By Calvin Biesecker
The former vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission yesterday warned a Senate panel that securing nuclear materials around the world remains an important priority yet access to these materials, and the ability to “explode” them, remains worrisome.
Lee Hamilton said that in discussions he has had with “highly qualified people within our government…I believe the access to nuclear materials and the ability to use those materials and to explode them is much greater than people generally think.”
Hamilton, a former Democratic representative to Congress from Indiana, told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, that Congress needs to “keep a hard sharp focus on this question of nuclear proliferation” and be careful not to “weaken or underfund” it.
Hamilton testified alongside Tom Kean, the former chairman of the 9/11 Commission and a former Republican Governor of New Jersey. The two currently serve as co-chairs of the non-profit Bipartisan Policy Center’s National Security Preparedness Group, a successor to the 9/11 Commission.
In their joint prepared remarks, Hamilton and Kean noted that there is enough highly enriched uranium around the world to make 60,000 nuclear weapons and pointed out that President Obama and former President Bush both placed a high priority on guarding the nation against the threat of a nuclear terrorist event.
According to their testimony, the Obama administration plans to spend $14.2 billion over the next five years on nuclear non-proliferation, yet there are proposals in Congress to cut the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration’s budget for non-proliferation by up to 22 percent.
During the hearing, senators, and Hamilton and Kean, spent the time discussing how well a number of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission have been implemented. One area of ongoing concern is how much authority the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) has over the entire intelligence community.
“At this time, however, it is not clear that the DNI is yet the driving force for intelligence community integration that we had envisioned,” Hamilton and Kean said in their prepared remarks.
Hamilton, along with Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I/D-Conn.), chairman of the committee, and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), ranking member on the committee, said that it appears that in the Obama administration authority for integrating intelligence with regards to homeland security rests with John Brennan, the White House chief for homeland security and counter-terrorism.
Collins said the problem with this arrangement is that Brennan, whose position does not require Senate confirmation, is not accountable to Congress.
Hamilton and Kean both said that Obama needs to step in and back the DNI, which will provide the position with the authority Congress intended when it legislated the position.
Other areas of ongoing concern related to 9/11 Commission recommendations include reform of congressional oversight of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). DHS and its components currently report to over 100 congressional committees and subcommittees, forcing department officials to spend a lot of time preparing testimony, testifying, and responding to requests for information.
The former 9/11 commissioners are also concerned that in too many metropolitan areas unity of command in response to an event or disaster has not been agreed to. Typically, county officials, a mayor or governor want to be in charge, Hamilton said.
The creation of the DNI and the National Counter Terrorism Center has helped here at the national level, they said, but there needs to be some requirements or incentives to obtain unity of command at the local level.