THE WASHINGTON POST

The Other Governor Who Could Head Homeland Security

Sunday, November 24, 2002

By Melanie Scarborough

The Republican dominance in this month's elections ensured that President Bush got his Department of Homeland Security. One of his most consequential choices now is the selection of the department's first secretary. Although Tom Ridge appears to be the president's choice, among others Bush should consider is former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore.

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Elected in 1997 largely on the strength of his promise to cut the car tax, Gilmore was nearly run out of town four years later when he insisted on keeping his promise. The economy had weakened, and the state Senate demanded that the governor renege on his pledge. Gilmore refused and was widely blamed for the budget impasse that followed.

But what most Virginians may have forgotten is that in 1999 Gilmore was tapped to head a national commission on terrorism. For two years before the subject was blurred by primacy, proximity and politics, Gilmore's commission studied potential avenues of terrorist attack and the best means of prevention and response.

In December 1999, the panel reported that a catastrophic attack in the United States was inevitable and that the nation should prepare by coordinating strategy among federal, state and local responders. A year later, the commission presented dozens more recommendations, many of which were adopted by the Bush administration after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: creating an executive branch office charged with combating terrorism; strengthening first-responder services; and improving intelligence-gathering and communication among investigative agencies.

Having spent three years anticipating terrorism and devising ways to counter it, Gilmore is one of the few people who could bring applicable experience to the Department of Homeland Security. Moreover, former governors are among the most suitable candidates for the job because they are experienced in supervising convergent agencies.

Gilmore stands out as one of the few governors -- perhaps the only one -- who addressed the terrorist threat in their states before the attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Recognizing Virginia's unique responsibility as home to a large concentration of critical data centers -- the Pentagon, the CIA, NASA laboratories, the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, more than 50 percent of the nation's Internet traffic, etc. -- Gilmore appointed a state secretary of technology to develop a plan for safeguarding those assets.

Gilmore also had the prescience not to close Virginia's Y2K offices after that threat passed. Instead, he deployed those Y2K workers to the technology office, where they could apply their expertise to averting computer shutdowns caused by terrorists instead of the calendar. For practicality and efficiency, that is hard to beat.

But the principal asset Gilmore would bring to the Department of Homeland Security is his vision of defeating terrorism while preserving essential liberties. Most Americans seem to fall into one of two camps -- believing either that rights must be restricted for the sake of security or that danger must be endured as the price of freedom.

Gilmore is convinced that security and freedom do not have to be opposing values.

"If we cast aside all the privacies and protections of the people in order to get at the enemy, then the enemy will have attained a great victory," Gilmore said. "Totalitarian governments are infinitely more secure than free societies."

To be sure, Gilmore's philosophy goes against the tide. The Pentagon and the Transportation Security Administration are designing supercomputers that will give government access to private information such as medical records and credit card purchases. Americans now are herded into guarded pens for public events on the Mall and the Ellipse. Washington is a city of barricades and fences, surveillance cameras and metal detectors. The nation's capital has become a monument to fear. We are living al Qaeda's dream.

"By moving into the homeland," Gilmore says, "the enemy is trying to force us to invade all the liberties and privacies of the American people to get at [them]. The challenge is to develop procedures and systems to combat the enemy while preserving the civil liberties of the people."

Indeed. If the president is looking for someone to meet that challenge, he doesn't need to look far.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company

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