in the Twenty-First Century".
by Tom Engelhardt
$68 Billion per year for seventeen "security" agencies gets us what exactly?
Since 9/11, itself a massive security failure resulting in the hideous deaths of thousands of our citizens, what other federal agencies have failed?
Let's see: The SEC (failed to recognize, stop gigantic ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff. He ran his scam for what- twenty years in spite of the fact at least one person in the investing business informed the SEC of the scam).
The MHSA-- the agency supposedly responsible for monitoring coal mining in our nation.
The Veterans Administration.
The NHTSA: They had no problem with GM covering up their ignition starter problem; a problem resulting in the death of what? Twenty people?
The TSA: We have to take off our shoes, be subjected to ridiculous body scans before boarding flights in the U.S.-- but they recently allowed a person infected with EBOLA to fly into a major U.S. airport.
And now the numerous epic failures of the Keystone Kops; our "Secret Service" agency who allowed an armed guy to run directly into the White House-- where he could have injured or killed our President and/or someone in his family. And in Atlanta; the SS allowed an armed, private Barney Fife "security guard", a convicted criminal, to ride on an elevator with our President.
FAIL is not the adequate term here. I'm not sure there IS a word to describe what is going on here. the truly pathetic part is we know there are numerous people right here in the U.S. who would like to harm the President. These grotesque examples of lapses in, totally lax security proves just how easy that would be.
Regarding where we are in general with our "security agencies", Tom Engelhardt totally gets it right:
Yes, everything you’ve done has been in the name of national security and the safety of Americans. And as we’ve discovered, there is never enough security, not at least when it comes to one thing: the fiendish ability of “terrorists” to threaten this country. Admittedly, terrorist attacks would rank above shark attacks, but not much else on a list of post-9/11 American dangers. And for this, you take profuse credit -- for, that is, the fact that there has never been a “second 9/11.” In addition, you take credit for breaking up all sorts of terror plans and plots aimed at this country, including an amazing 54 of them reportedly foiled using the phone and email “metadata” of Americans gathered by the NSA. As it happens, a distinguished panel appointed by President Obama, with security clearances that allowed them to examine these spectacular claims in detail, found that not a single one had merit.
Whatever the case, while taxpayer dollars flowed into your coffers, no one considered it a problem that the country lacked 17 overlapping outfits bent on preventing approximately 400,000 deaths by firearms in the same years; nor 17 interlocked agencies dedicated to safety on our roads, where more than 450,000 Americans have died since 9/11. (An American, it has been calculated, is 1,904 times more likely to die in a car accident than in a terrorist attack.) Almost all the money and effort have instead been focused on the microscopic number of terrorist plots -- some spurred on by FBI plants -- that have occurred on American soil in that period. On the conviction that Americans must be shielded from them above all else and on the fear that 9/11 bred in this country, you’ve built an intelligence structure unlike any other on the planet when it comes to size, reach, and labyrinthine complexity.
It’s quite an achievement, especially when you consider its one downside: it has a terrible record of getting anything RIGHT in a timely way. Never have so many had access to so much information about our world and yet been so unprepared for whatever happens in it.
400,000 deaths by firearms in the same years..
One more time: Congress, including the democrats, is a massive failure; they are the worst sort of joke. I guess we've all forgotten part of Congress' job is to monitor the performance of and spending of all of our federal agencies.
Congress is not doing their job. Instead, what they do is react with "hearings" where they rake over the coals the heads of agencies, AFTER major failures occur. What is Congress doing to STOP the failures? Keep right on signing the big fat checks for these agencies?
http://www.tomdispatch.com/...