. And in many cases, we're dealing with people whose underlying offense is the illegal entry. So it's not—you know, it's not that degree of seriousness, let's say, of narcotics trafficking or violent crime. But we do have to enforce the law. And until the law changes, or unless it changes, we're going to enforce the law as it is.

Question:    Also I want to broaden this out. In your letter to the Connecticut delegation, you talk about how your policies to conduct raids take an ad hoc approach and you prioritize your efforts on a series of criteria. Criteria number five is going after noncriminal fugitives, which is what you did here.

Is that the harbinger of things to come? In other words, are you going to go after more noncriminal fugitives?

Secretary Chertoff: What it means is, first of all, again if we get information that there is a pool of people who are in a particular location who are noncriminal fugitives, we will go after them, too. I mean, given a choice, we will go after the people who are the highest threat. But if we get information and we—it's cost effective to do an operation against noncriminal fugitives, we'll do that. Also, if we encounter noncriminal fugitives in the context of an operation, we will not let them go.

Let me be clear what a fugitive is. This means somebody who has been ordered by a judge—they've had all their process, their appeals, whatever, and now the judge has ordered them to leave. And what they have basically done is defied the judge. They said, I don't care what the judge says; I'm not going to obey the order. I have to tell you, it's not a crime in the sense that a murder is or drugs—but it's not something to be laughed off or treated with impunity.

If we basically were to say to people, you can just defy court orders, that does strike me as a problem for the rule of law. So I do think we—it may not be the priority of a national security threat, but it is something we do need to enforce.

Mr. Cook:Mimi—

Question:    One other question.

What is the IA looking into and when might they—

Secretary Chertoff: There is a series of affidavits that the mayor sent over to ICE that said people, you know, complained about the way arrests were made or searches. And those were always evaluated. We keep our hands off that.

It's not uncommon when you do enforcement operations for people who are on the receiving end to complain. Sometimes, their complaints are legitimate; often, they're not. We look at them in the normal course.

Mr. Cook:Mimi.

Question:    This is sort of a broader question about the grants programs. The Congress wants to act on the administration's request overall for the grant programs. And increasingly there are folks at OMB and also on the Hill, politically secure people, I would guess, who are saying, look, not only should we not be adding to the administration's request, but this is becoming a revenue sharing program. You know, a lot of these states and cities have largely met their needs or at least gone a long way, and we ought to start thinking about cutting back this program.

Now, politically, of course, that would be nearly impossible. But I wonder what your perspective is on that?

Secretary Chertoff: Well, I do think that, you know, if I look at the appropriations bill which passed out of the House, you know, we had about a 7 percent increase in our budget request over the past year, which was a generous increase. And I think they doubled it, an additional 7 percent. Most of that came in grants.

And I do agree that the marginal benefit of additional grant dollars starts to diminish over time. In fact, there is a lot of grant money in the pipeline that hasn't actually been expended yet. And there is a little bit of a concern that it starts to become a substitute for revenue sharing or for the COPS program. And that's not what it's meant to be.

Let me stand back and say, there are lots of important uses for the money within the overall budget cap of Homeland Security. And if the money tips more and more towards grants, it doesn't leave us money to do some of the unglamourous but necessary things that are federal responsibilities. Let me pick one example.

There is a lot of complaining about the processing time it takes for people to get from their green card to their citizenship. We did a lot to reduce the backlog. But we are still laboring with an antiquated information technology system.

Now, it doesn't make for a good political sound byte to say, I want to put money into upgrading the IT system at Citizenship and Immigration Services. But if you don't do it, what winds up happening is you cause a lot of inconvenience to a lot of people and a lot of complaining.

And so I say to myself, well, if you are going to add a billion dollars for grants, an additional billion dollars for grants, is that actually better—a better use of the money as a revenue sharing device, or would it be better to not put that money into revenue sharing and put some of that into upgrading the IT, which is an exclusively federal responsibility? So I think you have succinctly stated kind of the challenge in the world of limited budgets, which is the overall limit.

Mr. Cook:Carl?

Question:    I want to get back to your statement that you don't believe that disagreements should lead to warfare, which I'm sure is sincere. And, you know, judging from your background. But you're part of an administration that hasn't always behaved that way.

Back after 9/11 when people in Congress were pushing to have a Department of Homeland Security, and even before they dumped all over them and said it was outrageous, and when they passed the department, they got into a big political fight over the unionization issue in which commercials were run by the Republican party against Democratic senators accusing them of lack of patriotism for opposing this provision.

