House Committee on Government Reform; Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations

House Committee on Government Reform
Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations

Opening Statement of Tom Lantos
(D-San Mateo, San Francisco)

City Hall, San Mateo, California
August 2, 2004

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman [Christopher Shays, R-CT]. Let me just first say there is no member of Congress for whom I have higher regard or greater appreciation than you. You have conducted a whole series of singular and significant hearings on homeland security ever since 9-11, and you have made an enormous contribution to enhancing our access to information in the face of terrorist threats.

I also want to thank my good friend and neighbor, Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, for joining our subcommittee. She and I share San Mateo County in terms of federal representation, she is an outstanding member of Congress, an important member of the Intelligence Committee, and her contributions to enhancing domestic security have been significant and will continue to be.

I also want to thank both the Committee staff and my personal staff, and all of our witnesses for their invaluable work.
I also want to congratulate law enforcement for apprehending those involved in this very serious theft of explosives. The suspects have been apprehended, and the explosives have been recovered. And this is one potential tragedy of significant proportions that has been defused.

We need not point out to anybody the unique and extraordinary timing of this hearing. If you have read this morning's local papers or The New York Times, if you listen to radio or watch television, the topic is basically the topic of this hearing on a broader and more expanded level.

I also would like to say a word about the committee on which Chairman Shays and I have the privilege of serving. The
Government Reform Committee is the oversight committee of the Congress of the United States. Whatever the issue - from inappropriate behavior by cabinet members, as was the case of the Department of Housing and Urban Development when I chaired the subcommittee and Chris [Shays] was my invaluable Republican colleague, to the protection of homeland security - this committee sees to it that the laws are carried out as they are supposed to be carried out, and as is likely to be the case with respect to today's hearing, new legislation is introduced and passed where gaps appear in the panoply of legislation that deals with national security.

Field hearings by this committee are fairly unusual. Field hearings demand that members and staff go out to various parts of the country, and the infrastructure of Washington, DC is not there, but occasionally field hearings are justified. This particular field hearing, and I want to thank my friend Chris Shays for holding it, is in line with other important field hearings this committee had here in San Mateo County in earlier periods. During a particularly severe storm over 20 years ago when Devil's Slide was washed away, at my request the then-chairman of the committee brought out this bipartisan committee to hold field hearings on Devil's Slide with laudable results. And about 20 years ago, I had the first field hearing on the subject of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve here in San Mateo County.

This time, a gap in our security as it relates to the storage of explosives by public agencies not only will result in dealing with this specific instance, which is really not our main concern - we are not a law enforcement agency, and this is not a court of law. Our main purpose will be to see what additional legislation is called for to plug the loophole in this most important arena.

The explosives industry is big business. We are using in this country about 2½ million metric tons of explosives every year. It's over a billion dollars in sales. And, and we dig into this particular episode, we discover that there are scores of thefts of high explosives across the country. At a time when explosives are the preferred method of operation of terrorists, the importance of safeguarding explosives should be obvious to all of us.

Federal security standards for public storage facilities at the moment are voluntary. This is a pre-9/11 standard which simply doesn't hold up in a post-9/11 world. In my judgment, we will need uniform federal standards, uniformly enforced across this country. And once we make that legislation and it is properly implemented, this particular gaping hole in our domestic security structure will have been eliminated.

Let me say just one final word about funding. We must not allow funding for homeland security to become pork-barrel legislation. It is, to quite an extent, as we meet here this morning. The state of Wyoming receives about $38 per person for homeland security purposes while California receives about $5. At a time when some areas are uniquely exposed to the dangers of terrorist attacks - and this morning, Secretary Ridge has designated New York City, part of New Jersey our nation's capital as high-risk areas, the notion that Wyoming should be getting many times as much per capita as California, with all of its vulnerable facilities, is simply unacceptable. Pork-barrel funding of homeland security is simply not something that the American people will tolerate.

I suspect in that many ways that since 9/11 we have been confronted with what I call the "guns of Singapore phenomenon." As some of you may know, the guns of Singapore in the Second World War were fixed in place aiming at the sea. But the danger, the invasion and finally the occupation of Singapore came from the land behind, and the guns of Singapore were never fired in that battle. They couldn't be - they were aimed at the wrong enemy. Now it's self-evident that when on 9/11 the terrorist gangsters and mass-murderers captured our civilian airliners, we had a phenomenon similar to the guns of Singapore. Our Air Force was more than ready to deal with alien and hostile air forces which simply did not materialize, but we were unprepared to deal with terrorism capturing domestic airliners.

At a time when explosives are so critical in the struggle against terrorism, to see a facility just a few miles from here be as undefended, unprotected as in fact they were during the Fourth of July weekend is something we cannot tolerate.
And as Chairman Shays so properly indicated, we are dealing with a national wake-up call which could be a blessing in disguise. And if Congress acts and the Administration follows, we will be able to plug this enormous loophole in our national security apparatus.