Mark Souder: “I yield myself 2 minutes. After the first attacks on 9/11, the Secret Service was given responsibility for the airspace…”

“I yield myself 2 minutes. After the first attacks on 9/11, the Secret Service was given responsibility for the airspace in the National Capital region. During the final 6 months of the Department of Defense working with the Secret Service, there were 182 intrusions into the 15-mile security ring. In December, 2000, DoD was tasked into finding a more optimal solution because one of the problems, which we saw just a couple weeks ago here at the Capitol building, is when we have a plane going 85 knots, 93 miles an hour, and all of a sudden an F-16 comes on going at 300 miles an hour, there is no escorting of the plane, there is no ability to talk to the plane. So the Air and Marine division, AMO, of the Customs and Border Protection agency inside DHS, has the smaller planes, the Citation, the Black Hawks with which to do this. Just last week my staff and other staff in the Senate and the House learned on Friday that inside the Department of Homeland Security there is no designee who is the lead, and we have to work it out between DHS and the Department of Defense; but it is just appalling that inside the Department of Homeland Security we do not have a lead as to who is in charge in the air. A couple of basic things that we need to understand here. That plane got within 2 minutes.…”