CNN news 2010-01-03 加文本

2010-01-03 cnn

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You have said that throughout this, the system worked smoothly. What exactly worked in your opinion?

JANET NAPOLITANO, HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY: Yeah, that's a phrase taken out of context. What I said is moving forward, meaning once the incident happened, we were able to immediately notify the 128 flights in the air as well as airports on the ground domestically, internationally. Our law enforcement partners, our other allies institute immediate safety procedures to make sure that this could not happen on other flights and that people were watching out for it on other flights even as we focused on what went wrong part of this one.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: So you do recognize that it didn't work smoothly leading up to this?

NAPOLITANO: Obviously, it didn't. No secretary of homeland security would say that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Governor, have a lot of things been prevented that we don't know about?

RIDGE: Well, I think there have been. One of the things you don't know about is the number of people that we have turned away because their name has been on the watch list or on the no-fly list. But the challenge, I think associated with this incident, Larry, isn't what Secretary Napolitano said on her clarification, is that the clash of cultures that I encountered when we set up the Department of Homeland Security, the difference between the old institutions of the cold war, be there law enforcement or intelligence community and the new department, the Department of Homeland Security, the old cold war mentality was need to know.

The new war, the new paradigm, the new enemy requires a need to share. And when the president said today he wants to scrub the watch list and see what the gaps were. Understand precisely why the total picture was not available to the terrorist screening centers so that this person could not have boarded that plane.

Why the state department didn't revoke his visa immediately is beyond belief in my judgment either, but the heart of this is it's a clash of cultures, it's an institutional challenge. DHS can only act on information it gets and I'm not sure they had all the information at its disposal.