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
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,
Unless it can be credibly established that a mobilizing Federal resource ... is not needed at the catastrophic incident venue, that resource deploys,
As far as my agency is concerned, port security really rests principally with the Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection.
The world is not going to stop moving because we are very focused on Katrina. Part of the responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security is to deal with all hazards, everything that's out there, and to continue to be able to keep our eye on everything that may happen in the future,
If confirmed, I pledge to devote all my energy to promoting homeland security and all our fundamental liberties.
This 30-minute seating rule was a sensible measure when first applied, ... Now, almost four years later, significantly enhanced layers of security ranging from hardened cockpit doors to air marshals make it reasonable to eliminate this requirement.
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.