Cabinet position created

WASHINGTON -- It will be the daunting task of President Bush's new Office of Homeland Security to ensure terrorists can't take advantage of the nation's ease of movement to carry out attacks.\nPennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, the head of the new agency, will be "sitting at the right hand of the president," a senior Bush administration official said Thursday.\nThe office will create a plan to tighten security across the nation.\nThe Cabinet-level office is part of a whole new bureaucracy Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have orderedin response to the Sept. 11 attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center.\nBush said in his address to Congress on Thursday that Ridge "will lead, oversee and coordinate a comprehensive national strategy to safeguard our country against terrorism."\nIn addition, the National Security Council will get a national director for combatting terrorism and an Office of Cyber-Security, said the official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity.\nThe official quoted Bush as saying Ridge is "the individual I want to pick up the phone -- when the balloon goes up -- and call and know that we've got it all tied together and we know what the states are going to do and the cities are going to and what needs to be geared up from the standpoint of our health agencies."\nThe Sept. 11 attacks have left the nation feeling exposed and vulnerable.\nFederal investigators have found evidence that terrorists lived in the country for years before the attack, taking flight lessons, learning to fight at a gym and learning how to breach airport security.\nSome members of Congress have already begun to criticize the CIA for not picking up hints of the attack and acting to stop it.\nThe new office is aimed at knitting together the counterterrorism functions now scattered across several entities, including the FBI, CIA, the National Guard and local police and firefighting forces.\nIt will not only focus on preventing terrorist attacks, but also on fortifying potential targets by developing plans to protect the nation's transportation, power and food systems, the official said.\n"These measures are essential," Bush said. "The only way to defeat terrorism as a threat to our way of life is to stop it, eliminate it and destroy it where it grows."\nBefore the president's speech, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., called for the creation of a special federal agency to combat terrorism at home. As chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, he planned hearings on the issue Friday.\n"A funny and great thing happened on the way to my hearing tomorrow morning on the homeland security agency," Lieberman said Thursday night. "The president not only endorsed the idea, he apparently created it."\nLieberman said he would still hold the hearing, and would discuss ways to turn that office into a permanent agency.\nRidge, who saw combat as an enlisted man in Veitnam was born in the Pittsburgh suburb of Munhall. His family moved to Erie in the west of the state in 1948 when he was 3 years old. His parents were politically active -- his father a Democrat, his mother a Republican.\nHe graduated from local Catholic schools, worked summers as a union laborer and attended Harvard University on a scholarship. He graduated with honors in 1967 and enrolled in Dickinson Law School before being drafted at the end of his first year.\nRidge was successful in his first bid for congress in 1982 and served 12 years. He was elected governor in 1994 and re-elected handily in 1998. He is barred from running again when his term expires in January 2003.\nHis social agenda included welfare reform and a special legislative session on crime that gave birth to a three-strikes law and a faster death-penalty process.\nRidge has signed more than 200 execution warrants since becoming governor in 1995, including two warrants for Mumia Abu-Jamal, the convicted killer of a Philadelphia police officer whose case is a well-known cause among anti-death penalty activists.\nRidge was twice mentioned as a potential Republican candidate for vice president -- for a brief period during the early days of Bob Dole's run for the presidency in 1996 and more prominently as a potential running mate for candidate Bush.\nWhen Bush announced in the summer that Dick Cheney would be his vice-presidential candidate, Ridge said he had withdrawn his name from consideration three weeks earlier.\nRidge and his wife, Michele, have two adoptive children.\nHe will resign as governor Oct. 5, said his spokesman, Tim Reeves.