Remarks by Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff and Professor of Public Policy and Communication at George Mason University Frank Sesno in a Conversation

Release Date: 04/28/06 00:00:00

Fairfax, Virginia
George Mason University
April 26, 2006

Mr. Sesno:  Well, thank you very much.  I'm here welcoming our guest with pure spring water.  

Welcome, thank you for coming.

Secretary Chertoff:  It’s good to be here in the home of the Patriots, Final Four.

Mr. Sesno:  That’s right, we know that.  Before we go, I would like to thank the sponsoring units of the university who have made today possible -- the School of Public Policy, and Dean Haynes is here; and the College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Communications and Jack Censer is here; and we also have Dean Polsby from the School of Law.  So thanks to all of you.

Well, if you’re judged by the company you keep -- Katrina, bin Laden, Michael Brown.  You must be having a great time these days.

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, I can’t say I’ve been in bin Laden’s company.  I'd certainly like to find him, because then I think we could, as we say, bring him to justice or bring justice to him.  But it’s been a challenging year.

Mr. Sesno:  Well, I want to talk to you about a lot of this, but I would like to start with the news of the day, and another name -- Susan Collins, joined by Senator Lieberman today, on behalf of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Reform, held a news conference, and she was, frankly, withering about FEMA, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security.  She says FEMA is discredited, demoralized, and dysfunctional, and has become a symbol of a bumbling bureaucracy in which the American people have completely lost faith.  And the Committee is calling for FEMA, as it now exists and is called, to be abolished.  Your response to that?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, first let me stand back.  I think the Committee obviously made a serious study of the situation, and frankly one of the things which emerges is that many of the shortfalls that we saw in Katrina, which was admittedly an unprecedented catastrophe, are shortcomings that were built up over years and decades, in terms of things that were not planned for or capabilities that were not built.

I think that the critical message from the Committee report, which I endorse, is, the answer here is to continue to integrate emergency management within the Department of Homeland Security, that what we do not want to do, and the Committee has come out strongly against this, is to pull FEMA out of DHS and somehow make it a stand-alone organization.

So then the question is, how do we complete that integration.  And there are a number of things in the report which I think are very helpful suggestions, and things which we’re already in the process of putting into effect.  For example, we have to have experienced emergency managers in charge.  And the last few months, I'm pleased to say, the President has nominated very experienced managers to head our preparedness and our response functions.  I think right now we have at the senior leadership of DHS over 100 years of very experienced emergency management background actually performing these functions.  

The Committee talked about regional preparation, training and exercising.  We’ve got that underway.  I announced our regional principal federal officers and coordinating officers yesterday.  I’ve been down speaking to the governors.  We are working together side by side putting together evacuation plans.

The Committee recommended a full-scale national operations center.  We agree with that.  We’re in the process of building that capability now, even as we speak.        
So I think there’s a lot of positive in this.  I don’t know that renaming is particularly a solution here, because --

Mr. Sesno:  So you don’t want to do away with FEMA as FEMA is called?

Secretary Chertoff: I think what we want to do is enhance FEMA, bring it into the 21st century --

Mr. Sesno:  One of the things they’re saying, though, is that FEMA is so discredited that calling it FEMA and having it operate as FEMA -- for example, one of the things they want to do is put back together again two things you’ve taken out, which is preparedness and response, put those back together under FEMA, rename it, and relaunch it.

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, here’s my view on the naming issue, and of course, I don’t -- I'm not someone who believes that branding is a big part of what we ought to be doing; I'm interested in the substance, not the form.  But when the Department was originally created, actually, FEMA was abolished, and FEMA did not exist and still does not technically exist as a name on the books.  That was the original conception.  It was after a year of back and forth in the Department, which was before my time, that then-Secretary Tom Ridge allowed them to take the FEMA name back.  So in a funny way, the suggestion here is actually to go back to the original naming.

Mr. Sesno:  What about what Susan Collins says, that whatever you call this organization, it’s discredited, demoralized, and dysfunctional?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, first of all, I want to say, the one thing I would not want to see happen is for people to believe that the actual individuals who work at FEMA are somehow discredited.  The fact of the matter is that there were tools that were not in place that our FEMA employees needed.  But it is not a failure, for the most part, of the actual people who worked at FEMA.

Mr. Sesno:  She says the American people have completely lost faith in us.

Secretary Chertoff:  As I say, I mean, I think if you look at the fine work that was done, for example, by people who got up in helicopters and flew around -- and it was mostly Coast Guard, but we had some FEMA people up there -- when you look at the long nights that were pulled day after day by people who were in the field, at the Superdome and other critical sites, I think it’s -- we have to be fair in admitting that the individual effort made by a lot of these FEMA employees was really above and beyond the call of duty.

Mr. Sesno:  There’s no question about that, but we also have to be fair in acknowledging what the American people see and saw and now think.

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, clearly we have a circumstance now where the name FEMA has made its way into Jay Leno or David Letterman.  And if at the end of the day, slapping a fresh coat of paint on makes people feel we’ve done something different, I don’t know that I'm going to march up San Juan Hill to fight that, but I think the substance is the important thing.  And the important substance we’ve done is used the kind of 21st century tools that are available to start rebuilding and enhancing the organization that we have.

Mr. Sesno:  One of the most important things in the proposal that they made is to have the head of this new created organization, whatever it’s named, not just report to the Secretary of Homeland Security, but in a crisis, report directly to the President as well, not unlike the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the way the Joint Chiefs operate.  What do you think about that?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, of course, we all know but it bears being reemphasized, the President is always in charge.  I mean, we operate in a unitary executive, which means at the end of the day, everybody works for the President --

Mr. Sesno:  Yes, but I can’t get him on the phone.  

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, the President gets to have on the phone whoever the President wants to have in the government.  And of course, my philosophy has been, in dealing with issues, particularly in this particular subject matter, to rely heavily upon and to encourage expression of the views of the very experienced emergency managers we have.

So, again, I'm interested here, a month before hurricane season, not in engaging in moving the boxes around on the org chart, I'm interested in making sure we’ve got the planning finished, we’ve got the supplies prepositioned, we’re got the tools built, and we’ve got the people ready to go.

Mr. Sesno:  But just to be clear -- and I want to talk about your preparedness for this pending hurricane season, because I think everyone’s biting their nails about that -- but to double back on this notion of, to whom does the director of this organization report?  Would it empower whoever’s in charge of the disaster agency to be -- to have a formal phone line, hotline relationship with the President of the United States at a moment of disaster and crisis?

