Mr. President, we turn now to the Homeland Security bill. This is obviously a timely period for taking up this legislation in light of what has happened in London. We recognize, once again, as a result of the heinous crimes that were committed in London that there are people out there who totally disregard innocent life and who are willing to kill innocent individuals simply for the purpose of making a political statement as to what their cause is or what their presumed cause may be.

Of course, we were, unfortunately, focused on this fact by 9/11, but maybe over the last 2 or 3 years the success of our Nation in resisting attacks has caused a touch of complacency in this area. However, London has to clearly remind us that complacency cannot be tolerated when it comes to fighting these people who call themselves Islamic fundamentalists and who are essentially killers, terrorists, murderers without any moral creed or cause, and whose actions are totally unjustified in any form of civilized society.

The Department of Homeland Security was set up in the post-9/11 world in order to try as a nation to get our arms around the issue of how we can best protect us in the United States of America. It was set up in the context of other agencies that have responsibility for other areas of protecting us relative to this war on terrorism.

Of course, we have our Defense Department which is, through its extraordinary men and women, pursuing the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan and in Iraq. We also have agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency, the FBI, and the Justice Department, that are committed to making sure they obtain the intelligence necessary to protect us. But within this umbrella of agencies which are trying to pursue this war on terrorism, there is included, of course, the Department of Homeland Security.

The Department of Homeland Security was put together as an amalgamation of different agencies. I think there were 22 initially that were thrown together. Some of those agencies, when they were put into the Department of Homeland Security, were already functioning extraordinarily well and had a track record of success. Some of the other agencies had a spotty track record. Regrettably, some of the agencies did not have a very good track record at all. But they were brought together for the purposes of trying to involve a coordinated effort in the area of fighting terrorism.

I believe we have to recognize, as we pursue this fight on terrorism, that the people we are fighting are driven by a philosophy which we as a rational society, especially as a Western society, find hard to fathom. The concept that you would kill innocent civilians simply for the purpose of making a point is something which we find repugnant and almost incomprehensible. But that is the nature of the people we fight. We have to understand their purpose is not necessarily to win a global war in the sense it has historically been perceived, such as World War I or World War II, or even the Cold War. Their purpose essentially is to assert their culture in a way that destroys any culture which they perceive as alien to it, to assert their religion in a way in which they perceive destroys any religion which they see as alien to it, or any group of states which they see as alien to it. They are willing to pursue this with fanaticism which allows them to develop individuals and attitudes where people will strap bombs to themselves and attack us or where they attack innocent individuals, as they did in London. And thus, the threat is a threat of immense proportion, and it is a threat which we have to pursue in a different way than we have pursued other threats that have confronted our Nation.

We all understand this, but executing it has become difficult. I believe we have not yet grasped as a nation how we execute in defending ourselves from this type of threat. What we know is this, and our approach must be tempered by it: We know we can order the priority of the threats as they reflect relative to us. We know, for example, if these individuals get their hands on a weapon of mass destruction--chemical, biological or, God forbid, a nuclear-capable weapon--that they will use that weapon. They will use it in a way which kills tens of thousands, essentially hundreds of thousands of innocent individuals. So we know that is the No. 1 threat we must confront.

We know also that as a nation, because we are a democracy and because we are an open nation and because we seek to participate in the world in an open and vibrant way, our borders are porous and that access into this country is easy, and that represents, regrettably now, a threat to us.

We know also that because we are such an open society and because we are a society which is built around the concept of individual responsibility and people being able to go out in the world and participate in activities, that we have innumerable areas of infrastructure, areas of individual participation and activity which are open to attack, such as occurred in London. And that is an issue of threat.

What we have attempted to do in this bill is take the resources we have and focus them on a threat-based approach so that we basically focus the most resources on the area where we see the greatest threat. The way we structured this bill is that we are focusing most of the energy of this bill, most of dollars in this bill, in two primary areas, as far as new dollars are concerned. We are still spending a lot of dollars in a lot of different places, but the new initiatives in this bill are focused on trying to better get a handle on defending ourselves from an attack by a weapon of mass destruction and, secondly, making our borders, which are inordinately porous, less porous and having better accountability as to who is coming into this country and what their purposes are.

