November 26, 2002	Tuesday	Ramazan 20, 1423

WASHINGTON, Nov 25: US President George Bush signed a law on Monday creating a vast Department of Homeland Security to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States, setting in motion the biggest government overhaul in half a century that will take at least a year to complete.

“We can neither predict nor prevent every conceivable attack,” Bush said at a White House ceremony. “...Yet our government will take every possible measure to safeguard our country and our people.”

“...The continuing threat of terrorism, the threat of mass murder on our own soil will be met by a unified, effective response,” he pledged.

A chief aim of the new department will be to avoid breakdowns in communication between the FBI, CIA and other federal agencies exposed by last year’s hijacked airliner attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon.

While neither the FBI nor the CIA will be part of the new department, it will include a division that would analyse intelligence in hopes of thwarting future attacks.

Bush said he would nominate White House adviser Tom Ridge to head the new agency, taking on what many believe is an impossible job screening out would-be attackers without slowing down some 500 million people. Ridge is expected to win easy confirmation in the U.S. Senate.

Bush will nominate Navy Secretary Gordon England to serve as Ridge’s deputy at the Cabinet-level agency, which will consolidate all or parts of 22 federal agencies, including the Coast Guard, Secret Service and Border Patrol.

The president acknowledged it would be an “immense task” setting up the new agency. “Adjustments will be needed along the way. Yet this is pressing business and the hard work of building a new department begins today,” he said.

The new department was initially proposed by Democrats and opposed by the White House. Bush later offered a similar plan and made it a central theme in the Nov. 5 election, in which his Republican Party gained control of the U.S. Congress.

Bush will submit a reorganization plan within the next 60 days. No sooner than 90 days from receipt of that plan, agencies can be transferred. The administration has a year to consolidate the two dozen federal agencies.

But it is expected to take several years to fully integrate the various agencies and their different ways.

“While the nation is continuing to be protected today, there’s no question the new agency will go through growing pains. Wrinkles are going to have to be ironed out,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer conceded.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat who first proposed a Department of Homeland Security a month after the Sept 11 attacks, warned against bureaucratic foot-dragging.

“While we have been debating the creation of this department, our terrorist enemies have been plotting and planning to exploit our vulnerabilities. We must close the gaps in our domestic defences as quickly as humanly possible,” Lieberman said.

Ridge, a former Pennsylvania governor, is currently director of the White House Office of Homeland Security.

Bush said Asa Hutchinson, the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, would be nominated to serve as undersecretary for Border and Transportation Security.

Formation of the department comes at a time of growing concern that Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network, blamed for the attacks on America, will strike again. Intelligence agencies in recent weeks have reported an increase in communications among militants.

The president will have broad authority to hire, fire and transfer workers at the department in the name of national security. That flexibility, opposed by most Democrats and their allies in organized labour, was the biggest hurdle to passage.—Reuters