Secretary Chertoff:  I think -- listen, I think, Frank, that the President has to have the ability to hear from anybody with expertise.  But I think at the end of the day, you have to have a chain of command.  That’s what they have at the Department of Defense, that’s what we need to make sure we have here.  We need to have a chain of command in which the Secretary, who has the ultimate responsibility, knows that his directions will be followed, and that everybody is going to play through that chain of command.

Mr. Sesno:  You think it’s best --

Secretary Chertoff:  One of the main criticisms, one of the startling criticisms, and one of the most unfortunate criticisms to come out of this report is the insubordination by the then-head of FEMA.  And the lesson there is, when the then-head of FEMA decided to go outside the chain of command and operate like the Lone Ranger and try to call into the White House, what he did is he deprived himself of all of the tools of the Department.  It was only when we brought Admiral Allen in, who understood the chain of command and who followed the chain of command, that we were able to bring all of our forces to bear, and then the situation got a lot better.

So I think that, obviously, we -- I want to make sure and I have made sure the President gets the full range of advice that he needs, but I also want to make sure that I have the principle responsibility as the principle federal officer under our National Response Plan, I'm held accountable, I want to make sure as a consequence that I have full command and control over my Department.

Mr. Sesno:  Your recommendation, then, is this person continues to report to you or the Secretary.

Secretary Chertoff:  My recommendation is that we operate within the existing chain of command, that we make available to the President the full range of advice -- and I'd be the first person to encourage that advice to be made available to the President -- but that just as with every other Department of government, including the Department of Defense, at the end of the day, the national command authority in that Department runs President, Secretary, and then down to the combat commanders.

Mr. Sesno:  Well, we can talk about org charts, as you say, all the rest -- but what people really want to know is, if there’s another Katrina -- and hurricane season starts June 1, right, so we’re not far away -- do we have a repeat of last year?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, here’s what we’re doing that’s much different.  First of all, we’ve begun the process of planning early and we’ve begun the process of planning, using a lot of the lessons we’ve learned.  We’ve identified in advance those people who will be representing the federal government on the ground, we’ve gotten together with the governors and the emergency managers, and they are working together, training and exercising together.

We’ve built a communications capability now that would let us put people into the field who could be eyes and ears for the leadership of the Department.  We’ve created an emergency communications capability we can put into the field if all of the regular communications go down.

Mr. Sesno:  So that what happened last time, where the Mayor is not able to talk to anybody because everything’s down, that won’t happen again?

Secretary Chertoff:  Right.  We’ve now got the tools in place to prevent that from happening again, and we’ve got --

Mr. Sesno:  In any community that could be hit?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, certainly in the significant communities.  And frankly, we can get to an afflicted community, within a reasonable period of time, those capabilities.  It may not happen in the first 10 minutes, but we’ve got mobile communications packages that we can get pretty much to any place we need to get them within a reasonable period.

Mr. Sesno:  So what worries you most about this coming hurricane season?

Secretary Chertoff:  What worries me most would be if we began to give people an unreasonable expectation about what happens in a disaster.  And what I mean is this:  No matter how good you are at every level of government, it is accepted and understood by everybody in this business that help may not come to every single individual in the first 24 or 48 hours of a disaster.  That means people have to be prepared.  It means they have to know what the emergency supplies are that are recommended, it means that if they are told to evacuate, they have to evacuate, they can’t try to ride it out.

So I think it’s important that with all the changes we’re discussing here, people not feel like they can abdicate their personal responsibility.

Second, local and state responders still have the principle responsibility in an emergency.  They’re going to feel it first.  They’ve got the capabilities that are closest to the ground.  And they can’t abdicate their responsibility, either.  And I'm not saying that they’re trying to.  But we need to make sure we reinforce the message that local and state communities have to be full participants in their own emergency preparation.  We come in only on top of that to support, if in fact there’s a need for federal intervention.

Mr. Sesno:  There was a very interesting piece that the Associated Press ran today, I think it was, reporting -- this GAO report that said that still not set up -- the system, FEMA, whatever we want to call this thing, to avoid the kind of massive fraud that seemed to accompany Hurricane Katrina, where millions, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars just sort of vanished into thin air.  And some of the people, the two-and-a-half million people who got emergency cash assistance, you remember, in the last hurricane, that maybe as many as 900,000 did so based on questionable identification -- false ID, duplicate ID, what have you.  And they dug into where some of this money was spent -- I'm sure you’ve seen this, right? -- a $400 massage, a $450 tattoo -- that must have been a heck of a tattoo -- and if you’ll pardon me, $150 worth of products from Condoms To Go.

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, let me separate a couple things.   First of all --

Mr. Sesno:  Please.

Secretary Chertoff:  This GAO report, obviously, is somewhat out of date.  It deals with last year’s situation.  One of the things we’ve done --

Mr. Sesno:  But it happened.

Secretary Chertoff:  One of the things we’ve done this year is we have put into effect a data-processing system through something called ChoicePoint that will apply to people who call on the telephone or who people who register online.  We’ll apply against that an ability to verify that, in fact, the Social Security numbers and the names match and that we are dealing with legitimate people.

Mr. Sesno:  So that can’t happen again?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, you can never say nothing can happen.  Anytime you have a million transactions, there are going to be some problems.

Mr. Sesno:  But that degree of --

Secretary Chertoff:  But that degree of fraud should not happen under the system we have in place now with the contract that we’re currently operating.  We didn’t have that last year.

As far as people spending money on things other than emergency supplies, traditionally the way the law works is when people lose their homes, they get a certain amount of assistance, for rent, for food, and to rebuild their houses.

Now, I think in every year that that’s happened some percentage of those people use the money for something else, because after all, if your insurance check comes for your house being burned down, and instead of rebuilding your house you go out and spend it on tattoos and massages, shame on you.  But unless we’re to go to a system in which we give everybody their assistance in kind, meaning you get a voucher and you have to do it kind of with Big Daddy sitting on your shoulder, we’re always going to have some people who abuse the system.

Now what do we do to correct that?  We generally give the money out in stages.  If people misuse the money, they don’t get the next set of money, and we try to reclaim the money they’ve spent.  And I'm certainly open to looking at the possibility, for example, of using vouchers more readily to avoid this kind of --

Mr. Sesno:  Or in-kind type --

Secretary Chertoff:  Correct.  But --

Mr. Sesno:  If it were targeted -- this is what you can spend the money on.

Secretary Chertoff:  Correct.  But at the end of the day, we always have this debate in this country, when it comes to giving people assistance, there are those who want to basically force everybody to take a voucher and have it spent -- like food stamps, for example -- and then there are those who say, you know, we’d have to empower people to make decisions, even foolish decisions.  And I think as we talk about designing our emergency program for the next couple of years, we should talk about whether we want to move to a move voucher-based system as opposed to a traditional system of giving people their money in cash.

