On May 15, Quinney College Professor Amos Guiora, an expert in security and counterterrorism, will speak before the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security’s Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing, and Terrorism Risk Assessment.
Guiora, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Israel Defense Forces, will be a witness at a hearing titled “The Resilient Homeland: How DHS Intelligence Should Empower America to Prepare for, Prevent, and Withstand Terrorist Attacks.” Guiora’s publications include “Global Perspectives on Counterterrorism” (Aspen Publishers) and “Constitutional Limits on Coercive Interrogation” (OUP).
In his prepared testimony, Guiora urges the public and private sectors to share information with one another: “Ultimately, the point is to develop a national security strategy in which the private sector is part of the discussion.”
“The only way that will happen is if there is information sharing between the private and public sectors.”
In his testimony, Guiora also advocates that the private sector begin to approach security issues more systematically: “[I believe] business leaders should more carefully scrutinize who their employees are, and other related issues — how they develop additional sites for their business, the possibility of quarantine after a terrorist attack, how they can restrict their employees from traveling between sites to reduce the risk of contagion or further attacks, and how they might begin making [contingency] plans for setting up alternative sites after a terrorist attack.”
According to Guiora, the testimony will also including risk planning, security planning, risk and threat assessment, evaluation planning, and rule of law legislation. In an executive summary of his prepared remarks, he writes: “To ensure a resilient homeland in a post-9/11 society, the United States must have a homeland security strategy that (1) understands the threat, (2) effectively counters the threat while preserving American values, (3) establishes a system of accountability, and (4) creates public-private and federal-state partnerships facilitating intelligence sharing and the continuity of society in the aftermath of an attack.”
The hearing will convene at 10:00 a.m. EST in 311 Cannon House Office Building.
Click here to view a live webcast of the hearing, including Guiora’s testimony
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