Are you still paying a price in dealing on things like the immigration bill and some of this for this kind of attitude on the Hill?

Secretary Chertoff: I think—you know, here is an area outside of my expertise, which is the evolution of political discourse over the last 20 years. I don't know who struck John first. Some people go back to the Bork hearings. I'm sure you can go back to—

Question:    I was talking about Homeland—on this specific area and the ads that were run against a senator who was, I believe, had lost limbs in war and was accused of being a lack of a patriot because of a union provision fight.

Secretary Chertoff: I am not the arbiter of what are tasteful political ads and what are not tasteful political ads. All I can tell you—and I don't—I don't have—I don't see anything wrong with vigorous argument. Now, whether vigorous argument oversteps into unfair personality attack has to be judged by the eye of the beholder.

All I can tell you is, from my standpoint, I don't see any reason why I can't respect or be friendly with someone who disagrees with me or is from another party. I may have a very —I may believe they are seriously misguided in their viewpoint, but it doesn't mean I do not respect them. It doesn't mean—

Question:    That wasn't the question. The question was, whether you are paying a price in trying to negotiate things like the immigration bill and that there is just still so much suspicion on the Hill, you know, over these various things that have happened—

Secretary Chertoff: I don't think a particular set of ads has caused—has been responsible for the state of political discourse. I think it is the accumulation of the way rhetoric is engaged in at every level over the past several years. And I would go back to Mark's observation. I mean, I guess I made a decision when I came in here, into this job, you know, how do you want to conduct yourself?

And in some ways, I can see, you know, it's easy to get very—you know, to kind of put yourself in a position where you get very, you know, rabid and you kind of take the view that if you're on a team and you hate the other team. And some people like that and applaud that. That's not my style. I just—I really think that—I see a huge difference between people who are really enemies of ours and people that are on the other side of the political spectrum but are still fundamentally our friends. And my friends.

And I don't—I personally will not—do not regard myself under an obligation to have personal animosity to people I disagree with. If some people think that that shows I'm not committed enough, then that's their privilege.

Mr. Cook:Gil.

Question:    Yes. Sir, you have a program that encourages local law enforcement to help enforce immigration laws. Now, broadly speaking, is it possible for local police to understand the complex immigration laws? And how much have you gotten a response on this program?

And just quickly—and, second, since I have to worry about places like Culpepper, Virginia, when ICE agents visited the city council to talk about this program, they refused to speak in a public meeting; they wanted to go into private. And they left when the council said they had to operate in the sunshine.

Is there a conflict here that hurts your efforts?

Secretary Chertoff: Well, I don't know about the particular thing in Culpepper. I will say, you know, different communities have different views on this issue. Some want to have the training and want to work with us. And it's not hard to—you know, they're not doing their—representing the United States in court. They're just enforcing the law and they need to understand the basic principles.

It's particularly helpful, by the way, with respect to when they've arrested someone, helping arrange with deportation so they can go literally from the jail cell to the plane back to where they came from.

Some communities don't want to do it. We can't make them do it. I don't want to make them do it. We offer it as an option. It helps us leverage our resources. But, you know, again, it's the local's decision in the end.

Mr. Cook:Al?

Question:    Mr. Secretary, you have obviously got a lot of things to worry about. What is your—what is it that is your biggest single concern? What keeps you up at night?

Secretary Chertoff: I mean, I worry—in the long run, I worry of course about a weapon of mass destruction. But I would say in the short run, I worry about a developing complacency and cynicism about the threat that we are facing. And so I try to be really clear about what that is.

And there is an ideology of Islamist extremism which you see manifested in parts of Pakistan, among the Taliban in Afghanistan, in Somalia, in groups in North Africa that are setting off bombs, in Indonesia. And that ideology has a vision of acquiring and controlling territory, imposing its ideology on that territory and using that as a platform to attack the West. It is not going to go away by itself and, although I think we've done an awful lot to disrupt its activities, they are working to improve their capabilities even as we are as well.

And while I think—I don't think anybody has accused me of being hysterical or amping up the threat and trying other make people, you know, paranoid about it. I do worry that we are beginning to swing in the other direction with people starting to be unwilling to make the necessary sacrifices in order to make sure that we can continue to disrupt and repel these kinds of attacks. This problem is not going to go away.