Mr. Sesno:  Do you ever worry that just this parade of stories undermines credibility to the extent -- not only is it just from a PR point of view tough to do your job, but when that warning to evacuate or respond to a potential terrorist attack comes that people just don’t take it seriously?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, I don’t think I worry about people not taking seriously the insistence that they evacuate or the fact that they’re -- we put out a terror alert.  In fact, I think after Katrina, we got probably better reaction to evacuation orders than had been the case previously.  It’s always a struggle, obviously.  

And here’s a point that I really have to emphasize.  There are three categories of people who have to evacuate:  those who are sick and are in the care of others, and in that case we have to require hospitals and nursing homes to live up to their responsibility; second group of people who are able-bodied but poor, and that’s where we are working with state and local government to make sure we’ve got the transportation and the shelters that people need in order to take care of them; but the third group, which is the vast majority, are able-bodied and they do have cars, and if they don’t evacuate, it’s because of their decision.  

And one of my messages this year is, for people who are thinking they’re going to ride out an evacuation order, they are not only betraying their obligation to themselves and their families, but they are violating a civic obligation, because, Frank, let me tell you, when the Coast Guard comes in there to rescue people, if they’ve got to spend time rescuing people who could have helped themselves, then they are not spending time rescuing those who can’t help themselves.

So part of your obligation to everybody else in the community has got to be, if you’re able-bodied and you have the means, you’ve got to listen to instructions.

Mr. Sesno:  Of course, in New Orleans, there was the problem of so many people who weren’t able-bodied or didn’t have the means, apparently didn’t have the means or get the word, and so then we were left holding the bag.

What happens if a hurricane, anything like Katrina hits New Orleans again this year?  I mean, New Orleans is really not prepared yet -- the levees are not in good shape.  Is it just gone?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, that’s a particular problem, because right now we’re in a situation in New Orleans where we’re in the middle of reconstruction.  We’ve got people in trailers, we have debris -- or materials that are being used to construct that are not in place yet.  And so therefore, it’s probably going to be necessary to evacuate for a storm this year that would not have been a basis to evacuate --

Mr. Sesno:  So the threshold is going to be even lower.

Secretary Chertoff:  Right, we’re going to have a lower threshold, and we’re going to need to make sure that people are educated and educating themselves about what they need to do and where they need to go.

Now, as we speak, we are in New Orleans and we’re in the surrounding parishes working on evacuation plans.  We’re looking to see where there’s additional assistance that’s needed.  We’ve got the military working with us.  I met with the Governor last week to talk very specifically about asking for any gaps that she sees and making sure we can fill those gaps.

Mr. Sesno:  But as a sort of fact of life, what do you think would actually be left of New Orleans if another Katrina hit it this year?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, I think -- obviously depending on the way in which it hit, depending on the condition of those levees that remain from last year that weren’t broken but may be weakened, I think we could have a pretty significant and bad event in New Orleans.

Mr. Sesno:  Could we see what we saw all over again?  Could we see New Orleans under -- I mean, why not, right?

Secretary Chertoff:  I mean, I think it would -- it’s a function of how much wind, how much storm surge, to what extent does the storm surge impact those elements of the levees that may be weak that haven’t been strengthened yet.  So I can’t -- I'm not an engineer, I can’t predict exactly what’s going to happen.  But I can tell you there are certainly scenarios that require us to be very, very cautious about what’s going happen.

Mr. Sesno:  I guess my question is, how honest are people being with the residents of New Orleans and the rest of the country, that if there’s another hurricane that’s like Katrina – and it’s right in the path, I mean, it could happen, that there is no New Orleans to talk about?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, parts of New Orleans -- I don't want to overstate it -- parts of New Orleans are above sea level, and that's kind of a different situation.  But there are no -- there's no question that when you have a city which has significant parts below sea level, in the right set of bad conditions, you could suffer damage that would be comparable to what we had last year, with the exception of the fact that we have fewer people.  I think we have a more mobile population, and our planning and our preparation is going to be a lot better.

But at the end of the day, you can't stop a hurricane.  So if, in fact, you get a 25- or 30-foot storm surge, and it comes into the city, you're going to see some pretty serious damage.

Mr. Sesno:  You worry about that?

Secretary Chertoff:  Sure.  And I tell you, I worry mostly about the people.  If property is going to get damaged, it's going to get damaged, and, as I said, you can't stop the wind and the water.  What you can do is make sure that people get out and make sure that they get to a place where they can be safe and you make sure that we can take care of them.

Mr. Sesno:  Another subject, immigration.  If you don't know about this man's responsibilities, they range far and wide, from sea to shining sea and border to border, and not just natural disasters, obviously, but terrorist disasters, as well as the whole border and immigration thing.  You launched this immigration crackdown, Secure Border Initiative, and all of that, where you were actually going earlier in the month, you rounded up a thousand people, you went to employers and businesses in more than two dozen states.  Where is this leading, and where does it end?

Secretary Chertoff:  About a year ago, maybe a little less, we took a look at the whole issue of immigration, which is a problem that's been going on for 20 years.  And we said, how can we deal with this not piece meal like we've done it, but systematically and strategically?  We built a three-part strategy.  Part one is, better security at the border with more boots on the ground and better technology.  Part two is, better interior enforcement, particularly focusing upon employers who are major abusers of the system so we really have a high impact.  And part three was a temporary worker program, which, of course, is what the President talked about in January of 2004.

If you bring all those elements into play, we're convinced that is a strategy that will finally get us control over the issue of immigration.  The piece that you saw last week, which was a long time in the making, was part of a series of enforcement steps designed to tell employers that they cannot violate the law with impunity.

Mr. Sesno:  One of the things that gets most all the attention is the southern border, but I'm actually very interested in the northern border, because Canada's open immigration policy, and many of the watch list characters who have come across the border have come from the north, not from the south.  Can't build a wall, so what do you do?  How do we stop it?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, what we're talking about doing, of course, is not building a wall anywhere, although we find fencing and barriers are sensible in some places.  It's really a function of technology.  You want to use our UAVs, our satellites, our sensors, our high-tech to give you a picture of who's coming across the border.  And then if people are coming across illegally, you can intercept them using helicopters or all-terrain vehicles or even horses, sometimes.  

So we're in the --

Mr. Sesno:  Horses?

Secretary Chertoff:  Oh, yes.  Horses are great in the desert. I mean, you get people coming across some parts of the Arizona desert, which are impassible to vehicles, horses are a terrific way of --

Mr. Sesno:  High-tech isn't everything, is it?

Secretary Chertoff:  High-tech, low-tech, we use all the tools we have, depending on the particular circumstances.

