After the events of September 11, 2001, like many Americans I waited to see our country go into action to find those who had perpetrated the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.
As much as I disliked the personality and policies of President George W. Bush, I liked his rallying cry in the World Trade Center rubble. This was the first time since World War II that Americans, as a society could have been harnessed together to defeat an enemy. Sadly after that, President Bush only told us to go shopping.
While we were going shopping, the Bush administration was creating a Frankenstein-like monster of a national security agency, called Homeland Security. The stitching together of so many disparate agencies with overlapping responsibilities seemed to me at first glance to be both an unwieldy and ominous combination.
Yes, it is true that no further attack has been perpetuated like that of September 11, 2001, thank God. Therefore, certainly, our intelligence community, military and law enforcement has been effective in their work. There have only been a few much lesser incidents. However, almost nine years later, the CBS News report I have posted here, based on a Washington Post study, shows that indeed the machine is made up of many parts that still do not fit together. Perhaps it is time for a reevaluation.
I wonder if this is what Homeland Security with its many parts is like in its functioning.
M.C. Escher - Relativity
I can see the figures in the puzzle of our nation's security with binoculars or infrared goggles and wearing earpieces and carrying laptop computers. Going up and down the never ending, folding back of stairs, in a never-ending search for what Bush called, "the evil doers." I hope that there will be a reevaluation of the colossus and a divesting of some of its appendages. Take the Coast Guard out for a start. I love the Coast Guard and what they do, they do with excellence. Take them out of Homeland Security and place them, not back in a governmental department like Commerce or Treasury, but where they have always belonged, in the Defense Department. The CBS piece interviews Washington Post reporter Dana Priest who says, "It didn't give me great confidence to hear the government itself say we really don't have our arms around what we've built."
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