We moved a fair amount of money in this bill to try to accomplish those two basic philosophical goals of addressing those two items of threat. That does not mean we underfunded anything in this bill that was already on the board. But it does mean we tried to focus this bill a little bit better.

Within this legislation there are a lot of different agencies. As I mentioned earlier, some of them are functioning extraordinarily well, some are functioning in between, and some simply are not doing as good a job as we hoped they could do. Regrettably, this agency, even though it has only been around for 2 years, has had over 486 reports written about it by either the inspector general, the CRS, or the GAO. I brought them with me because I think they are so staggering in their proportions it is worth looking at in physical proportions the number of reports. There are three piles. If we take one pile, which I probably cannot pick up, and put it on top of another pile--it will all fall over, unfortunately--we end up with almost 3 feet 9 inches of reports about things not going that well at the Homeland Security Department. Each one of these reports is substantive. Each one of these reports is worth review and requires action. They reflect the fact that almost 3 years after this Department was put together, the Department has some very serious problems, and they need to be addressed.

I congratulate the new Secretary, Mr. Chertoff, for his approach to trying to get a handle on some of these problems. He is going to report to us Wednesday or Thursday on what his second stage review is. He put a lot of time into this, but I think his approach will probably be based on the concept that we have to have, first, a policy-driven approach and, second, it has to be systemwide. Today, there is too much anecdotal reaction in the Department, there is too much haphazard reaction, there is too much reaction to the crisis of the day. I think his approach is going to be to put in place a much more systematized approach. But that is not going to immediately resolve the problem. Hopefully, it will begin the process of resolving the problems of this Department, which are many and acute.

This bill does put in place a large number of what, for lack of a better word, we in the Congress call fences, where we essentially say to the Department: Before you get this money, you have to show us you are going to do this effectively. It is not something I like to do. I am a legislator; I am not a manager. I used to be a manager. I used to be a Governor of a State. That is a management position. But when we see a department which has as many functions as this Department and it is not functioning correctly, regrettably, I do think it is the responsibility of the Congress and especially the Appropriations Committee, which has a unique oversight role, to step in and say before we give you more money to do this, we want to make sure that money is not going to be wasted, mismanaged, misplaced, or misappropriated, so we are going to require you to do something else. So this bill has in it a lot of what I would call fences.

The purpose of the bill, as I mentioned, is to fund more aggressively those areas which we see as threats. Obviously, after London, many people are going to feel that a threat which needs to receive more attention is the question of how we handle mass transit. I could not agree more. There is no question but in light of the London attack--and we knew long before this with the Madrid attack and before that with the Israeli situation--this is a clear area where terrorists, who have no regard for human life, tend to focus their heinous activity. We know mass transit is an issue, but the question becomes how do we best protect mass transit.

We have put in this bill over the last few years literally tens of millions, now hundreds of millions of dollars which is available for upgrading security, for upgrading electronic surveillance, for upgrading bomb dog activity, for upgrading the number of police officers on mass transit. There is pending, in fact, within the Federal Treasury about $115 million to $150 million that has not been spent. There has been so much money put into this so quickly, it simply has not been spent, and it is still available.

On top of that, there is the $7 billion which we have put into first responder money which, if States want to reallocate some of that toward mass transit protection, they can. That has not been spent. So there is a lot of money sitting there for the purpose of helping mass transit.

If you talk with people who run mass transit, they say it is not enough. But as a practical matter, it has not been spent yet. So whether it is enough is clearly irrelevant because until it gets spent, it is clearly enough.

Independent of that, however--the fact that there is still significant dollars in the stream of things--we have the issue of how to effectively defend mass transit. We all know mass transit is such a huge enterprise where millions of people, on a daily basis--tens of millions if you take all the transit systems in this country--are moving in and out of different transit modes, whether it is trains, buses, or ferries, and are moving in and out of these on a constantly churning basis. The opportunities to attack this type of a system are almost endless.