Mr. Sesno:  I was reading the numbers about the northern border, and up in Michigan in particular, the Ambassador and Blue Water Bridges, according to DHS, and the Office of the Inspector General who looked hard at that, there's some 4.7 million truck and nineteen-and-a-half million passenger crossings every year.  That's a lot of crossings.  And for local authorities up there, in a sense, saying, who's in charge, because it's not clear.  How does that get sorted out?  What's going to change?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, I think what is clear is, obviously, the control of the border crossings is in the hands of Customs and Border Protection.  We have inspectors at all the ports of entry.  Among other things, we are standing up radiation detection equipment at all the ports of entry so that when trucks or other vehicles go through, we can detect if there are emissions that suggest radioactive material.

So we actually -- there's no question about who's in charge.  There's no question that we're putting more people and more technology into those ports of entry.  We are moving, as required by Congress, to having a western hemisphere card that would enable people to move back and forth, but would give us a biometrically secure way of checking their identity and making sure they're not terrorists.  So we are elevating security at the ports of entry every month.

Mr. Sesno:  A western hemisphere card -- how many of you students -- well, everybody -- how many of you hold a passport, a valid passport?  How many of you hold a driver's license?  Okay.  How many of you have been to Canada?  Did you need anything to get into Canada when you went?  No?  Is that going to change?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, I think you do need a driver's license --

Mr. Sesno:  Yes, you need some kind of ID, but you don't need a passport right now.

Secretary Chertoff:  Right, and where we're headed is not to require a passport, because we -- although a passport will certainly be okay -- but to come up with a card that is like a driver's license.

Mr. Sesno:  And this is this western hemisphere card.

Secretary Chertoff:  Right, and --

Mr. Sesno:  So now we're going to have a passport and a western hemisphere card and -- why not just have one thing people can actually use?

Secretary Chertoff:  Frank, that's exactly right.  And I think where we really want to go eventually, but it's -- in terms of rolling it out, it's not going to happen overnight -- we want to eventually go to a system where we offer people the opportunity to combine all of these things in one card.  

We've got another initiative Congress passed about driver's licenses, to get biometrically-secure driver's licenses.  And my vision is, in a few years, if you get a license like that, that will do double duty.  It will be your western hemisphere card.  It could be your registered traveler card to get through the airport.

And to do that, we need to do -- we need to pick a good software architecture, we need to figure out a good software system, and then we've simply got to begin the process of transitioning to these kinds of cards.

Mr. Sesno:  So we all -- isn't that effectively a national identity card?  And maybe why not, right?  And have all the information on one card, and you have your civil liberties issues, maybe, but you also have some convenience.

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, what it would do is it would take what we currently have, which are a number of different identity cards, and it would give people the opportunity, wouldn't force them, but it would give them the opportunity to have a more convenient single biometrically-secure card that they could use in a variety of situations.

Mr. Sesno:  You favor that?

Secretary Chertoff:  I think it makes perfect sense.

Mr. Sesno:  So why not do it now?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, I think we're headed in that direction, and the only constraint here is the amount of time it comes to come up with a software solution.  We've got 50 states and a number of territories that would have to migrate over to the driver's license format that we're talking about.  It's going to be expensive, and there's been some complaining about that, but at the end of the day, what I'm hoping is in four or five years, people have the opportunity, not compulsory, but they have the opportunity to get a card that will be their driver's license and it will be their western hemisphere card, it will be secure so they will be protected against identity theft, and frankly, it will solve a number of the problems we now face using the different kinds of identification that we use.

Mr. Sesno:  And how do you respond to the other big worry about this that Big Brother has everybody on this centralized database?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, I don't think it needs to be a centralized database.  What it needs to be is a single card that will do duty in a number of different databases.

But you know, Frank, my response to criticism about this is to ask the following question:  What is the value in relying on forms of identification that are easily forged or easily tampered with?  Why is that -- why would anybody consider that a good thing?  Why don't we think it's better, even protecting our own identities, to have a secure card so that when someone comes forward and claims to be Michael Chertoff, there's a card that can verify whether it is Michael Chertoff or not?  That protects my data, it protects my privacy, it protects my finances, and it's also better for national security.

Mr. Sesno:  You're going to have a heck of a sales job on that one.

Secretary Chertoff:  You know, I think when you actually talk to people and you actually discuss what we're talking about, I rarely encounter people who have a real objection to it.

Mr. Sesno:  Okay, I'm going to ask for the questions on the cards, if you want to bring those over.  Whenever they come in, I'm going to go into this -- Brian's got them.

So the other day, we see our friend Osama bin Laden popping back up on another tape.  You've been briefed, you know the intelligence -- at least I imagine a very good part of it.  Where is he?  What's he doing on tape?  And why don't we have him yet?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, you know --

Mr. Sesno:  And I have a follow up question.  

Secretary Chertoff:  We have -- one thing I think we always have to emphasize is we have done an extraordinary job capturing or killing much of the top leadership of al Qaeda, and that means --

Mr. Sesno:  Yes, but he still taunts on tape.  They come out of this whenever they want.

Secretary Chertoff:  There's no question -- he's made a decision to hide himself somewhere, and of course, in doing that, we've done an awful lot to incapacitate his ability to be operational.  And I think what we're now engaged in is a public relations war in which bin Laden is attempting to remain relevant.  We've had a very successful result of the negotiations in Iraq last week.  That was a real step forward.  And I don't think it's a coincidence that within a few days of that, you've seen, for example, Zarqawi get up on tape, and what he's trying to do is he's trying to win the hearts and minds of people in Iraq by suggesting somehow he's still relevant.  And that's why a very important part of what we do here is not letting the enemy psych us out.

Mr. Sesno:  Where is he?  Where do you think he is?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, he is no doubt in some remote location somewhere in areas in central Asia that are very inaccessible, very difficult to get to.  I'm not going to -- I'm going to mightily resist the temptation to reveal classified information here since I'd like to keep my job and stay out of the gun sights of the people who investigate those things.  

But I can tell you that -- and I think it's kind of evident from the fact that we haven't heard from him very often, that we really do -- we've done an awful lot to put him and the leadership on the defensive.  They have to spend a lot of time worrying about their own skin, and that puts them off balance.

Mr. Sesno:  Do we think -- do we think he's still in charge?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, you know, you raise an interesting question.  What does it mean to say, in charge?  I think his ability to actually plan and approve operations is very, very curtailed, is very -- I think he's really been hamstrung in his ability to do the kind of operational planning that he might have done in 2000.  

Mr. Sesno:  What makes you say that?

Secretary Chertoff:  Just, I would say, my kind of considered judgment, based on what I've seen.  But I would also say that there's another set of issues we have to worry about, which is, again, this propaganda issue.