There are some long-term strategic things we need to do as well. But certainly, from the Homeland Security standpoint, I worry that we're going to have—it's going to be harder and harder to persuade people to keep our guard up.

I think, you know, it's been a while since we've had a successful attack in the U.S. We've had attempted attacks. Last August was an attempted attack. We had Richard Reid was an attempted attack. I think we are due for another effort. I think they are going to want to carry out another attack. And I think that as they, you know, recruit—there was a propaganda video that was shown on ABC a couple of nights ago. And without vouching for the credibility of the video or treating it as a specific threat, obviously the people who put the video out were sending a message that they are attempting to recruit from within our own ranks, the ranks of the West, western Europe in particular, but also the United States.

So we have to begin to look for the possibility of that attack coming from a quarter that is a new quarter. And that's why we're doing a lot with respect to raising the level of security internationally and in terms of, you know, this visa waiver process, which we are trying to make more secure.

Mr. Cook:Paul.

Question:    Mr. Secretary, I really like that question and I'm wondering if you do wake up at night, if you do have premonitions of something that, you know, with all your knowledge, oh, my gosh, the light goes off—but first, didn't you have a mustache?

Mr. Cook: Welcome to our Washington Whispers man.

Secretary Chertoff: It was shaved off. I shaved it off. You know, time for a change, you know.

Question:    Was that one of the nights you were staying up awake?

Secretary Chertoff: No. It was just, you know, a decision for time for a change.

Question:    Wasn't George Steinbrenner or anything like that?

Secretary Chertoff: No, no. There is no great symbiotic value to it. I don't have premonitions. I actually sleep very well, generally. I don't usually, you know, get up worrying.

What I have in my mind is, and I say this sometimes, I've got to look in the mirror and feel that I've done everything reasonably possible to protect this country. I'm well aware of the fact that I can't guarantee that there won't be an attack. I'm well aware of the fact that if, despite my best efforts, there is an attack, I am very likely to be harshly criticized because we operate in an environment now, these days, where you have to blame somebody. And therefore I'm in the position where I'm likely to get the blame.

What's important to me is I have to live with myself. And I have to ask myself, have I exerted myself and done everything I can reasonably, not excessively, but reasonably to protect this country. And increasingly what that means is I've got to make sure that particularly because Congress is playing an increasingly active role, which is a good thing. That's fine. They should welcome the responsibility. It's good to have the responsibility, because they now share my burden as well. They have to look in the mirror and ask are they doing everything reasonably possible to secure the country. So that's really where my head is at.

Mr. Cook:Carol.

Question:    To return to the weapons of mass destruction, there is $30 million in both the House and Senate homeland appropriations bill right now for securing the cities. I gather that will be spent on buying technology to put on roadways and pathways into New York City.

I've been told by several scientists that even the next generation equipment would be unlikely to detect uranium encased in lead. Would you speak to that?

Secretary Chertoff: Yeah, let me say two things. First of all, this is the first generation of this program. There are technological challenges. Bear in mind that some of the things we're most worried about, including a dirty bomb, involves highly reactive emitters. So although there are different levels of radioactivity depending on the nature of the product you're using, some are comparatively low emitters. And a low emitter could be used, like highly enriched uranium could be used in a nuclear bomb.

But low emitters are actually not very useful in dirty bombs. Dirty bombs actually want highly radioactive emitters. So it may be that the technology is better at detecting high emitters as opposed to low emitters. That's still a good thing, though. That still takes some hay off the haystack. You know, the whole nature of this business is, there's not a perfect solution. But you chip away at the problem.

Second, when you do heavily encase something like uranium, you then add a lot of weight. So that creates another constraint. And it also gives you the opportunity to build systems that would allow you to detect density, you know, highly dense material.

What are you trying to do? You're trying to make it harder for the other guy to succeed. Doesn't mean impossible, but harder. And every time you add a measure, it makes it more difficult for the guy to beat the measure. It's like when you have your car parked in the city of New York. You know? If you leave your car door open, anybody can steal it. If you lock your door, you've now made it a little harder. If you put a club lock on, you've made it a little harder. If you put an alarm on, you've made it a little harder. The most determined car thief will eventually beat those things. But not every car thief is that good and they – some of them will wind up moving on to do something else.

So it's about reducing the risk, even if you can't eliminate it all at once.

