Homeland Security

One of the most controversial floor fights today will be over homeland missile defense. The House Armed Services Committee provided $100 million for an Environmental Impact Study for a military site on the East Coast to defend against ballistic missiles. It also added $357 million more to the president's budget request for the only system currently deployed to defend the homeland from long-range missiles, the Ground Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system. The Rules Committee has made in order an amendment by Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.) to eliminate $403 million from GMD. The East Coast site is likely to be sucked into the debate when Members argue the merits of her amendment.

The East Coast site and increased funding for GMD meet common objections from opponents.

Few issues unite Democrats and Republicans, much less bring people together from across the entire political spectrum. But provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), authorizing military detention without due process, did just that.

This week, Congress has the opportunity to join a rare bipartisan chorus rising across the country. An amendment to the NDAA, sponsored by Representatives Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and Justin Amash (R-Mich.), has galvanized everyone from Occupiers to Tea Partiers, united by the specter of domestic military detention without trial.

In the last two months, state legislatures in Virginia and Arizona passed, with broad bipartisan support, bills forbidding state cooperation with any attempts at federally sanctioned kidnapping under the NDAA. A dozen city and county councils in eight states from coast-to-coast -- led by Democrats, Republicans and even Green Party members -- have passed similar resolutions.

Why the fuss?

There are few things that have real bipartisan consensus in Congress nowadays. So, when both parties agree to cancel a billion dollar boondoggle, it is clear that there was something very wrong with the project.

This past month, both the House and Senate Appropriations Committees agreed with the Pentagon’s and the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) decision to cancel a $6 billion plutonium laboratory in New Mexico—the  Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility (CMRR-NF) at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Despite this consensus, one member of Congress is leading the charge to put money for  the CMRR-NF back into the budget.

It’s become increasingly difficult over the years for Democrats and Republicans in Congress to get together and do something productive. Factor in an election year, and it’s down-right impossible.
 
Or is it?
 
Earlier this week, Representative Adam Smith (D-Wash.), ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, announced that he will be pushing for an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would ban indefinite detention within the United States and reverse a dangerous provision of law that could force the transfer of some terrorism suspects into military custody.
 
Representative Smith, a Democrat, will be joined by Representative Justin Amash, among other Republicans, in what promises to be one of 2012’s few truly bi-partisan initiatives. What’s more – and this you’re not going to believe – it’s an initiative that makes a whole lot of policy sense.
 
Let’s take a step back to see how we got here.
 
Last year, in pushing through the defense authorization bill, Congress enacted a set of provisions on detainee policy that were a fundamental affront to the rule of law and our national security. Two provisions in particular stood out.
 
First, Congress codified the authority of the military to pick up and indefinitely detain without charge or trial individuals suspected of terrorism. No probable cause. No jury trial. No guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
 
Although the government had been exercising this authority for a decade in the case of detainees held in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, some proponents of the new NDAA detainee provisions, such as Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), warned of new threats among us, here at home. To these members of Congress, America is now the battlefield, and anyone determined to have substantially supported terrorism could be subject to lifetime imprisonment without ever facing charges.

Today the House Armed Services Committee will debate the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), possibly overturning 25 years of safety standards at our nation’s weapons facilities. During this debate members of this committee will have a choice – they can protect communities around nuclear sites and the employees who work there or they can go on record as turning their back on those safety standards.

There are several sections of the NDAA that relate directly to nuclear safety and pose a threat to security. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this bill is the fact that it would overturn the “adequate protection standard” that has guided nuclear safety oversight for over two decades. The adequate protection standard, which through legal precedent has been defined as not allowing cost considerations to impact safety recommendations, would be muddled by a new “low as reasonably practicable” standard, an imprecise measure undefined by statute and almost certain to favor cost-cutting measures over public safety.

The United States experienced an inspiring moment earlier this month, when a 747 carried the space shuttle Discovery to its new home at the Smithsonian. I was fortunate to be in Washington that day; as I looked up at the sky, I was moved to feel pride in the intelligence, the vision and the scientific knowledge of this great country that made the space shuttle possible.
 
I keep thinking about that day as I consider Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives, former chief of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center Jose Rodriguez’s book that praises the benefits of the torture he helped inflict on 9-11 detainees. It’s difficult to rationalize how the visionary work of something like our space program can come from the same country as the cowardly and inhumane work of our detainee interrogation program. This country can do such good, but we can also make terrible mistakes, and when we do, we must admit them, not justify them.

Illegal immigrant workers not only take jobs from American workers, they also damage the future of millions of American children through fraud and identity theft.

It’s an issue that will not go away if our southern border is sealed or Mexican citizens decide the United States is no longer a desirable destination, as a recent Pew Hispanic Center study suggests. Forty percent of illegal immigrants are visa overstays who come from around the world. That percentage will only rise if the recent Pew Hispanic Center study is correct. Illegal immigrants need fraudulent documents to obtain employment no matter where they come from.

Children are particularly susceptible to identity theft.

Earlier this month, Army Maj. General Stephen Smith, director of the Cyberspace Task Force for the service, discussed his plans for secure remote access.

According to Maj. General Smith, the Army and the Defense Information Systems Agency will issue a broad agency announcement by the early summer detailing a new approach to securing mobile devices.

In plain English, the proposed solution would provide remote workers with an easy-to-use solution to access their network data and information from wherever and whenever they wanted, but would prohibit then from extracting or downloading that information externally (onto external devices). Maj. General Smith clearly understands the importance of and need for both identity management and data entitlement, which are not only serious concerns with potentially catastrophic consequences for the government, but also for private business. 

In my opinion, the largest threat we as a nation face is from cyberattack and loss of critical data. 

In 2010, I introduced SB1070 to the Arizona Senate with two goals: To alleviate the problems that the federal government’s failure to secure our border and enforce our immigration laws inflicted on the citizens of Arizona, and to spark a national conversation about this issue that would eventually lead the federal government to act.

Despite parts of the bill being blocked by activist lower court judges, it has already succeeded on both counts. In 2009, illegal immigrants comprised 9.8 percent of Arizona’s workforce (Pew Hispanic Center) and the Federation for American Immigration Reform found that illegals cost Arizona taxpayers $2.6 billion a year. At the same time, failure to enforce our laws led to rampant crime, Phoenix had the highest kidnapping rate in the country, and dozens of police officers and citizens were killed or maimed by illegals.

The purpose of this bill is not to indiscriminately go through Hispanic neighborhoods and ask everyone to prove they are citizens.  Rather, SB1070 is part of Arizona’s attrition through enforcement strategy that began with 2004’s Prop 200 and 2007’s Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA), which I also authored. 

Every few years, some outrageous abuse of the taxpayer's dollars rightfully grabs headlines. Many will remember the infamous $400 toilet seats that were part of the defense procurement scandals of the 1980’s. More recently, there was the “bridge to nowhere,” a $25 million dollar boondoggle that perfectly exemplified poor Congressional oversight of our taxes.

The problem with these headline grabbers is that they often focus on comparatively small matters in the relative scheme of federal spending and arguably distract attention from vastly more wasteful spending.

You need look no further for an example of this than the hundreds of billions of dollars that the U.S. is projected to spend on redundant and unnecessary nuclear weapons over the next decade.