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
Unless it can be credibly established that a mobilizing Federal resource ... is not needed at the catastrophic incident venue, that resource deploys,
We face an extraordinary threat to our national security and physical safety of the American people of a character that, at least in my lifetime, we have never faced before,
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.
going to be about as ugly a scene a you can imagine.
It is going to be about as ugly a scene as we've witnessed in this country, with the possible exception of 9/11,
Our role is not to repair the dikes. Our role is to step in if something happens.
The second is there are some communities that we thought originally would take mobile homes that have decided they don't want them. And we're not going to cram mobile homes down the throats of communities in Louisiana and the Gulf - and other parts of the Gulf Coast.
I'm not going to judge others, ... I did not have a problem dealing with state and local officials.
The whole point of this program is let people decide the fate of their own lives, ... And I think that avoids the whole issue of someone coming from outside and saying, 'You must do this' or 'You must do that.'
If there are contracts that turn out to be not properly cost effective or inappropriate in some other way, we can redo the contracts; we can renegotiate those contracts,
I want to have the people who are present here on the ground
Katrina was a crash course in things that worked well and didn't work well.
The tenor of his discussions on Monday . . . was, this was bad, but it could have been worse, ... There was not a report to me until the following morning that there was a significant breach of the 17th Street levee.
Get yourself into that command center in Baton Rouge!