Talk Radio News Service: News, Politics, Media

By Justine Rellosa- Talk Radio News Service

Former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean (R) and former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.), the chairmen of the 9/11 Commission, testified before the House Homeland Security Committee to discuss the challenge of evolving terrorist threats and the need to re-frame the nation’s watchlist.

Hamilton argued that the U.S. should have a single terrorist watchlist available to the entire intelligent and law enforcement community.

“We’ve not done a very good job of integrating the watchlist or assuring its accuracy and we just keep adding thousands and thousands of additional names to it. So I think the watchlist needs a lot of work,” Hamilton said at Wednesday’s hearing.

Kean directed his focus toward the attempted bombings in New York's Times Square and a commercial airliner Christmas eve and commented on how they showcased the problem of threat detection.

“I think the Christmas Day bomber, and perhaps the Times Square bomber, did us a huge favor. It got us to look again at the watchlist and the problems with it. It got us to look at the problems of information sharing again,” Kean said. “It focused our attention at a time when our attention quite naturally wandered.”

Both Kean and Hamilton called for pushing forward with intelligence reform and passing legislation that will strengthen governmental institutions that are designed to fight international terrorism and threats to the U.S.

“The burden is on the President now to clarify who’s in charge of the intelligence community... As long as you leave it to the inter-agency process, without clear direction from the President, you are not going to have an integrated intelligence product,” Hamilton said.