A professional terrorist--and clearly these people are professional. They train for the purpose of killing people, using terrorist weapons. The professional terrorist is always--almost always going to be able to find, in a nation our size, with a transportation system of this size, going to be able to find a point of attack that is not secure unless--I doubt that we could spend anywhere near enough money. We have enough money to spend to fully secure mass transit, and if we did we would probably make mass transit nonfunctional.

Yes, we can raise the visibility by putting more officers on trains, more bomb dogs and surveillance agents, and we should do that, but as a practical matter the way you protect your mass transit system is the same way you protect your other infrastructure systems. It is through aggressive and robust intelligence. You have to know who these people are before they attack you. That is the key to this exercise--robust intelligence capability. And there is some irony because to accomplish robust intelligence capability you have to go where the people come from. Where do they come from? They come from the Middle East. We are fighting them in the Middle East. Yet people who have concerns about that want to put dramatically new dollars into the mass transit system.

Well, the best place to get intelligence, quite honestly, is the breeding ground of these terrorists: Iraq, Afghanistan. And so that war in Iraq and Afghanistan is, as the President has pointed out a number of times, taking the war to them to find them before they can find us. Then, once you capture the people, you have to get the intelligence from them. That is why Guantanamo Bay is such an important part of intelligence of our country and why people come down to the floor and compare it to a Nazi concentration camp is such a gross misstatement of our purpose there and the actual action there. It is totally irresponsible to make statements such as that. No one has ever lost their life at Guantanamo Bay, and the interrogations which occur there occur under strict regimes. They are constantly monitored and meet all the necessary responsibilities of legal and humane rights.

But we get vast amounts of information as a result of moving very bad people from the Iraq and Afghanistan arena over to Guantanamo Bay. We get a vast amount of information from those individuals which gives us the intelligence we need.

Then, of course, you have the issue of profiling. Clearly, if you are going to stop these people, you are going to have to profile. That is being resisted. And then, of course, you have the issue of the PATRIOT Act. Clearly, if you are going to stop these people, you have to know what they are doing, and the way to do it is through electronic interdiction of their activities to a large degree. Yet you have people resisting.

Intelligence is the key to defending mass transit. Yet within this body, regrettably, there is a lot of resistance to those elements of our efforts which are necessary in order to effectively pursue strong intelligence. But that is not an issue for this bill. The homeland security intelligence role is not at the margin, but it is certainly not at the center of the effort to gather intelligence. That is done by other agencies--the Defense Department, CIA, and FBI. However, I certainly am willing to entertain moving more money into mass transit. We could probably do another $100 million in mass transit and not affect this bill substantially. But once you get beyond that, you are going to have to take it out of the deficit or someplace like that. But will you buy more security with those dollars? Not a great deal, I don't think, because the people you are dealing with know how to get around those types of security initiatives however well you may create a better sense of security.

This bill will, I suspect, over the next few days come under amendment in the area of how better to protect our borders. Maybe we will get better border security. The other part of the equation is how you let people into this country who legitimately want to come to work and are not seeking to do us harm but seeking to improve their livelihood. The Guest Worker Program, maybe we will get into that program, and certainly how best to address mass transit protection in light of London. I am open to all of that. I am flexible. Our purpose here is to make this agency work better.

In that context, I congratulate the Senator from West Virginia, my ranking member, and who has joined us on the floor. He has been a partner in putting this effort together. He is totally committed to trying to make sure we have a much safer country and a stronger Department of Homeland Security. He has done a great job of putting forward his ideas, many of which I totally agree with, some of which I may not agree with, but most of which I do agree with. I respect immensely his years of service to this Nation, which have been extraordinary, and his counsel, which is exceptional. I thank him and his staff for the generous and extraordinary way they approach everything, but especially this bill. As we move forward, I am sure he will have some additional ideas of how we can improve it on the floor, and I look forward to hearing those thoughts and ideas and I continue to look forward as we move this bill down the road to passage sooner rather than later because the Nation does need a Homeland Security bill.