Presenter: Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen
Cohen Breakfast Meeting with Reporters in Washington, D.C.
Thursday, January 11, 2001
<snip>
This is going to start a debate which hasn't taken place yet, really, and that is what about a homeland defense CINC. A commander in chief for homeland defense. Now the minute you say that and the chiefs have examined this, by the way, the Americans for Civil Liberties is going to say wait a minute. The military is going to have a commander in chief for homeland defense? Our constitution is structured so that the military is not involved in domestic affairs.
But if you have a series of incidents that take place, and if you have mass casualties, which government department is in the best position to provide logistics, lift, medicines, vaccines, and coordinate it? It's going to be the military.
So what we have done down at Joint Forces Command, we have created a small group that's going to help the state governments should they ever be confronted with a situation like this, to be able to plug into this planning group, say here's how we can help. But this is something that's going to mature and materialize in the near future. So planning and preparation is the best way to say yeah, we don't have to be paralyzed with fear. We know or can reasonably anticipate this is going to happen, and here's how we contend with it. That's what we have to do.
Q: I want to talk about exactly what you've just been talking about. Two questions.
What in your judgment is the proper limit on the role of DoD homeland defense? Where do you run up against posse comitatus? When you look at that, given...
And specifically, what role do you see for DoD in things like principal infrastructure protection that you were talking about earlier?
Cohen: John Hamre did a tremendous job on the critical infrastructure questions, working with all of DoD's agencies, but also integrating that with the private sector.
We are all linked together. Most of our communications are tied in, except for the secure lines, tied in to our commercial system, so protecting that critical infrastructure becomes critically important.
We have devoted billions of dollars to that effort. But we also have to constantly stay in touch with our civilian and private counterparts as such, the civilian sector.
The first part of your question about...
Q: Where do you run up against posse comitatus?
Cohen: Well, you run up against it immediately. Immediately. So as it is, you start down, well who has jurisdiction here? The mayor? The state governor? The EPA? FEMA? The governor could call upon the National Guard. But if that's insufficient, what's the first call he's going to place saying, I've got several thousand people who are down here and I don't have the medicines, I need your help. He's going to call the president of the United States, saying declare this an emergency, or call out the reserves, others, we'll need you. We need the lift, we need the transport, we need all of this.
So we have to have at least some plan in place that would be consistent with our constitutional process whereby the president could then at the request of a governor say we need your help under these circumstances.
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=876Still reading the whole thing, just makes me wonder....
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