Michael Chertoff
Michael Chertoff
Michael Chertoffis an American attorney who was the second United States Secretary of Homeland Security under Presidents George W. Bush andBarack Obama, and co-author of the USA PATRIOT Act. He previously served as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, as a federal prosecutor, and as Assistant U.S. Attorney General. He succeeded Tom Ridge as United States Secretary of Homeland Security on February 15, 2005...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPublic Servant
Date of Birth28 November 1953
CountryUnited States of America
People have got to take some responsibility for preparing themselves, ... That means you get yourself three days' worth of food, three days' worth of water; you get yourself flashlights, batteries, either a hand-crank radio or a battery-powered radio, a first-aid kit precisely because you know it's going to take 48 to 72 hours to be able to fully service everyone.
We are emphatically behind the idea that we must in this country be full partners with the rest of the world in a robust and free-flowing pattern of travel and trade.
We owe the American people a full accounting from all levels of government concerning what went right and what went wrong with the initial Katrina response,
Vice Admiral Allen is doing an exceptional job, and he has my full support in the important work ahead,
Nobody leaves a hotel without getting a full measure of three months of rental assistance. So no one has been evicted - no one who's eligible has been evicted from a hotel without getting a significant amount of money to find - to pay for their rent.
I still don't have the full story about why some things weren't moving, and I look forward to having the answer to that,
Admiral Allen has my full support in the very difficult work we have ahead,
Federal, state and local resources have been fully mobilized,
It's important to allow the new people who have the responsibility ... to have access to the information we need to do better, ... We don't want to sacrifice the real ability to get a full picture of Mike's experiences; we don't want to sacrifice that ability simply in order to make an image point.
I think we're going to be ready when it does hit land,
I think we have discovered over the last few days that with all the tremendous effort using the existing resources and the traditional frameworks of the National Guard, the unusual set of challenges of conducting a massive evacuation in the context of a still dangerous flood requires us to basically break the traditional model and create a new model -- one for what you might call kind of an ultracatastrophe,
I think we need to prepare the country for what's coming, ... What's going to happen when we de-water and remove the water from New Orleans is we're going to uncover people who died, maybe hiding in houses, got caught by the flood, people whose remains are going to be found in the streets. . . . It is going to be about as ugly of a scene as I think you can imagine.
I think that that predication unhappily turned out to be correct and one of the things I said was we're racing the clock. Unfortunately, the hurricane beat us,
I think there's a strong argument that it ought not to be located in downtown Washington because of the desire to have some distance, you know, between ourselves and some other buildings,