He is clearly reaching out and trying to convey to people we may not have operational control over that they were to go out and take steps themselves.  And one of the issues we're looking at as we try to envision the threat over the next five years is, what do we do about people who become kind of solo operators -- people who are al Qaeda sympathizers, who may never actually meet with an al Qaeda member, or get trained, but will virtually because members of the al Qaeda?

Mr. Sesno:  Because of the Internet.

Secretary Chertoff:  Because of the Internet, because of their ability to train themselves on the Internet, because they will open up – they’ll turn on the TV and they’ll see somebody exhorting them to go out and commit an act of violence.

Mr. Sesno:  Al Qaeda free lancers.

Secretary Chertoff:  Correct.  And I think that's an issue which we're very focused on now because it has a lot to do with how we prevent people from getting radicalized and becoming potential terrorists based upon what they see on TV or read when they open up the Internet.

Mr. Sesno:  And that's an issue you have to engage on the Internet and beyond.

Secretary Chertoff:  That's right.

Mr. Sesno:  You disrupt those Internet communication systems, that's --

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, I think a large part of it is the battle for the hearts and minds of people.  How do we understand what makes people suicide bombers?  How do you turn somebody from an ordinary citizen, like the people who did the London bombing last year, into someone who's willing to strap on a backpack and blow up a subway?

Mr. Sesno:  Do you worry that we're going to -- we saw the London bombing -- I'm going to get to your questions in just a minute, but this is actually fascinating -- we think about the London subway bombings and who did those.  Those were Brits, essentially -- or people who were -- do you worry about that happening in this country?

Secretary Chertoff:  One of the things we do literally every day is use all of our investigative tools to try to detect whether there are people in this country who are likely to become operational, whether it's because they are in direct contact with someone in al Qaeda in Pakistan, or because on their own they're going to become inspired to take action that they believe furthers jihad.  And so that is a challenge for us.

Part of that, of course, is traditional intelligence, but part of it is, again, to try to understand what puts people in a position where they become susceptible to this kind of appeal to terrorism.  And I think as we understand that better we can counteract that partly by relying on moderate members of some of the communities to make sure they are pulling people away from that kind of radicalization into the mainstream.

Mr. Sesno:  Just to sort of show what a cheery job this really is, one of the things you've talked about is your fear of nuclear attack on our soil.  Does al Qaeda or any known terrorist organization, do you think, right now have access to that kind of technology and that kind of weapon?

Secretary Chertoff:  No, I don't think that in the near term there's a significant likelihood of a traditional nuclear device being detonated.  Now, we all know that a radiological device is an easier thing to do --

Mr. Sesno:  A dirty bomb.

Secretary Chertoff:  A dirty bomb.  It's, frankly, much less damaging, although there would be a psychological effect.  But, again, Frank, you're putting your finger on an issue for us, at a national level, in terms of our priorities.  We've got to be focused on catastrophic attacks:  weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, radiological, biological, chemical.

Other kinds of attacks, you know, the kind of low-level attack that a single wolf or a loner type of terrorist might undertake by going to a shopping mall and shooting people up -- those are things we can deal with because we have experience with.  Where we really have to put our efforts is those kinds of catastrophic attacks that would be really earth-shattering in terms of the country as a whole.

Mr. Sesno:  All right, let me move to some of your questions, and you can bring me some more to these as we go here, because we'll tick through these.

Here's a question:  Where do you consider the most serious threat to our security coming from, external or internal?

Secretary Chertoff:  I'd say in terms of the scale of the consequence, it's external.  If we're worried about a weapon of mass destruction, the thing I would be most concerned about is somebody in some remote location somewhere in the world building a laboratory and fabricating a weapon of mass destruction.

In terms of likelihood, however, I think obviously there's a much greater likelihood that some lone individual will inspire himself to go and blow himself up in a shopping center.  But the consequences, although bad, would be obviously less earth-shattering than a weapon of mass destruction.

So I think the probability is much more internal; I think the consequence is much more external.

Mr. Sesno:  Here's one:  What effect does negative press on have on your ability to do your job?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, negative press is obviously always a challenge.  We've got to maintain the trust of the American people.  The principle responsibility, of course, is for us to make sure that we are forthcoming, we try to be as accurate as we can.

I would say the biggest challenge for me in the press is what I call "policy making by anecdote."  We have to make decisions, policies based on looking at the total consequences of what we do.  Inevitably, when you make a policy decision -- whether it's in the area of FEMA or in the area of national security -- there will be one or two instances where the way the policy falls is going to wind up injuring somebody.

Now, what we often see in the press is the singling out of a particular story of one or two people who have gotten a bad shake, and that's presented as if that invalidates the entire policy.  But we all know from our experience that when you have to plan on a large scale, you can't do it based on a single anecdote -- you've got to look at the total picture.  

And I think for me the biggest struggle when we talk about things like, for example, instance on some kind of accountability on the way people spend money, is that we will inevitably get pushed back because there will be the one or two cases where it seems to have worked an unfairness.

What I try to do is be very straight with the public about what is a reasonable expectation.  I try to tell people when there's bad news coming, "This is going to be a piece of bad new; you're not going to like it."  As we talk about hurricane season I'm trying to tell people we're going to be a lot better than last year, but a disaster is always going to be a disaster; there will never be a happy disaster; there will always be some people who, notwithstanding our best efforts, will lose their lives, some people will be anxious, some people will be cold and hungry and tired.  My job is to minimize that and make it as little as possible, but there are no guarantees in life and --

Mr. Sesno:  But this bad press thing is fascinating, because it's not just the traditional press -- and they'll beat up on you mercilessly, that's what we're paid to do; it's called accountability and sometimes it's fair, sometimes it's not.  But people can go places now virtually, over the Internet, they can turn on a live picture of something now.  They saw this with Katrina last year.  There was the famous Anderson Cooper/CNN interview with Senator Landrieu when she wanted to thank everybody in Washington for passing bills and he said, excuse me, I've got dead bodies floating down here.

So it's a negative press in a traditional way, but it's also a new dimension where people themselves can go farther and see more and get more information directly.

Secretary Chertoff:  That's right.

Mr. Sesno:  That's another degree of transparency and accountability that you confront.

Secretary Chertoff:  That's a big challenge.  And, of course, it's important for us to be sure that we understand what people are seeing, because, obviously, that's part of the reality that people consider when they make judgments about things.

But here, too, you have to be careful.  There were people who went into -- newsmen who went into the New Orleans area and we got reports about widespread mayhem in the Superdome.  And, of course, what's now emerged at the end day is there were apparently I think less than a half a dozen people who were found dead in the Superdome after they had evacuated everybody.

