The key person to lead the country in the document is
Francis Fragos Townsend.
Background on her is:
The WashPost article on this event says:
"The new directive gives the job of coordinating policy to the president's
assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism -- *Frances Fragos
Townsend*, who will assume the title of national continuity coordinator --
in consultation with Bush's national security adviser, Stephen J.
Hadley<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/related-topics.html?tid=informline&subject=Stephen+Hadley >,
with the support of the White House's Homeland Security Council staff."
A friend of ours looked into the unknown person who will now be taking
control and sent us this email -
AND JUST WHO IS FFT?
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/artic ... _print.htm
* Frances Fragos Townsend: *Townsend's critics, unsurprisingly, don't see
it quite that way. "She's a trip; she's one of the most ambitious people
I've met," says a former Bush administration official. "She's always sucking
up."
Townsend credits her success to tenacity. "Nobody could be more surprised
than I," she said in an interview, "that I wound up here." Townsend is the
only child of Irish-Catholic parents from Long Island. Neither parent
finished high school, and they separated when she was a teenager. Townsend's
mother, an office worker, helped to push her daughter through law school.
But Townsend was also close to her father, a roofer and World War
IIveteran. [Overweeningly ambitious, poor origins, eminently
corruptible.]
Townsend's career began as a prosecutor in the Brooklyn district attorney's
office, but it took off when she moved to the U.S. attorney's office in
Manhattan, where she began prosecuting corporate and mob cases for Rudolph
Giuliani. Comey, a young prosecutor there, remembers the disappointment of
some of Townsend's witnesses when he was asked to take over one of her Mafia
cases. "You know," he says, laughing, "they were all depressed when I became
their handler, and I don't think it's because I'm any less attractive. It's
just that she had a great rapport with people--great people skills."
Townsend developed a unique perspective on al Qaeda because of her close
personal friendship with a legendary FBI agent and al Qaeda expert named
John O'Neill, who retired from the bureau but lost his life on Sept. 11,
2001, just days after starting his job as security chief at the World Trade
Center.
Another of Townsend's mentors is former FBI Director Louis Freeh, who
encouraged her to accept a sensitive Justice job that turned into a hornet's
nest. In 1998, at Reno's request, Townsend became the head of the
powerful Office
of Intelligence Policy and Review. The OIPR enforces a controversial statute
known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, under which the FBI or
other agencies can obtain special wiretaps and other search and surveillance
warrants to track spies and terrorists. ...*Townsend believed that the FISA
court and its chief judge at the time, Royce Lamberth, would refuse to
approve search warrants and wiretaps if they believed too much information
sharing was going on* and if prosecutors were controlling or directing the
intelligence-gathering efforts. One knowledgeable source backs her up and
says Townsend "cared very much about following procedures." But others
suspect an ulterior motive. Some Justice Department prosecutors felt *Townsend
wanted to keep the wall up* because it kept prosecutors out of national
security investigations, leaving more authority in the hands of Townsend and
friendly bureau agents. *Whatever the case, there were serious
consequences. Both the Government Accountability Office and the 9/11
commission have blamed OIPR in part for the government's intelligence
failures before the terrorist attacks. Sources say that OIPR's narrow
interpretation of FISA led to misunderstandings and overly cautious behavior
by the FBI. As a result, in July and August of 2001, FBI intelligence
analysts prohibited their own criminal-case agents from searching for two
men on the government's terrorist watch list who they knew had entered
the United
States. The men later proved to be two of the 19 hijackers. ...*
Barely two years later, Townsend was on her way back to the top. As National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's counterterrorism deputy, Townsend beefed
up White House involvement in security planning for the Olympic Games in
Athens and made several trips to Saudi Arabia. "She's been very important on
issues of terrorist financing," Rice told *U.S. News. *Rice said Townsend
also played a key "debottlenecking" role in Iraq, to "make sure people were
getting the kind of merged intelligence that was needed." ..."Terrorism
ought not to be about politics," Townsend says, "and I don't think it is in
this administration." Last March, however, Townsend made a $2,000
contribution to the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, just two days after
Rice's former counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke--another Clinton
holdover--excoriated Bush's counterterrorism record during the 9/11
commission hearings.