Question:    If I could just follow up on that, then this generation of detectors might stop a dirty nuclear device, but not a weapons grade nuclear weapon?

Secretary Chertoff: It may stop a plutonium based bomb. And it may be, depending on how you configure your even HEU bomb, it may be able to detect the HEU. Obviously, it's easier with a higher emitter.

But on the other hand, the more you shield, the more you lay yourself open to a different kind of detection, which is density. So one of the things we want to look at is, are there passive detectors that will enable you to recognize highly dense material. And if things start to weigh a lot, it also reduces the type of vehicle—number of vehicles you can use to bring them in.

So I don't want to say this is an easy problem to solve, but we are determined to start solving that problem.

Mr. Cook:Jerry.

Question:    Mr. Secretary, over the years, Congress seems to have been willing to spend money with the Border Patrol and on the border than in monitoring the seven million importers in the country. What is the right mix there and what does the current Senate bill do in that regard?

And second, where are you in the evolution of an employee identification of eligibility technology?

Secretary Chertoff: I think we need to do a lot more. I think that the value of the next dollar spent on employment verification is probably the highest and best use for enforcement at this point. Because that is the engine that brings people in. That doesn't mean I only want to do that, we need to continue to do things at the border. But the area which is land is the employment verification.

The technology actually exists. We have basic pilot. We are now moving to a next generation of basic pilot which allows you to actually access a photograph in a DHS database, so you can actually compare the person you're looking at with the person who is on file in our database. That's another step forward.

The way EEVS will work if the bill passes—and the technology all exists to do this—is it will take your—let's say you use a passport. It will allow you to get on line and look and compare the passport in front of you with the passport on file at the State Department. Or if you have a photo drivers license, the idea is to enable you to look into the state database and see an identical version of the picture in the database so you can compare those.

The technology to do this exists. It's not a new technology. It does require expenditure of money on not only the piping but the software and the system development. Which good news though is that there is a proposal and an amendment that's been filed that would tie up into this bill direct funding for I think over $4 billion which would be used for not only the border patrol triggers but the electronic verification system trigger. That's a very, very important part of this.

Question:    Has ICE been undersized relative to the Border Patrol?

Secretary Chertoff: No, I think we've been scaling them up pretty consistently in the budgets so that they have—you know, we've ramped up in terms of retention and removal to keep pace with the Border Patrol. We've ramped up with interior enforcement.

But, you know, it's a little bit like your tax system. You know, you don't audit every single tax return. You have the right mix of criminal enforcement, civil audit and then you have to have a system—there is a certain amount of self-compliance. What we want to do maybe a little bit more simply than the tax system is make it easier to comply. Instead of having to spend hours with your tax form, I've actually seen the system work. And basic pilot really is something that can be done in the matter of a minute. It's not a very cumbersome process.

So we've got to build it out. And that's what the money is there for. But the technology is there.

Let me say something about all these identification issues. This is—of course it's hard to build IT systems and to just penetrate the market with new identification. It's not easy and it doesn't happen overnight. But it's worth doing. If you don't start—someone said, you know, every journey begins with a single step. If you don't start and you don't move the process forward, you're never going to get there. So—and I think we're overdue from a variety of standpoints to have a way of—you know, ways of identifying people that protect them against identity theft and allow us to verify who people are.

Mr. Cook: We've got about seven minutes left. We're going to go to Ian Swanson, Dan Thomassosn and Gordon Lubold.

Ian.

Question:    Mr. Secretary, I just wanted to go back to your comments about the political culture in Washington. How difficult does the divisive political culture in Washington make in terms of getting an immigration bill through the Congress? Do you have people—when you're trying to get votes for this bill in the Senate or the House, do you feel like some people have a knee jerk response of being against it because Ted Kennedy is supporting it or, conversely, because President Bush is supporting it?

Secretary Chertoff: Actually, I haven't found—in dealing with legislators, I haven't found anybody whose position is driven because they don't like another person. When I hear people, you know, on TV or radio, sometimes I hear that, yeah, I don't like it because so-and-so is supporting it. But legislators I've dealt with, whether I agree or disagree, have been responsible. I mean, I don't—I have a lot of respect for somebody who I disagree with on this issue.

For example, I've known Jeff Sessions for a long time. We were U.S. Attorneys together. I have a lot of respect for him, I consider him a good friend. He has always been very up front where he's coming from. I can actually understand his point of view. I think he's got—he makes arguments that are serious arguments.