What was the reason for that disconnect?  Well, it's true that the picture shows you some things, but a lot of what we saw were people coming out of the Superdome and reporting what they said were their experiences, and a lot of times those people -- maybe not intentionally -- were exaggerating their impressions, and so that becomes incorporated.

Mr. Sesno:  The problem with that one, though, too, is that the Mayor and the police chief picked up on that and they stood to the microphones and did interviews and they corroborated -- I mean, they were passing on bad information, but they were talking about that, too.

Secretary Chertoff:  That's a big challenge for all of us.  You know, part of my job, again, is to make sure -- first of all, I have much better information this year than I had last year -- part of it is to remind people -- and there's an old, old saying that they have in the military, that the first report from the battlefield is virtually always wrong.  That means we've got to learn to condition ourselves as a society to withhold our judgment from the first reaction and wait until a little bit more of the facts are in so we can really be intelligent about figuring out what's going on.

Mr. Sesno:  So you think you got a bum rap in the press?

Secretary Chertoff:  I don't think it's a question of a bum rap or not.  I think that we were all operating with a very difficult circumstance, with a lot of imperfect information.

Mr. Sesno:  Okay, here's another one, this one on civil rights.  Thanks for coming.  How do you justify monitoring the email and phone communications of American citizens who are not suspected of any crime?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, first of all, of course, all these things are guided by a very complicated set of laws.  In the case of monitoring the -- again, without getting into classified areas -- we're either dealing with things that come under FISA where you have warrants because you're dealing with people who we have some probable cause to believe are connected to terrorism; or we're dealing with international phone traffic, which traditionally has been an area where the government has a wide latitude because you're dealing with international travel and international communication.

The bottom line here is this:  In the 21st century, we don't have the kind of radar against terrorist bombs that we had in the 20th century against Soviet bombers.  Our radar is intelligence.  Our ability to detect people talking about plots is the only thing that allows us to disrupt those plots before Americans get killed.  And if we don't use that radar, what we're going to see is more and more Americans getting killed.  And frankly, what we'd be more likely to see is a real backlash.

So the use of these kinds of electronic surveillance as a way of warning ourselves to prevent terrorist acts is to my mind as valid and as reasonable as the use of radar to keep bombers out of the country in the 21st century.

Mr. Sesno:  But you're a judge, how about just some judicial oversight?

Secretary Chertoff:  And there is quite a bit of judicial oversight, for example, in the FISA process, in the traditional process of actually intercepting content.  But again, without getting into a lot of technical legal stuff, there is a court decision from the court which is responsible for this surveillance that says in national security cases, the President does have the authority as a matter of the executive branch's power to do intercepting in order to prevent certain kinds of activity.

And in the international context, there's a long line of cases that will uphold the right of the government to monitor what goes back and forth across the border.

Mr. Sesno:  I have a government major who has got a question for you here.  In the nature of immigration as it takes center stage in Washington over the past several weeks, could you explain the role of Homeland Security in making the borders secure, but specifically what changes do you foresee within the Department?  And what are the challenges that the Department has to overcome with respect to borders?

Secretary Chertoff:  Great question.  Our Customs and Border Protection, that's our border inspectors and it's our Border Patrol.  That's the first line of defense.  Immigration and Customs Enforcement, those are our customs and immigration investigators, deal with issue of customs violations inside the country, and they also do -- and immigration violations inside the country -- and they also do long-term investigations against criminal groups.

We're using a lot of different tools to try to come to grips with this problem.  First, we're putting more Border Patrol on the border.  Second, we're giving them better equipment.  Some of it is more fencing and vehicle barriers.  Some of it is high tech equipment like unmanned aerial vehicles or satellites.  Third, we're being much more focused strategically on making cases against criminal organizations that are engaged in smuggling people across the border, many times, by the way, victimizing the very migrants who are paying to get across the border.  Fourth, we're focusing on employers who are flagrantly violating the law -- not people who make a mistake or don't know whether they're hiring someone who is undocumented, but companies that are literally building their business on employing people who are undocumented, and, again, often victimizing those people because they know that people who are undocumented can't really complain to the authorities.

Mr. Sesno:  That's part of the crackdown.

Secretary Chertoff:  That's part of the crackdown.  So all of these things are part of building a systemic strategy of layered defenses against people coming across the border.  And of course, the last piece as we said is a temporary worker program that would enable us to deal with the need for labor in certain parts of the country by giving honest migrants an opportunity to work in the country with documentation and with regulation so we could then focus our resources on the people who are criminal or who are threats to our national security.

Mr. Sesno:  This crackdown with employers, is this going to intensify?  Are you going to do more of it?  Is this open-ended and forever?

Secretary Chertoff:  We are going to continue to move forward with this.  We've made a number of cases in the last year, we've got a number of cases in the works.  We'll continue to make high impact cases because I think it's important that we enforce the law in this country.

Mr. Sesno:  Who is that message intended for?

Secretary Chertoff:  It's intended to tell, first and foremost, employers, they have an obligation to make sure they're in compliance with the law.  Now, we understand that there's a lot of the work that's being done in this country that is being done by undocumented workers.  And a temporary worker program is a program that would allow that work to continue, but bring it out of the shadows, bring it into the light, make sure it’s regulated, make sure people are protected, and make sure that we know what -- who is doing what in this country.  

But part of creating that pathway to a temporary worker program is making it clear that those who don't want to follow the law are going to be punished.  So basically a strategy that has a carrot and a stick is, to my mind, the only successful way to deal with a problem that we've not successfully dealt with for two decades.

Mr. Sesno:  We've got some great questions here, so let me try to tick through a few of them.  As of today, what percentage of total daily cargo containers are vetted upon entry into the U.S.?  This is port security.  

Secretary Chertoff:  One hundred percent are screened, meaning we know what is inside.  We get information about what is inside each container from manifests and other loading documents.  

Of those that are screened, based on our intelligence and the information we have about the container, the shipper, and the destination, we inspect 100 percent of those that we deem to be high risk.  We will have by the end of October approximately 70 percent of the containers coming into the United States coming through radiation portal detectors at our ports.

Mr. Sesno:  Seventy percent of all containers.

Secretary Chertoff:  Correct.  By the end of next year, it will be virtually 100 percent of all containers coming in through radiation portal detectors.

Mr. Sesno:  Which means that you will not be able to sneak a nuclear device or a dirty bomb into the United States of America?

Secretary Chertoff:  It will make it very difficult to do that.  Now, we're not technologically in the place we ultimately need to be, which is why we're now looking at the next generation of technology, which would address not only radiation that comes in without shielding, but radiation that comes in with shielding.  And we're looking to have systems that deal with that deployed in the next couple of years.

