From the website baltmoresun dot com.
"WASHINGTON // Nearly five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security continue to clash over who is in charge of coordinating and vetting information on terrorism. As a result, state and local authorities continue to get conflicting or incomplete information - sometimes none at all - on threats inside the United States, officials say.
The feud over control of the information caused federal agencies last week to miss a White House deadline for outlining how it should be distributed to state and local authorities, intelligence and counterterrorism officials said yesterday.
The absence of a federal game plan is causing "confusion at the state level," said Col. Ken Bouche, who heads the information management division of the Illinois State Police. "The longer we wait ... the more leads we miss."
Under federal law, the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security are considered the main repositories for information about terrorism.
In part because it has a long-established system for sharing information through joint task forces, the Justice Department was at first "somewhat resistant" to the notion of a broader plan, said a counterterrorism official familiar with the issue. Eventually, officials at Justice agreed that Homeland Security had an important role to play and that a plan was needed to incorporate the department.
Meanwhile, though Homeland Security officials were well-intentioned, they consistently took the position that the legislation that created the department gave it sole responsibility for information sharing, the counterterrorism official said.
In a December memo, President Bush directed Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to provide a solution by June 14.
But White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said yesterday that the president still had not received their proposal and left open when she expected it to arrive.
"They reached some consensus on broad aspects of the framework, and they are still working," she said. "We expect to see some additional progress soon."
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
So, the heads of two of Bush's agencies are having a TURF WAR??????????
So much for the Bush Crime Family protecting American soil from terrorist attacks. They are in a TURF WAR.
Gambling with the lives of American's everywhere. |
