| Today's Feature
September 11th.
From the office
of Congressman Roy Blunt
It has been a year since the
cowardly terrorist attacks on September 11 took
the lives of nearly 3,000 innocent Americans and
citizens from more than 80 other nations at the
World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon
outside of Washington and at the crash site of a
hijacked airliner in Pennsylvania. Despite that
crisis, America remains the cornerstone of
freedom. The Constitution is still the law of the
land. Our nation is strong and resolute in its
goal to destroy the networks of international
terrorism.
While this anniversary is a day
of solemn remembrance, it is also a day of
recognition that we as a nation are better
prepared to meet the challenges of terrorism than
we were a year ago. We can attribute that
readiness to the resilience of the American
people, the might of our armed forces, the
fortitude of our president, and the foresight of
our homeland security officials.
There is, nonetheless, a lot
more work to do in shoring up the defense of our
homeland. America will never be 100 percent free
of the terrorist threat. And Oklahoma City taught
us that not all of our enemies are foreign.
September 11 was a national
lesson in defending our republic from foreign
threats and protecting individual liberties. Our
citizens want an iron-clad guarantee against
further attacks. There is not one. International
terrorists have been taught to take advantage of
the very freedoms we enjoy to attack the system
they despise.
As long as we maintain the
freedoms that have made our nation great, we will
leave open the door for more attacks. But we must
maintain these freedoms and, instead, marshal all
of our resources to protect and defend the
homeland through a new Department of Homeland
Security.
Our initial successes on the
battlefield in Afghanistan have shown the true
professionalism of the U.S. Armed Forces. Members
of the Taliban and al Qaeda have met America's
best military units and suffered substantial
losses in both men and material. With our allies
we have made great strides at striking at their
finances andinfrastructure. But they remain well
armed and trained with access to sophisticated
tactics and basic equipment, and they operate in
hard-to-find, nomadic, small cells in many
countries.
At home, Americans continue
weighing individual liberties against greater
personal security. As a member of Congress, I
have voted for legislation that seeks to maintain
the freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights
while granting new powers to law enforcement to
identify, track, apprehend and prosecute those
groups, individuals and financial resources who
would commit or support terrorist acts. That
legislation will be subject to a full
congressional review in five years so that it may
be fine-tuned or terminated to ensure that
constitutional guarantees are protected.
Congress is also directing new
federal money to city and rural fire departments,
health departments and police departments. The
men and women in first-responder jobs are the
people who are going to risk their lives tending
to the victims of attacks like those in
Washington and New York. America is an open
society country.
Freedom creates many targets
for the cowardly. Every city in America has a
potential target for a terrorist assault. Local
first-responders' training and preparedness are
more essential than ever in protecting our
homeland.
America should be using the
best technology to keep track of visitors in our
country. The terrorists who struck on 9-11 had
been to America before, and they had walked off
airplanes and stayed. They blended in with
law-abiding, freedom-loving Americans. We have to
do a better job of securing our borders, so
Congress has provided the funding and
reorganization necessary to fingerprint,
photograph and track virtually all of the
millions of foreign visitors entering the
country. Thousands of new agents are involved in
this effort. Congress has also demanded that
various federal law enforcement agencies share
their intelligence information and tear down
internal policies and bureaucracies that hinder
border security. Every effort must concentrate on
preventing future attacks, not merely responding
to them.
Moreover, streamlining our
internal security process requires creation of a
new federal department to oversee homeland
security. America needs a seamless, comprehensive
approach to protecting our homeland. The House
has passed legislation to develop an
unprecedented Department of Homeland Security,
which will ensure that our security is
consolidated, flexible, and accountable to a
single chain of responsibility and command. The
new department will employ 170,000 employees who
will be moved from various departments of the
federal government into a single homeland
security entity. They will oversee the nation's
borders, aviation security, bioterrorism
security, and other areas of homeland security.
Airport security has become a
matter of national security, so more than 52,000
trained federal employees will be checking bags
and people by the end of this year at the
country's 429 commercial airports. New technology
will be used to look for explosives and
biological weapons. Before September 11, airport
security was designed to protect people in
airplanes. Today, we know that a jumbo jet with a
suicidal terrorist at the controls is a weapon of
mass destruction. Now, airport security will be
designed to protect the people on the ground, as
well as those in the air.
America's strength, as well as
its new attitude toward terrorism, were on
display on 9-11 in the brave actions of a group
of American citizens aboard Flight 93. Armed with
the knowledge of events in New York and
Washington, they took action against their
attackers. Their heroic determination to confront
and take on the hijackers to prevent a potential
attack on the nation's capital at the risk of
their own lives was a remarkable act.
America's strength is in the
resolve of its people and the freedoms they
enjoy. Those who have put their faith in a credo
of intolerance, repression, hatred and
destruction face a nation that values knowledge,
compassion, democracy and individual liberty.
America will prevail.
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