Where I Stand — Mike O’Callaghan: A new Rudman warning

Thursday, July 3, 2003 | 8:55 a.m.

FORMER U.S. SENS. WARREN RUDMAN AND GARY HART produced "Road Map For National Security: Imperative For Change" in March 2001. They warned that "attacks against American citizens on American soil, possibly causing heavy causalities, are likely over the next quarter century. This is because both the technical means for such attacks, and the array of actors who might use such means, are proliferating despite the best efforts of American diplomacy."

The White House and the American people didn't pay any attention to the report until Sept. 11, 2001. Then it was too late for thousands of Americans on airplanes, in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Tragedy struck and forced the Bush administration to read the report and put several of its recommendations into action. Among those recommendations was the creation of an agency which reports directly to the president and coordinates and oversees homeland security.

Last week Rudman gave a report for an independent task force sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. The group took a close look at the Deptartment of Homeland Security and issued the report titled "Drastically Underfunded, Dangerously Unprepared." It drew a less than intelligent response from a Gordon Johndroe of that department. "I think the council would like to install gold-plated telephones," was Johndroe's flip remark.

Unlike Johndroe, I did read the report and found not one mention of gold-plated telephones. The executive summary did make note that there are serious gaps in communications and other shortcomings.

The task force also identified some obvious inequities in the distribution of funds from the federal government. This has already been identified as a problem in Nevada where Clark County, with almost 70 percent of the population, received about one-third of the funds. Rudman's task force recommended:

In other words, this latest report says the Bush administration should stop playing politics with the new department. The Los Angeles Times in an editorial noted, "Vice President Dick Cheney's home state, Wyoming, gets nearly $36 per person in federal anti-terrorism funding, while California, with its long, vulnerable border and busy ports, receives $9."

So what's next? Let's hope we don't have to have another dreaded terrorist attack before our government listens to the latest warning from a Rudman committee. We should have learned our lesson two years ago, when our government failed and didn't act upon the report made by him and Hart.