TSA, Intelligence services fritter away money


After billions of dollars spent, a new bureaucracy, thousands of additional federal workers and slow-downs to air transportation TSA wants more money to stop the same threats. First we need control of the organization and get our intelligence services speaking with each other.

Appearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Napolitano did not specify what those implications might be. But she said in written testimony that her department would be accelerating deployment to U.S. airports of advanced passenger screening technology, explosives-trained dogs and security personnel. She said the department would be working to enhance the training and size of the Federal Air Marshal Service and to develop better security technology in cooperation with the Department of Energy.

I am amazed that a department of the government that has spent billions with virtually no Congressional oversight is coming back for more.

In the same hearings the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dennis C. Blair said that the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) had recently faced a $30 million cut.

This administration has taken its eye off the ball when it comes to securing the country. One after the other intelligence officials admitted that “they personally deserved part of the blame for failing to disrupt the plot.”

The system should have been able to piece together multiple tips hinting that Mr. Abdulmutallab presented a threat, including a warning to State Department officials given by his father and intercepts from militants in Yemen discussing an unnamed Nigerian man whom they had recruited to carry out an attack, they said.

Part of the problem, Mr. Leiter conceded, is that despite the government’s having spent billions of dollars since 2001 to strengthen the nation’s defenses against a terrorist attack — including the creation of the National Counterterrorism Center — analysts inexplicably still cannot do a simple Google-like search of various computer databases to automatically search for links.

So far we have learned that
1. Our intelligence programs were focused on the wrong threats
2. Intelligence, Homeland Security, the FBI and the Department of State still aren’t working together effectively.
3. An airport security checkpoint did not find a bomb in the underpants of a terrorist.

All the failures we can control are with our intelligence system. Even full-body scanners couldn’t have identified this particular explosive.

So why are passengers being punished for the failures of the intelligence and security operatives. Let’s leave our system intact and operational. It works fine if the people running the counter terrorism systems of our country would do their work and communicate effectively this latest episode of the Christmas bomber would have stopped in Amsterdam instead of over Detroit.

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