WHAT IS WRONG WITH HOMELAND SECURITY. (30 APR 2016)

This is an article written to appeal to all sensible Americans. There is a saying, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” With that kind of thinking, many Americans went along with the Bush administration’s Patriot Act & the creation of a huge bureaucracy called Homeland Security (HS) in 2002 with Bush’s Homeland Security Act. The Act set up HS to protect us from terrorism & natural disasters… with the wording that HS would protect us so our “way of life can thrive”. So what are key features of our way of life? People flock to America because of our economic opportunities & the concept of liberty (that the Statue of Liberty represents). In fact, for many immigrants the Statue of Liberty was their first view of America as they entered the nation through Ellis Island.

RESULTS. The creation of DHS resulted in massive expenditures of money: $241 billion in its first 4 years. The govt. budget doc. for 2016 said $64.9 billion total for DHS, but when I added up the various budget parts for HS I got $103.8 billion. Either way it is a large budget. In 2007, the federal govt.’s General Accounting Office (GAO) had the job of grading the success of HS and they flunked it! Of the 24 emergency prepardness criteria it was assigned only 5 had been met. Of the 171 directives (goals given) it had accomplished less than half. Effective preventive measures had often been neglected. For instance, most airplane cargo is not inspected. By the govt.’s own assessments, a massive expensive bureaucracy–the largest in American history, with 5 levels to it, 22 departments and 187 agencies had been created with 220,000 employees…but our ability to deal with disasters had not improved, nor were we any safer. A massive security apparatus had been built with essentially no checks on the surveillance of Americans & foreigners. The overall result of spending many hundreds of billions of dollars on HS was to weaken our economy and walk over all the Constitutional rights, especially the fourth & fifth amendments in the Bill of Rights. In other words, the two values that people most appreciated about America, economic opportunity and liberty, were both severely weakened by HS. Certainly, the wording to preserve our “way of life” so that it could “thrive”, got overlooked in the haste to built up a police state that can track all your communication.

IF THE END JUSTIFIES THE MEANS, then the poor results from HS do not justify the means. For instance, FEMA, which is part of HS, did more harm than help during Katrina. They prevented state and local relief efforts from going in. And when FEMA went in, their acts were outrageous. That’s an entirely separate story from this article. As stated, the weakening of our economy and our civil rights by HS has destroyed the very things that make America great. Rather than protect our way of life, HS has destroyed it. Liberty was what the American Revolution was all about.

WHAT IS THE GOAL OF TERRORISM? The purpose of terrorism is to cause terror. So every time our government & the mass media scare Americans they are aiding & abetting the terrorists. HS was founded on its manifesto’s words: “Today’s terrorists can strike at any place, at any time and with virtually any weapon.” Over the years, the mass media and the govt. continue to scare us that terrorism is just next door about to happen; it is permanent fear from a permanent “war” on terror. Keeping people in a constant state of terror is actually doing the job for all terrorists. Late in WW 2, the Japanese sent almost 10,000 bomb-loaded hydrogen balloons via the jet stream to attack America. At least 300 were observed arriving to America. In order to prevent this terrorist attack from succeeding, every one (incl. the media) were forbidden to talk about the balloons. The mass fear that the balloon attacks would have made never happened. That is how one deals with terrorist attacks–not by gutting our Constitutional rights, creating a police state & creating an enormous bureaucracy and scaring the tar out of people daily. America will not be saved by bureaucracy and pork!

CAN GOVT. PROTECT US FROM ALL HARM?? Even though it sometimes acts as if it were God, govt. does not equal God. Israel, a small nation with a security apparatus many times stronger than ours, still has terrorist attacks. Our water & food supplies are poorly protected. So we are still very vulnerable, yet for all our vulnerability, terrorist attacks are quite rare. Even arrests of true terrorists are quite rare. (I will explain why in a minute.) The Justice department claimed it charged 400 people with “terrorism-related cases”, but its own Inspector General said that figure was bogus & inflated. A close exam reveals that except for a few nut cases running their mouth as to what they were going to do, the FBI & HS have not been arresting real terrorists. No genuine Al Qaeda cell was ever arrested. One wanna-be group that talked with an FBI agent posing as an Al Qaeda rep is the best that they got. They may tell us that ISIS cells are in every state…but they are not arresting and shutting down ISIS cells. So what is going on?

Place yourself in a jihadist’s shoes–they are more upset about Islamic rulers (like the House of Saud) who claim to be Islamic but are totally corrupt. The jihadists call them “infidel” Moslem regimes. If they decide to spare some of their hate for apostate Moslems in order to spend it on Americans, they hardly have to go all the way to America. There are American targets all over the middle east, incl. Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, where locals are calling for jihadists to fight infidel armies on Moslem soil. So there are plenty of distractions to get the attention of violent jihadists long before they think of going to America. So the Middle East has been soaking up the blood of jihadists, long before they think of making the long trip to America. And many Americans don’t realize that jihadist leaders have actually considered attacking American civilians as counterproductive. Bin Laden’s approval rating with jihadists crashed after 9-11. Which is all very good, because frankly even though a police state has been created to supposedly protect us, we are still as vulnerable to terrorist attacks as we ever were, only now we are poorer & still scared. There are deadly health threats that are being neglected that are far more of a threat to Americans than terrorists, but are not receiving funds or attention. Because HS is not arresting genuine terrorists here in the US, the FBI director said, “I remain very concerned about what we are not seeing.” So the quiet, is used to scare us some more!! So bureaucrats of the largest American bureaucracy ever created frequently give us scary warnings…if anything, they are preserving their jobs. The “mass casualty event” has been our civil rights & liberty. Bear in mind that the maker of a bio-weapon or dirty radiation bomb has a high chance of killing himself trying to make the weapon.

SAFETY IS NOT HOMELAND SECURITY BUT HOME SECURITY. In a major crisis, like Katrina or 9-11, the reality is that you will probably have to take care of yourself during the most critical first stages of the disaster. Who knows how long it will take for help to arrive, but obviously before it does you are on your own! Bloated bureaucracy and pork from pork projects will not be there to save you. We in America need to refuse to be terrorized from the govt. & media fear mongers, and continue to ground our lives in rational thinking and faith. We need to analyze if there is any difference between the acts of our government and terrorist organizations. Sadly both kinds of agencies do the same behaviors. No wonder the administrations after 9-11 have felt that the “rule of law” was used by terrorists (hence the Bush administrations justification for illegal detentions & torture). Both groups feel constrained by legal & moral laws, and feel the end justifies the means. As this article points out, the end results in this case don’t justify the means.