I'm not persuaded. And I think in the end you've got to do a comprehensive bill. But I don't think he or any of the people who oppose the bill on either side have ever suggested to me they are opposing it for frivolous reasons.

Question:    Do you think the comments in the blogosphere or on talk radio make it more difficult for members to come to the center on this issue because those comments emphasize, you know, either the left's support in the form of Ted Kennedy for the bill or I guess the right in the form of the Bush Administration?

Secretary Chertoff: I mean, I understand it's personally difficult—must be personally difficult sometimes for people to hear discussion on the radio or on television or on blogs which is intemperate, where people are called names. That's where I do think we step over the line if someone says that you're a sellout or a traitor if you support the bill. Or sometimes—I mean, I don't spend a lot of time in the blogosphere but sometimes I see blogs. And, you know, when people write blogs, some of them are well reasoned. But some of them have a lot of capital letters and exclamation points and a lot of language that you tend to hear in an Army barracks and a lot of cursing and attacking of other people's motives. I don't think that that's particularly helpful.

But, you know, I think you make a decision that if you're going to get into public life, you're going to do the right thing. And if people are angry and don't like it, so be it.

Mr. Cook:Dan.

Secretary Chertoff: Can I—let me just say one other thing.

I lived for a long time in an environment where I was prosecuting people, organized crime. So these are people who are bad people who will do pretty much whatever they can to stay out of jail. So I figure if I survived that, you know, I'm not going to worry about people calling me names.

Mr. Cook:Can.

Question:    Here I am. One of the raps on the creation of your department was that it was so large and there were so many disparate parts and it kind of crossed so many other departments that it would be very difficult to get your arms around—anybody, no matter how good they were in management and administration.

Do you think you've gotten to that place where you can do that? And have you managed to avoid the kind of turf wars that are inevitable in bureaucracy?

Secretary Chertoff: Yeah, I think I'd say we're about three quarters of the way there. One thing which actually has been largely avoided, although not entirely, is turf wars. I think that this—particularly the generation of component heads that I've been able to see come into the department during the time I've been here have really actually been very DHS minded. And part of what we've done is very consciously cross-fertilized the department. We've put Coast Guard people in a lot of positions, we moved the head of Secret Service to be the head of Customs and Border Protection. We are actually building and trying to leave for the next administration a doctrine and a culture that encourages and actually requires joint activity and cross-fertilization as a way of progressing.

We tried—you know, DOD has been very helpful in giving us the benefit of their experience over 40 years before they got to Goldwater-Nichols, about how do you bind a department. And, you know, time and again now I'm pleased as I see—you know, the head of the Coast Guard, the head of the Customs and Border Protection, the head of ICE coming to me and saying, you know, we have a joint plan to do something and I can see how they've integrated across these disparate agencies to drive to something that actually adds value as the sum of its parts.

Or our science and technology, under Admiral Cohen who came to us from the Navy, transformed it. Now we do our research. We have project teams that are driven by the operators. The operators say to the S&T, this is the kind of capability that we need, and then we use that as a basis to fund things.

So I think we are now seeing the fruits of this—of this harvest. I understand that there is one force that tends to pull against us. When we took—when we bound these agencies together, there were some committees in Congress that felt they might lose jurisdiction. And those committees—you know, there is sometimes a pull from those committees to get that jurisdiction back. They want to reclaim it. The 9/11 Commission identified this issue of congressional oversight as something that had to be addressed.

I think it's important that we come to—I'm willing to have congressional oversight. I think Congress has to clear up who is going to do the oversight. Let's try to keep it to a manageable number of committees.

Question:    It's 88 now, right?

Secretary Chertoff: Yeah, I don't know what it is.

Let's keep it to a manageable number of committees. And let's for god's sake, even if people think, you know, you could still tweak the department, let's let us now build the institution and the sinews, instead of continuing to churn it up.

Question:    Certainly you've improved INS to some degree, I would say, considering—

Secretary Chertoff: I think—again, it was unglamourous work. We accepted the background check issue, which is another IT problem at the bureau. We—yeah, they have moved a lot. But it required kind of hunkering down and changing the business process.

Mr. Cook: There are lots of questions still on the table but we said we'd get you out of here at 9:30. Thank you for coming, sir, very much. We really appreciate it.

Secretary Chertoff: All right. Good to do it.

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This page was last modified on June 20, 2007