New Leadership in the Wings: John Edwards spoke out last week against the hapless phrase 'War on Terror'Expounding what Richard Clarke called the "puppydog theory", President Bush repeated last week that al-qaeda continued to threaten to 'follow us home', while declassifying intelligence that they intend to attack 'at home', regardless.
This calls to attention the lack of preparation in the Homeland and the "C"'s and "F"'s that the 9-11 Commissioners have been handing out on implementation of their recommendations.
ITEM:
Heck, even Michelle Malkin is making the case for how unprepared we are still. "If the Left weren't stuck in 9/10 mode and so bent on demonizing Jacobsen, it would be heralding the OIG report as evidence of the Bush administration's homeland defense ineptitude", quoth she, writing up the latest breakdown in airport security.
ITEM:
A few months ago or so, the Boston police department had that embarrassing episode in which they were unable to swiftly determine that a bunch of blinky promo items weren't a credible threat. Instead of taking it as a clarion call for how ill prepared we remain, the press feasted on the deflection, the demands for damages from the sponsors of the ad campaign and the laws needed to prosecute a hoax...
ITEM:
"While the Defense Department has pushed extra equipment to units in hurricane-prone states in part to compensate for what has been ordered to Iraq, an ABCNews.com investigation has found some Plains and western states have few if any helicopters on hand to respond quickly to a disaster."
THE ONGOING FALLOUT FROM THE MISCONCEPTUALIZATION OF A "WAR ON TERROR"
The focus on Iraq has taken our eye off many other things that need doing. We haven't been very good at pushing private companies to upgrade the plant and grounds for security reasons. Instead, we seem to be passing out public funds for them to do so. I hope I'm wrong, but I'll bet in 18 months the stories of fraud and abuse will start to pour out from what seems to be a largely unattended taxpayer spigot.
MEASURING PROGRESS - HOW MUCH BETTER ARE WE A YEAR ON FROM THIS ASSESSMENT?
From the NYT Book Review:
"National security policy, the authors argue, should reject the model of a military "war on terror," and instead adopt an intelligence-based approach ...
"The Bush administration's stubborn adherence to the traditional conception of war has caused it to disregard more important and effective defensive actions. The administration, Benjamin and Simon write, has failed to safeguard nuclear weapons materials in the former Soviet Union; failed to identify and protect the most vulnerable targets within the United States, such as water supplies; failed to work effectively with private businesses that are responsible for other vulnerable targets, such as chemical plants; and failed to increase in any significant measure the monitoring of container cargo at shipping ports, of which only one in twenty is inspected.
According to the authors, the FBI is still so reluctant to adapt its methods to the realities of terrorism that it has used its intelligence "analysts" to take out the garbage and answer phones, the result being a very large turnover of employees who should be piecing together scraps of intelligence in order to find terrorists and disrupt their plans."