Mr. Sesno:  Okay, next question.  This is from someone the environmental and infrastructure department.  Public civil infrastructure was recently given a grade of D and trending down by the American Society of Civil Engineers.  In light of the recent call for making critical infrastructure more resilient to risk events -- natural and manmade -- what is the DHS position and action plan to actually achieve this and do better than a D?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, I think first of all, I think these are important areas of expectation to clarify.  Virtually all the infrastructure in the country we're talking about -- levees, bridges, tunnels, buildings -- is owned by private entities or state and local government.  The building codes are promulgated by local government or sometimes state government.  

We've got to learn that not every problem in this country is soluble by the federal government.  We can lead, we can set certain standards, but unless we're going to completely upend our constitutional system, we're going to have to continue to rely on local and state government to carry out their role.

I think infrastructure is a big problem.  One of the things we've learned is if you don't make investments in maintaining and repairing, sooner or later you're going to have a catastrophe.  We got to make sure those private businesses that maintain infrastructure put the money into it to make sure that they maintain what they've got responsibility for.  Where local and state government have bridges or tunnels they operate, they've got to maintain them.  Where the Army of Corps of Engineers is responsible for levees, the Army Corps has got to maintain it.

One of the things I've suggested, for example, and I sent a letter out on this today, is oil companies, which certainly are not hurting for money right now, have a responsibility to make sure their gas stations have generators so that when we have a catastrophe, they can pump gas so people can get back to work and we can start the process of recovery.

Mr. Sesno:  What percentage of gas stations have generators?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, I can tell you, a lot less than need to, because last year in Florida, we had plenty of gas in the ground, we had plenty of fuel in the tanks, and there weren't enough generators to get the gas pumping for several days.  

And had the gas stations had the generators, we could have started the recovery from Hurricane Wilma 24 to 48 hours before it happened, because people would have gotten in their cars, they would have opened the grocery stores, they would have started the power plants, and everybody would have been back to work.

Mr. Sesno:  And you're calling on the oil companies to shell out, pay for that?

Secretary Chertoff:  Yes, I think it's -- in fairness, if you're running -- basically, you're running a business and people are coming to you, and you've taken the responsibility to play a pivotal role in our economy, you have an obligation to make sure you have business continuity.

Mr. Sesno:  So they got all these profits from all these high prices, plow it back in on the corner?

Secretary Chertoff:  I don't think you're going to have to put all your profits back into generators.  But I think it's reasonable to ask these companies to do what they have to do to make sure their dealers and their franchisees are equipped to continue to pump gas even when we have a catastrophe.

Mr. Sesno:  Next question on avian flu.  What's Homeland Security -- you have this great job.  

Secretary Chertoff:  Yes.  

Mr. Sesno:  What's Homeland Security doing about the possible disease pandemic which may be coming from Asia or anywhere else regarding the avian flu?  And I think you commented recently that the birds are coming, they're migrating and this could happen.  

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, the President put out a national strategy because it's not just a homeland security problem, it's a problem, again, across the federal government, and with state and local public health departments, too.

Obviously, the responsibility for protecting human health on the federal level lies with the Department of Health and Human Services.  But a lot of that responsibility really lies with state and local public health authorities who have the power -- the legal power, to do a lot of what needs to be done to prepare for and respond to an emergency.

At DHS what we're doing is, we're making sure that we are able to coordinate with all the levels of the federal government, not only in terms of human health, but in terms of animal health, if we have an attack that affects domestic poultry, in terms of making sure that our critical infrastructure would continue to run, even if we had a significant pandemic, and making sure that we could do adequate screening at the borders, if that was an appropriate response.  So again, our job is to work with our partners at all levels of government to make sure we've prepared the resources, we've prepared the plans, we understand our responsibilities, and we're capable of responding effectively if we ever have a human pandemic.

Mr. Sesno:  Here's a related question.  Why is the federal government spending considerable resources to develop a vaccine against bird flu when we don't know the strain of the virus that will emerge?  Wouldn't the money be better spent on basic research?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, that's a great question, and I think the answer is we're doing both.  We're spending money on research, but what we're trying to do is allocate money to build capacity, once you've identified the strain, to rapidly increase manufacture.  I think we all know that the ability to come up with a particular vaccine that would match a particular strain of the virus probably has to wait until we actually know the specific virus we're dealing with.  

But once you've identified the strain, you've got to produce enough vaccine.  And right now, as a consequence of a lot of things that have happened over the last few years, our capacity to manufacture vaccine quickly is not what it needs to be.  And I think a lot of what we're putting into play, in terms of money, is designed to increase the ability to manufacture on short notice.

Mr. Sesno:  Here's a really good and very sensitive question, and very germane, and thinking about Katrina last year, and the chaos there, and the disappearance of basic services, including police.  Do you see an increased role for DoD -- Department of Defense, the military, in civil response?  And if so, please elaborate.

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, I think -- there's no question one of the lessons of last year was that when we need to put a large-scale presence of federal people on the ground to work a situation, particularly in security, DoD is really the best source of that.  It's the largest agency by far, and it certainly has more boots on the ground.

Mr. Sesno:  They got the choppers.  They got the radios.  They got the --

Secretary Chertoff:  Now, one thing a lot of people don't understand is that many of those resources are in the National Guard, which, by the way, in a normal day-to-day are under the control of the governor of the state, not under the control of the Department of Defense.

And in fact, it's very unusual to federalize the National Guard.  Almost always our emergency response through the National Guard is run by the individual governors.  What we're working on now is joint planning with the National Guard, with the Department of Defense, so we know exactly what the National Guard can bring to the table if we have a disaster, so we know what the Department of Defense has to supply if there's some kind of a gap, and then making sure that we can get that where it needs to get as quickly as possible.

Mr. Sesno:  So let me ask you this.  You talk about being better prepared for another Katrina, all right?  Let's anticipate that there's another Katrina someplace.  And the thing is just breaking down, the town, the city, the state can't handle it.  This year, what do you do?  Would you recommend to the President the military needs to take over here, effectively?

Secretary Chertoff:  No, I think depending on the circumstances some parts of Department of Defense might step in and actually take over some of the functions if, in fact, state and local government were overwhelmed.  If, for example, you ran through the National Guard, you ran through local law enforcement, you ran through all the National Guard units and law enforcement units available from other states, and you still didn't have what you needed to take care of some of the emergency missions, we might very well ask Department of Defense to step in.

I can tell you for one thing that we always rely on the Department of Defense to give us assistance with respect to rescues.  We have our local rescue capabilities, we have our Coast Guard rescue capabilities.  But if that's not enough, the Department of Defense has helicopters and crews, and they go out and they help us.

