DHS's Napolitano to give counterterrorism address in NY

Next Wednesday, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano plans to give a public address on counterterrorism issues at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, a person familiar with the planned speech said on condition of anonymity. The speech will come amid Napolitano's planned visits to relevant agencies and key sites in New York, including Ground Zero.

Last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also used the sixth-month mark in the job and a CFR speech to help raise her profile as the nation's top diplomat, which she has followed with a much-covered trip to India and Thailand. Clinton will also appear on NBC's Meet the Press for the full hour on Sunday, for the first time since becoming secretary of state.

The person familiar with Napolitano's planned remarks wouldn't get into substance, except to say a broad theme is likely to reflect recent press comments by DHS under secretary and former NSC counterterrorism official Rand Beers that terrorism is a threat common to us all and therefore requires a collective response involving the American people as well as international partners.

Napolitano is getting key guidance from several key officials, among them: Beers, who served as a national security advisor to the Obama campaign; deputy DHS secretary Jane Holl Lute, a former U.S. Army officer, Clinton-era NSC Europe hand, and former U.N. peacekeeping official married to holdover NSC "war czar" Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute; and assistant secretary for policy David Heyman, who headed up the homeland security shop at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

This week, the National Security Preparedness Group, which includes the former cochairs of the 9/11 commission, former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean and former Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton (many of whose former staffers have gone on to prominent positions in the Obama administration), visited DHS joined by former Pennsylvania governor and first DHS Secretary Tom Ridge. Members of the post 9/11 commission-group, which has recently been reconstituted to look at issues related to progress the U.S. government is making on homeland security and counterterrorism, recently met with the Director of the National Intelligence Dennis Blair and CIA Director Leon Panetta, a former member of the Study Group, an associate said.