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During her confirmation hearing on January 15, 2009, DHS Secretary-Designate Janet Napolitano did not talk about responding to terrorism. Instead she referred to it as ‘man caused disasters’:
The overriding and urgent mission of the United States Department of Homeland Security is contained in the name of the agency itself. To secure the homeland means to protect our nation’s borders by finding and killing the roots of terrorism and to stop those who intend to hurt us; to wisely enforce the rule of law at our borders; to protect our national cyber infrastructure; and to prepare for and respond to natural and man-caused disasters with speed, skill, compassion, and effectiveness.
In an interview with SPIEGEL on March 16, 2009, Napolitano made this statement about her testimony:
SPIEGEL: Madame Secretary, in your first testimony to the US Congress as Homeland Security Secretary you never mentioned the word “terrorism.” Does Islamist terrorism suddenly no longer pose a threat to your country?
Napolitano: Of course it does. I presume there is always a threat from terrorism. In my speech, although I did not use the word “terrorism,” I referred to “man-caused” disasters. That is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.
In an April 21, 2009 speech to the Anti Defamation League, she made these remarks:
The first area is the area that really fueled the creation of the department in the first place, and that is the battle against and the prevention of terrorism and terrorist attacks. And that can be terrorism that comes from abroad of terrorism that is homegrown. There was some critique of some testimony I gave where I didn’t use the word terrorism, per se. I used the phrase “man-caused disaster,” which had been used by other secretaries before me, because so often we think of terrorism and the mindset is just al-Qaeda. And al-Qaeda is with us. It is a force, and it is one that we recognize and understand as an extremist force in the world.
But it is not the only such group, and so to use a different phrase is an effort to cause people to think more broadly about what we are dealing with, and that is those who seek to commit violence to impact broader societies through their economies, through the exercise of their freedoms, and the like. And that is what we are fighting, and that is what we are resisting. So the issue of terrorism, counterterrorism, in the broader sense is the number one mission of the Department. It is why it was founded, and it is what we grapple with every day.
I used the poor man’s Lexis-Nexis (Google), and was unable to find a single reference by the previous two DHS Secretaries to ‘man-caused disasters’. So, why the sudden about-face, and is she pandering to her audience? Are the facts of terrorism interfering with the desire to create ‘nuance’? In 3 short months, she’s had more positions on terrorism than I had in playing 17 rounds of Twister. And I’m not referring to a man-caused disaster unless you’re talking about her leadership.
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