Mr. Sesno:  How many government students -- majors do we have here?  Lots.  So on this topic, it's an interesting constitutional issue, as well, posse comitatus, the Insurrection Act.  Do you think there needs to be some vast run at the constitutional process?  Does the authority now comfortably rest that if the President needed to, the military could do this very job?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, I think most of what the military would need to do doesn't require dealing with anything controversial like the rules about using military force in the United States.

When the military performs a rescue mission, or brings medical supplies, or is involved in transporting evacuees, that's something that doesn't raise any complicated legal issues at all.

There's always the question, what do you do if there's a break down of law and order, and it's outside the capacity of the National Guard.  And there is some law that governs that.  But I don't think this a huge constitutional controversy.  I think we always want to honor the basic principles of government, which have served us well for over 200 years, which is, most of the authority for dealing with domestic issues resides with the governors and with the local authorities.  And to the extent we can honor that, and to the extent that they're capable of dealing with it, that's where we ought to be, the way we ought to be functioning.

If there is an overwhelming circumstance, obviously, that's when the federal government has the ability and has some authority, although not total authority to step forward and take a more active role

Mr. Sesno:  Got about another five minutes.  We'll do one more of these and then a couple of wrap-up questions.

Question from a colleague here:  How do you view the role of the behavioral science in homeland defense, that is to say beyond after-the-fact reactions, behavioral scientists can help design systems to match human abilities, analyze, prevent errors, that kind of thing -- brings to mind risk communication, and the whole notion of risk.  So how about that one?

Secretary Chertoff:  I think there are at least three areas I can think of off-hand.  One is, as you say, risk communication.  And we're looking at this now.  We're trying to understand how can we better communicate to people when they're under pressure about what they need to do, what the situation is and what steps they have to take to protect themselves.  That's an area we're doing research in.

Second, as I said, was radicalization.  How do we counteract those people who want to take ordinary young folks, men and women, and turn them into suicide bombers?

Third is, you know, we're looking at sophisticated behavioral tools for doing the kind of screening we do at the airport.  You know, when people come across the border, our Customs and Border Protection people are trained to look at behavioral cues that will give them some indication that someone is hiding something, trying to smuggle something in or is otherwise a threat to the country.  We want to continue to build on that using research to see what can we do at the airport, for example, so that our TSA screeners are not merely looking at what's inside bags or in shoes, but they're actually looking at how people respond to questions as a way of better determining who ought to go into secondary screening.

Mr. Sesno:  There was a survey recently -- a couple more and then we'll let you go -- a state homeland security survey released earlier this month found several things from the states, and actually, this harks back to a previous answer that you gave -- that the demands on National Guard forces, for example, have left more than the half the states reporting that they won't be able to meet the commitments under their state emergency plans.  And a lot of them cited Iraq, obviously, as a reason.  The majority said that these various obligations would reduce their Guard capacity by 25 percent.

So the question is, how exposed are we?  How under-prepared or under-able are we to respond in this way?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, I've spoken to the National Guard Bureau at DOD about this issue.  Their, obviously – have a principal responsibility of monitoring the capabilities of the National Guard.  And they've assured me that there are more than sufficient Guard and Guard capabilities in the United States to deal with any foreseeable circumstance.

Mr. Sesno:  So despite this survey, they're not -- you're saying it's wrong?

Secretary Chertoff:  I'm not a big believer in surveys, and I understand that each governor, looking at the Guard in their own state, doesn't necessarily have the ability to see what the total mix of resources are.  But I do know the National Guard Bureau is comfortable that it can handle anything that they can foresee happening.  And of course, we have as a last resort the ability to supplement with active duty forces.  

One thing I might say is, I think the National Guard now is better trained, better prepared and more experienced than maybe at any other time in its history, and that's a very positive development.

Mr. Sesno:  Here you are a university, and we've got a lot of really terrific young people here, you've got this very unusual perspective.  Many of our students were either in university or in high school when 9/11 happened.  What is the future of this country, of terrorism, of the things that this generation is going to confront?  Because the challenges, the problems -- presumably, the opportunities -- are different.

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, I think, you know, Frank, I would agree that it's a time of great challenge, but also a time of great opportunity.  When I look back on my own life -- and, of course, I'd read about World War II and the greatest generation -- I was just a small child when the Civil Rights movement was on, so there was a bit of a sense when I was in college and law school that maybe the great events had passed by, and what we were going to have was basically going out and earning a living and it was going to be pretty mundane.  

And of course, 9/11 really made the point that history is not over, that, in fact, our generation faces an enormous challenge that is comparable in scope to what prior generations have faced.

So for people who are now young who are thinking about particularly public service, which I've spent most of my life in, this is a time of real peril, real challenge, both to our security but also to make sure that we don't compromise our way of life, but with that come real opportunities to make a contribution in all sorts of things, whether it's homeland security or defense or law enforcement, that I think will offer many of the people in this room the opportunity for really rewarding careers.

Mr. Sesno:  Biggest headache in your job?

Secretary Chertoff:  Boy, that's tough.  I think it varies -- I think it varies day-to-day.  I think it's -- it's simply trying to keep ahead of all the different kind of information that's out there and make sure that we are, to the best of our ability, giving accurate and timely information to the public about what the challenge is and what we're doing.

Mr. Sesno:  Biggest reward?

Secretary Chertoff:  The people I work with.  I am constantly, pleasantly surprised -- well, I'm not surprised anymore, maybe, but certainly  pleasantly reaffirmed when I see how hard the people in this Department work, the sacrifices that they make, and all of this is in the name of trying to protect the American public.  I think that is, for me, the most rewarding part of the job.

Mr. Sesno:  Without referring to your boss, who's your favorite person in Washington?  

Secretary Chertoff:  My wife.  

Mr. Sesno:  I said without referring to the boss.  And should I ask who your least favorite person in Washington is?

Secretary Chertoff:  We don’t have enough time.  

Mr. Sesno:  Well, Mr. Secretary, thank you very much for your time and your candor and your humor and your insight today.  It's a huge job that you face and enormously challenging.  You going to be in this job for awhile?  I mean, you know, this is Washington.

Secretary Chertoff:  As long as the President wants me to serve and thinks I can make a contribution, I'll be here plugging away.

Mr. Sesno:  So you're not going anywhere?

Secretary Chertoff:  As I say, I'm not quitting on something that I believe in.

Mr. Sesno:  Good for you.  All right, thank you very much.

Secretary Chertoff:  Thanks a lot.

Mr. Sesno:  And thanks to you and to all your very good questions.  Appreciate it.  

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