In a memo to community groups and the Maine and New Hampshire delegations, Senator Collins said that she would be immediately sending disks containing information that she received as the result of the subpoena that she, as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and ranking member Joseph Lieberman issued to the Department of Defense on June 7. In addition, information released to date by the Department and posted on its website is difficult to access and in some cases, impossible to search. So Senator Collins has been working to create a system whereby individuals can search for specific information.
The text of Senator Collins' memo is as follows:
M E M O R A N D U M
TO: Kittery-Portsmouth Community Group Brunswick Task Force Grow DFAS Limestone Maine Congressional Delegation New Hampshire Congressional Delegation Governor Baldacci Governor Lynch BRAC Commission Analysts for DFAS Limestone, PNSY, and BNAS FROM: Senator Susan Collins
RE: Additional Documents to Share/Search Capabilities
DATE: June 17, 2005
The Department of Defense (DoD) has produced thousands of pages of documents, and posted thousands more on its webpage, in response to the subpoena that Senator Lieberman and I issued last week. In total, DoD has posted approximately 25 million pieces of information in hundreds of specific documents on its webpage. Although the documents are organized by broad categories, they can only be searched one at a time. For technical reasons, a significant portion of these documents (approximately 20 percent) cannot be searched using a standard search function and need to be read manually.
Staff searched various categories of documents (posted by DoD as of June 15) relevant to Brunswick Naval Air Station, Kittery-Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, and DFAS Limestone. Because of the technical issue noted above, the searches cover approximately 80 percent of the relevant pages on the website. The results are set forth on a CD that is being delivered or sent via FedEx to you today.
In addition, we have been working to find a way to conduct quick, reliable searches across the entire set of documents made available by DoD. Staff from my office, including technical support professionals, are creating a searchable database of all relevant BRAC documents. We expect it to be operational by early next week for documents disclosed by DoD as of June 9. We will add to the database over the course of the week. In response to the subpoena, we have also received disks containing thousands of pages of additional information, which we also plan to add to our database. In the coming days, we expect to receive more information from DoD. Once we have all of the DoD webpage and supplemental documents in our database, we should be able to conduct searches capable of identifying files containing particular terms or using a variety of other search parameters. We are in the process of determining how to maximize accessibility of these search capabilities.
We will continue to share with you whatever relevant information we discover and encourage you to continue letting us know what additional and specific data we need from DOD to help make our case.
Finally, earlier this week, both Senator Lieberman and I met with Secretary Gordon England who promised the Department''s continuing cooperation. I specifically asked Secretary England to make available the Department analysts who were most involved in the decisions on our bases and the DFAS Center. He agreed to do so.