Last night the folks at CBS News provided a brief
look at the problems at ISCD that have been discussed here for over a year
now. Nothing new here other than former DHS Assistant Secretary Todd Keil
confirms what
I said back in February about his being forced out because of CFATS
problems.
Okay I’ll take that back. On the video (I didn’t see this on
TV, who would have known) Keil claims that he requested an IG investigation,
but that request was not forwarded to the IG. If there is any documentation of
that request (and I really doubt that there is) then Under Secretary Beers has
something to answer for. Of course someone like Keil would have known that such
a request was political suicide, so if it was really made he would have gone
directly to the IG as was his ‘right’ as a federal employee. More likely he
mentioned that an IG investigation was needed and it was quashed with his
reluctant acquiescence.
The timing on this is absolutely stupid. Congress is leaving
town so they can’t (wouldn’t really any way, but now they have the excuse) do
anything about it. This is a 90 second wonder that will be forgotten in the
news about the campaign and political conventions.
One question for the producer at CBS; why Senator Grassley?
This was the only member of Congress that they included in the piece and he has
little or nothing to do with the oversight of CFATS. Why didn’t they ask Lieberman,
Collins, King or Thompson? These are the people that have abdicated their
oversight responsibilities for the CFATS program.
Of course, this piece by CBS, all of the hearings to-date,
have ignored the basis of the problem. Congress saddled the folks at CFATS with
an unenforceable program, denying them the ability to tell facilities what they
needed to do to get a site security plan approved. With each facility requiring
a multiple visit negotiation where one side had to remain silent ensures that
the site security approval process would be time consuming at best. The fact
that the folks at ISCD were less than efficient at implementing this was really
just icing on the cake.
BTW: A reader pointed me at this story last night,
commenting that I had been ‘scooped’ by CBS. Hardly, but CBS is over six months
late covering this story; FOX News beat them with their story back in December.
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1 comment:
Why doesn't Kiel fess up to ISCD HQ being the problem instead of this fallacious theme that it was the Field Inspectors that were the problem. HQ was responsible for the scheduling and approval of every last thing that was done by the field. An Inspector couldn't give a CFATS 101 brief unless HQ signed off on it, much less go out and inspect a facility. More BS from a beltway insider out to blame anybody but himself...
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