Coleen Rowley has a new article/memo up at Consortium News.
Working with a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), she has crafted an assessment of America's current safety that is devastating.
For example--Bush announced that he would create a Dept of Homeland Security after all within hours of Rowley's June 6, 2002 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Commission.
The announcement seemed timed to relegate to the "in-other-news" category the disturbing things reported to the Senate earlier that day about the mistakes made during the weeks prior to 9/11.
more...
Rowley hasn't trained as a writer, and her style is somewhat "train-of-thought"--but then she has an unusually incisive thought process, and she pulls together a whole pile of relevant facts and lines them up so that previously well-hidden confusions suddenly lead to obvious conclusions.
She rips into the Homeland Security Department:
a gross misstep [that] created chaos by throwing together 22 agencies with 180,000 workers—many of them in jobs vital to our nation’s security, both at home and abroad.
She goes on to list human and civil rights abuses and describe the current over-collection of information:
Extraneous, irrelevant data clutter the system, making it even harder for analysts to make meaningful future connections.
A needle is hard enough to find in the proverbial haystack, without adding still more hay....
The bottom-line result...is not only that our own constitutional and legal protections are jeopardized as seldom before, but also that—far from bringing any real benefit—these practices impede efforts to find and stop actual terrorists, and they lengthen the waiting lines at al-Qaeda recruiting centers.
Read it all here.