Christopher Shays: “we have been given a great opportunity to protect our countrymen and the world. The Bremer Commission, the Gilmore…”

“we have been given a great opportunity to protect our countrymen and the world. The Bremer Commission, the Gilmore Commission, the Hart-Rudman Commission, all warned us to wake up to the terrorist threat. Unfortunately that call came on September 11. We need to know, as these commissions urged, what is the threat, what is our strategy? And how are we going to reorganize to deal with implement this strategy? The threat is real. We are at war with terrorists to shut them down before they use weapons of mass destruction against us. This threat requires a new strategy. It requires detection and prevention. It requires us to be proactive and in some cases preemptive. This new strategy requires us to reorganize, to take various government departments and bring them together in a focused, unified approach under the four pillars outlined by the President. The first has a border and transportation focus. The second is emergency preparedness and response; one place for first responders to come to in our government and one place for resources to go out to them. The third pillar provide chemical, biological, and nuclear countermeasures. And the final pillar is information analysis, the plug into the intelligence community. We need to reorganize our government to be able to implement our new strategy and confront the new terrorist threat facing this Nation and the world. We need to wake up and do it now.”